Maybe this time it will be different. (Or maybe not). The drawing for the $607 million Mega Millions jackpot is on Friday, and the drawings for the $443 million Powerball jackpot and the $14 million SuperLotto Plus jackpot are both on Saturday.
The odds of winning are often more than 300 million to 1, but people still line up for the chance to dream. And they can dream big with the total earnings from all three games surpassing the billion-dollar mark.
According to the California Lottery, there have been no winners in the Mega Millions game since two jackpot tickets were purchased in December. The game is played in 45 states, but both winning tickets were sold at a Chevron gas station in Encino.
“While this is incredibly unusual and interesting, it is not unheard of,” California Lottery spokeswoman Carolyn Becker said at the time.
Last year, 10 tickets were Mega Millions jackpot winners. So far this year, no bill has had all six numbers. For the eighth time in Mega Millions history, the jackpot surpassed $600 million after no one matched all six numbers in Tuesday's drawing.
Powerball, which is also played in several states, has made several Californians rich. The three largest winning tickets in the game's history were purchased in California, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association. Three winners, from California, Florida and Tennessee, shared a $1.5 billion jackpot in 2016. Then, in October 2023, a winning ticket won a $1.7 billion jackpot, and a month later, another ticket sold in California earned $2 billion.
Then there's the California Super Lotto Plus, where no winner was drawn Wednesday. Five tickets matching five winning numbers were sold, netting the winners $6,500 each, officials said.
Although the lottery is less a game of numbers and more of luck, participants must keep an important number in mind: 41 million. The odds of matching the five Super Lotto Plus numbers plus the Mega number are 41 million to 1.
A portion of the money generated by lottery tickets purchased in California funds public education.
