$785M Mega Millions Jackpot Tuesday Is 4th-Largest In Game's History

ACROSS AMERICA — The odds of winning an estimated $785 million Mega Millions jackpot are long, but so is the hope among ticket buyers 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 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesdays and Fridays.

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.

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.