ATLANTA -- There were no winning tickets sold in last Friday's Mega Millions lottery game. As a result, the jackpot for Tuesday night's drawing is a whopping $512 million.
The odds of correctly selecting all of the numbers in the drawing to win the jackpot is a mind-staggering 1 in 302,575,350. Veteran oddsmaker and sports betting expert Jim Murphy from SportsBettingExperts.com points out that there's a much better chance of any number of things that can happen statistically than winning the lottery.
"You have a significantly better statistical chance of getting struck by lightning in the morning, bitten by a shark at lunch and hit by a meteor before dinner while hitting a golf hole in one in the afternoon than you do winning the Mega Millions jackpot."
The lottery is based on the basic notion that the higher the jackpot prize is, the more tickets are sold. Each state lottery has algorithmic projections for the number of tickets sold at varying prize levels.
Once the jackpot hits roughly $575 million, the odds of at least one ticket winning the jackpot exceeds 50 percent. This is why it is not often that we see prize amounts exceeding this amount, and why we have only had a single lottery prize to exceed $1 billion -- so far. That was a Powerball drawing in January 2016.
The current Mega Millions jackpot, at an estimated $512 million, ranks as the fifth largest Mega Millions jackpot and the eleventh largest jackpot overall. It has rolled over 22 times since May 8.
Now the odds of one person winning both the Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots is 1 in 75 quadrillion -- that's 75,000,000,000,000,000.
Murphy's comparison list is as follows:
ODDS OF VARIOUS THINGS:
- Odds that a person is right-handed: 1 in 1.1
- Odds that a pass thrown in an NFL game will be completed: 1 in 1.7
- Odds that an adult has sex before bed on any given night: 1 in 3.5
- Odds that an adult baseball fan is also a New York Yankees fan: 1 in 10
- Odds that an adult is also an only child: 1 in 20
- Odds that someone over the age of 65 has never been married: 1 in 21
- Odds of being called down as a contestant on the ‘Price Is Right’: 1 in 36
- Odds of an adult male being a virgin: 1 in 37
- Odds of having twins: 1 in 70
- Odds of an adult male being afraid of spiders: 1 in 85
- Odds of an IRS audit (all taxpayers): 1 in 100
- Odds that an NFL kickoff will be returned for a touchdown: 1 in 270
- Odds of being born with an extra finger or toe: 1 in 550
- Odds of bowling a 300 game: 11,500 to 1
- Odds of finding a pearl in an oyster: 1 in 12,000
- Odds of being hospitalized due to a toilet injury: 1 in 12,500
- Odds of an amateur golfer hitting a hole in 1 on a Par 3 hole: 1 in 12,500
- Odds of being hospitalized due to a toothbrush injury: 1 in 100,000
- Odds of being hospitalized due to a pogo stick injury: 1 in 115,000
- Odds of becoming a billionaire: 1 in 770,000
- Odds of dating a supermodel: 1 in 88,000
- Odds of having conjoined twins: 1 in 200,000
- Odds of being dealt a royal flush in video poker: 1 in 650,000
- Odds of a high school basketball player being selected in the NBA Draft: 1 in 6,864,000
- Odds of being elected President of the United States: 1 in 10,000,000
- Odds of becoming an astronaut: 1 in 13,200,000
- Odds of having identical quadruplets: 1 in 15,000,000
- Odds of two golfers in the same group hitting a hole in one on the same par 3 hole: 1 in 26 million
- Odds of being born: 1 in 400 trillion
ODDS OF BEING KILLED BY VARIOUS THINGS:
- Odds of being killed by heart disease: 1 in 7
- Odds of being killed by the flu: 1 in 70
- Odds of being killed by unintentional poisoning: 1 in 95
- Odds of being killed in a car accident: 1 in 111
- Odds of being killed in a fall: 1 in 127
- Odds of being killed in an act of murder by another US citizen: 1 in 249
- Odds of being killed by drowning: 1 in 1,188
- Odds of being killed by choking: 1 in 3,461
- Odds of being killed in a plane crash: 1 in 7,178
- Odds of being killed by accidental gunshot: 1 in 8,359
- Odds of being killed by police: 1 in 8,359
- Odds of being killed by a tornado: 1 in 60,000
- Odds of being killed by wasp or bee stings: 1 in 63,225
- Odds of being killed by an earthquake: 1 in 110,000
- Odds of being killed by fireworks: 1 in 340,000
- Odds of being killed by an asteroid: 1 in 1.9 million
- Odds of being killed by a shark: 1 in 3.7 million
- Odds of being killed by a foreign-born US immigrant terrorist: 1 in 46.1 million
