Brace yourself for lottery fever as the Mega Millions jackpot has once again crossed the billion-dollar mark, swelling to a cool $1.05 billion for the Tuesday, August 1 drawing.
That’s right, a billion with a “B!”
This humongous jackpot, which equals the fourth-largest Mega Millions prize to date, has been on a roll since it was last bagged by a lucky player in New York on April 18.
And it’s not just about that elusive jackpot; the heat is up across the other eight prize tiers, too. For the July 28 drawing, a mind-blowing total of 3,157,597 tickets turned out to be winners. And 586,903 of them had even tacked on the optional Megaplier for an extra buck, boosting their standard non-jackpot prizes by a whole 5 times.
The numbers from Friday night’s draw were the white balls 5, 10, 28, 52, and 63, plus the gold Mega Ball 18. There was a whopping $5 million win in Pennsylvania, where one of the five tickets matched all five white balls, winning the game’s second-tier prize. Then, there were tickets in Arizona, California, and New York each taking home a million.
In addition to the million-dollar winners, 92 lucky ticket holders across the country matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball, landing the third-tier prize. Fourteen of those, which included the Megaplier option, are now worth $50,000 each, while the remaining 78 get a tidy $10,000 each.
Since the last jackpot win on April 18, lottery fans have seen a staggering 26.4 million winning tickets, with prizes ranging from a modest $2 up to an incredible $5 million. And get this: 46 of these were second-tier prizes of $1 million or more!
The beginning of 2023 saw six jackpot winners in less than four months, an unusual occurrence, given the random nature of lottery draws. The first was a record breaker at $1.348 billion won in Maine on January 13, the second-largest in Mega Millions history. New York alone had two consecutive jackpot wins in April, a first in the game’s history.
Mega Millions has awarded…
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