Plus $1 billion...

[Angrboda]

Yeah, but if it is 1.6 billion you are winning, it makes sense to buy a ticket.

"There's a sucker born every minute." — P.T. Barnum

I think Barnum under-estimated a bit....

How Mega Millions changed the odds to create a record-breaking $1.6 billion jackpot

They don’t buy lottery tickets. Not habitually, anyway.

But the jackpot chasers typically emerge when they see the Mega Millions prize tick up and up and up, and they figure, “Hell, why not?”

That’s by design.

And if you have noticed a run of eye-popping jackpots from Mega Millions and the similarly designed Powerball recently, that’s by design, too.

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Mega Millions has existed in some form since 1996. But only recently has the game been shelling out massive jackpots. The lottery officials who run Mega Millions tweaked the rules and odds of the game last October to make jackpots pay out less frequently, spurring their monster growth. Since that change, three of the six largest Mega Millions jackpots have been paid out.

And then there’s the current, record-shattering Mega Millions drawing.

“Ultimately, these games, they’re all about the jackpots,” Gordon Medenica, Maryland’s lottery and gaming director, told The Washington Post.

Medenica, the lead director of the lottery consortium known as the Mega Millions Group, said in a statement Saturday that “Mega Millions has already entered historic territory, but it’s truly astounding to think that now the jackpot has reached an all-time world record. It’s hard to overstate how exciting this is — but now it’s really getting fun.”

And, of course, jackpot mania is kicking in across the country — exactly the way lottery officials dreamed it up.

The officials had been worried that the relatively smaller but more frequent prizes — a “paltry” $100 million, for instance — would result in “jackpot fatigue,” which is why they tweaked the game last year, Medenica told The Post.

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Here’s how Mega Millions used to work: Players picked five numbers from 1 to 75 and a Mega number from 1 to 15. The odds of winning the top prize were 1 in 258,890,850.

Since Mega Millions modified the formula, players now pick five numbers from 1 to 70 and a Mega number of 1 to 25. The odds of winning the jackpot are now 1 in 302,575,350.

Reducing the number of balls for the first five numbers increases the chances of winning a smaller prize. But raising the number of Mega Balls makes it harder to win the jackpot. (You still win the big jackpot by matching all six winning numbers in a drawing.)