$785M Mega Millions Jackpot: When To Buy Tickets In Illinois

ILLINOIS — The odds of winning an estimated $785 million Mega Millions jackpot are long, but so is the hope among ticket buyers in Illinois for Tuesday night’s drawing.

No jackpot-winning tickets were sold for Friday night’s drawing. The winning numbers were: 1, 3, 6, 44, 51, and the Mega Ball of 7. Drawings are held at 10 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesdays and Fridays.

To be included in Tuesday’s drawing, players in Illinois must purchase tickets by 9:45 p.m. In addition to the $785 million Mega Millions jackpot – the fourth largest in lottery history – there is another $265 million up for grabs in the Illinois Lottery’s Powerball lottery.

Mega Millions and Powerball players have purchased nearly 7.24 million winning tickets and won over $1.4 billion in prizes in 2022 in Illinois, lottery officials said.

There are more than 7,000 lottery retailers across the state and players can also purchase tickets on the Illinois Lottery’s website.

The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot — about 1 in 302.6 million — don’t increase with a flurry of ticket sales. But they are better than the odds a meteor will hit your house, according to a report from Business Insider. And the odds of a perfect NCAA basketball bracket chosen by a coin flip are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

Long streaks without a winner allow jackpots to grow larger week after week. The last time the Mega Millions jackpot was claimed was Oct. 14, when two winners in San Jose, California, and Fort Myers, Florida, shared in a $502 million jackpot.

More than 2.775 million winning tickets were sold in Friday’s drawing, with prizes ranging from $2 to $1 million. One ticket sold in Ohio matched the five white balls to win the game’s second-tier prize of $1 million, and 82 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win third-tier prizes of $10,000. And 16 of those tickets are worth $30,000 each because players put out another $1 to buy the Megaplier option. That number was 3X Friday.

Six months ago, a $1.34 billion Mega Millions jackpot, which marked the third largest lottery prize in U.S. history, was won with a single ticket purchased at the Speedway gas station in Des Plaines.

Although jackpot winners can choose to be paid through an annuity, with annual checks over 29 years, nearly all take the cash payout. For Tuesday’s drawing, that’s an estimated $395 million.

The huge Mega Millions jackpot comes less than two months after a record $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot was won in California on Nov. 8. The player has yet to come forward to claim the prize.

Mega Millions said its jackpot has gone over $700 million only three other times, “and all three times those rolls continued on past $1 billion.”

Mega Millions is played in 45 states as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.