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The jackpot for Friday’s Mega Millions drawing has grown to the eighth-highest in the game’s history. At $843 million, the prize is fueling ticket sales among regular lottery players in Maryland and others dreaming about what they’d do if they became overnight multimillionaires.
The massive jackpot, which has a cash value of $391.7 million, grew after no one matched all six numbers in Tuesday’s drawing: the white balls 11, 14, 17, 50 and 57, plus the gold Mega Ball 6.
To play the lottery game in Maryland, players must be 18 years or older. Tickets can be purchased at any lottery retailer or created online on the Maryland Lottery’s mobile app.
Mega Millions drawings are held twice a week on Tuesday and Friday nights at 11 p.m. ET.
Tickets are $5 each, with a built-in multiplier feature added in April that automatically increases non-jackpot prizes by 2, 3, 4, 5, or 10 times. Previously, the base ticket was $2, and the multiplier was an optional $1 add-on in most states.
The rule changes were designed to produce larger, faster-growing jackpots and more non-jackpot prizes The changes slightly improved the odds of winning the jackpot, from 1 in 302,575,350 to 1 in 290,472,336, achieved by decreasing the gold Mega Ball pool from 25 to 24 numbers.
The odds of winning any prize also improved, from 1 in 24 to 1 in 23.
Friday’s drawing is the 38th since the jackpot was last won in Virginia on June 27. It’s the longest streak without a jackpot winner since the game began in 2002, and the previous record of 37 drawings was set in January 2021, when a $1.050 billion jackpot was won in Michigan.
Mega Millions said 606,046 winning tickets valued at more than $12.2 million were sold across all prize tiers in Tuesday’s drawing, including 12 tickets that matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win third-tier prizes ranging from $20,000 to $40,000, depending on their multiplier. Those tickets were sold in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming.
In this jackpot run to date, there have been almost 11.7 million winning tickets at all levels, with total prizes exceeding $274 million due to significant enhancements to lower-tier prizes in changes made to the game last April, Mega Millions said.
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