What Are The Odds Of Winning The Mega Millions: what are the odds of being struck by lightning?
According to Lottery USA, the odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are one in 302.6 million and those for winning the Powerball jackpot are one in 292.2 million. While the odds that you will get struck by lightning are literally less than 1 in one million, it is still much more likely than your odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot.
Those are far longer odds than your odds of winning Mega Millions and Powerball, getting attacked by a shark, getting struck by lightning, and getting swept up in cosmic trash, and making that one perfect NCAA Tournament bracket. You have got a one-in-302,575,350 chance of hitting the jackpot, and a 1-in-12,607,306 chance of winning $1 million.
The odds of buying a ticket that matches all five numbers, then a gold solo mega ball, is an absurd 302,575,350-to-1. If you do correctly guess 5 numbers, but you do not hit a Mega ball, it is worth one million dollars, but that is 1 in 12,607,306.
Buying 5 tickets will get you five chances in 302 million of winning the money, better odds than buying one ticket, but still much more likely that you will be struck by lightning. The Mega Millions jackpot is over $1.1 billion, with the odds that every ticket will win on Friday drawing being one in 302.6 million.
That puts the odds that you will win the jackpot on Friday, when it is called for at 11 pm Eastern, at about 1 in 302,575,350, according to the Mega Millions. The odds of hitting Friday’s $1 billion-plus megamillion jackpot are astronomical, and even your odds of winning the much smaller lottery prizes are pretty slim, but that is part of the joy of dreaming big. That question does not seem quite as hypothetical anymore, as millions are buying lottery tickets every day in an effort to win Friday night’s $1.28 billion megamillions jackpot.
People love dreaming of winning the lottery jackpot, but odds are seldom in their favor. When it comes to winning the lottery, the odds are stacked against you. You are over five hundred times more likely to die falling down a flight of stairs (one in 583,019) than win the jackpot on one ticket.
If you walk one mile (and back) from a store to purchase a ticket to the game, you are almost seven times as likely to die (or to kill somebody else) as to win the Mega Millions jackpot.
Alternately, if you played Russian roulette 100 times per day, every day, for 83 years, at Mega Millions of jackpot odds, you have better than a 99 percent chance of survival. The lottery is a zero-sum game. To be clear, it is highly unlikely you would get killed by a shark–the odds are one in 4.3 million, according to the Florida Museums international shark attack file–yet your odds of getting killed by a shark are 70 times greater than winning the lottery.
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