Lottosend.com – Just like the Powerball, Mega Millions is also a multi-state lottery in the USA. You can buy the tickets for this lotto game in 44 states as well as the Virgin Islands and Washington D.C. The Mega Millions jackpot prize begins at $40 million and it gets even bigger after every draw that doesn’t have a jackpot prize winner. The current jackpot prize is a whopping $548,000,000.
You can purchase tickets online from South Africa here:
https://www.lottosend.com/megamillions
More About the Mega Millions Lottery Game
Back during August 1996 the Mega Millions draw was first introduced. It had a different name back then, it was called ‘The Big Game’. In the beginning, only six of the total US states participated in this lotto, but with time, the lottery grew in popularity and now almost all of the US states participate. The name of the lottery was changed twice; the first change was made in 2002 when it was called ‘The Big Game Mega Millions’ and the second name change was done in 2005, when it was re-named the ‘Mega Millions’, as it is called today.
A change in game matrix was also introduced by the Mega Millions lottery in October, 2017 in order to make it harder for people to win the jackpot, but to make it easier for them to take home a million-dollar 2nd place prize. Also, the changes were also aimed at producing bigger jackpots due to which the size of the starting jackpot was increased three times. Previously, the jackpot prize had begun at $15 million, but now the minimum amount has been increased to a whopping $40 million. A similar restructuring of the Mega Millions lotto game had been done back in October, 2012.
With harder odds, there are more rollovers and with more rollovers, jackpots get a lot bigger.
The updates made last year also brought an increase in price of the tickets from $1 to $2 whereas the number of white balls was reduced to 70 from 75. For the Mega Ball (the bonus number), the range was changed from 15 to 25. There was also an increase in non-jackpot payouts and there was also an addition of a ‘Just the Jackpot’ option ticket. With these changes, the Mega Millions is now more in line with its competitor, the Powerball lottery and attracts a lot of attention due to its extremely big jackpots.
On March 30th, 2012, the record for the largest United States lottery jackpot was broken by Mega Millions and it awarded a jackpot prize worth $656,000,000. Since then, the record has been broken by a few Powerball jackpots, which includes the one awarded on January of 2016 which is worth $1.5 billion as well as the one awarded during August of 2017, which is worth $759 million. At this moment, the record for the third and also fourth-largest jackpots in US history are held by the Mega Millions lottery.
How to Play Mega Millions Online
When you want to play the Mega Millions lottery, you get to choose five numbers between the range of 1 and 70 and an additional bonus number has to be selected between 1 and 25. The bonus number is referred to as the ‘Mega Ball’. You don’t have to select the first five numbers in any specific order. The basic price of a Mega Millions ticket in the USA is $2 and online lottery messenger services such as Lottosend sell them for about double the price for players from overseas. There is also a ‘Megaplier’ option applicable where you have to pay $1 for every ticket for multiplying every prize you win, other than the jackpot, by two, three, four or five.
The value of the Megaplier is also drawn randomly at the same time the winning numbers are drawn. You can choose your lottery numbers or you can go with the ‘quick pick’ option that allows a computer to generate random numbers on your behalf.
After the changes were put into effect in October 28, 2017, there is also a ‘Just the Jackpot’ ticket option available in some states. This option provides you with two tickets for a cost of $3, but these tickets can only be used for winning jackpots and don’t apply to other prizes.
Current Draw
The Mega Millions draw is conducted twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday at 23:00 EST. The last draw was conducted on Tuesday night and there was no ticket match for the jackpot prize, which meant that the jackpot for the next draw, which is scheduled for Friday, just reached $548,000,000. This is the fourth time this year that the jackpot has managed to surpass $400 million. If it is won at this level, this would become the 6th largest prize in the history of Mega Millions.
This amount is more than double the largest jackpot to be won in the month of October, which has been a challenging month for producing a top prize winner historically. In the 16 years that Mega Millions draw has been held, the jackpot has only been awarded 12 times in the month of October. The largest prize that was claimed in this month was on October 16th, 2009, and it was a sum of $200 million. While the jackpot has rolled over, four white balls and the Mega Ball was matched by thirty tickets for the $10,000 prize.
Six of these tickets are valued at $30,000 each because they went for the Multiplier option, which was 3x in Tuesday’s draw. In the drawing on October 2nd, the total number of winning tickets was about 1,001,138 at all prize levels. The last Mega Millions jackpot was won on July 24th, and since then, 12 million winning tickets have been given out at all prize levels, 18 of which were worth $1 million and more.
The last Mega Millions jackpot was worth a massive $543 million that was awarded on July 24 to a California office pool of 11 coworkers. This is the third largest prize in the history of the Mega Millions.
Three other jackpots have been paid out this year. The first one was paid out on 5th January and was worth $451 million, the second on March 30th worth $533 million and the third on May 4th worth $142 million.
To win this week’s $548 million jackpot, you have to match the five white balls and one Mega Ball and you can change your entire life. Tickets for the draw can be bought up to 15 minutes before the draw on Friday.
After the draw you can check the reults here to see if you have won:
https://www.lottosend.com/lotteries/megamillions/results/
