With no one matching Tuesday’s Mega Millions numbers, the jackpot has risen to $510 million, the year’s second-largest prize.
If no one wins the jackpot on Friday, it will be the 11th largest in the game’s history, Mega Millions officials said in a statement.
There were some minor winners in Tuesday’s drawing who matched the five white balls with the numbers 3, 4, 33, 36, and 52, but not the Gold Mega Ball number, which was 17. Players from Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas each won $1 million in that drawing. Nineteen third-tier tickets across the country matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball, winning their owners $10,000 each — except for one ticket whose buyer paid an extra dollar for the Megaplier option, netting them a $40,000 prize.
The most recent Mega Millions jackpot was won on October 14, when players in California and Florida split the $494 million jackpot for $247 million each.
Since then, nearly 13.8 million winning tickets with smaller payouts have been sold, with 33 of them worth more than $1 million each. New York was one of 18 states with winners in that category, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
According to the website, three jackpots have surpassed $1 billion since Mega Millions debuted in May 2002. The current record of $1.54 billion was set in South Carolina in October 2018.
This year’s billion-dollar jackpot, $1.337 billion, was won in Illinois in July. The anonymous winners claimed their prize in September.
Powerball saw a similar amount of drama in the fall, when its main prize grew to just over $2 billion. After a minor security delay, one lucky Californian claimed the entire till last month.
