Chance of Winning the Mega Millions Lottery

[chrishuff]

As requested by a particular person, I thought I might as well post this so that everyone can see it if they had ever wondered.

In the Mega Millions Lottery, you must choose 5 numbers out of 56 numbers. And then as a special twist you must choose a Mega Ball Number out of 46 possible numbers. The Mega Ball is a separate drawing, but you can still use combinations to solve this problem.

56 nCr 5 = 3,819,816

46 nCr 1 = 46

Now you must multiply the two numbers together to get the exact odds.

3,819,816 * 46 = 175,711,536

You have exactly a 1 in 175,711,536 chance of hitting the jackpot.

Now you may notice that the News says the odds are a nice round number, like around 175 million or 176 million. The truth is that they are totally wrong, but expect that a vast majority of the people won't notice, or even care about them rounding the number for the total number of possibilities.

[BlasianAsian]

Well, looks like I won't be winning anytime soon... )=

[007math]

We were going to buy it. Two people in front of us in line. Waited 3 minutes. Impatient, and left.

[BlasianAsian]

XD. My mom buys one every week. Everytime, she gets this excited gleam in her eye when she tells me to check the winning numbers. In fact, we did actually win $125, but she lost the ticket...that was 6 months ago...and we haven't gotten anything since then, lol.