There were no tickets sold with all six numbers in the latest drawing of the multi-state Mega Millions lottery, pushing the estimated jackpot for Friday’s drawing to $743 million, the game’s 10th-largest jackpot.
A ticket with five numbers, but missing the Mega number, in Tuesday’s drawing was sold at a gas station in Palmdale and is worth $7,326,642, the California Lottery announced.
Tickets with five numbers, but missing the Mega number, sold outside California are worth a multiple of $1 million. However, California law requires major payoffs of lottery games to be paid on a pari-mutuel basis, meaning they are determined by sales and the number of winners.
The ticket’s base prize amount was $3,663,321, then doubled to $7,326,642, because the ticket’s multiplier was 2, according to the California Lottery. It would have been worth $2 million in other states, according to the Mega Millions Consortium, which conducts the game.
The ticket with five numbers, but missing the Mega number, sold in Arizona is worth $3 million because its multiplier was 3, the Mega Millions Consortium announced.
The numbers drawn Tuesday were 25, 37, 59, 68, 70 and the Mega number was 10. The estimated jackpot was $707 million.
The drawing was the 35th since the last time a ticket with all six numbers was sold.
The odds of matching all six numbers and the Mega number is 1 in 290,472,336, according to the Mega Millions Consortium. The overall chance of winning a prize is 1 in 23.
The Mega Millions game is played in 45 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. Virgin Islands. It began in 1996 as The Big Game and was given the new name Mega Millions in 2002.
There have been at least 10 larger jackpots for the Powerball game.