Mega Millions Changes

So changes to the Mega Millions multistate lottery take effect today. It's now $5 a play, with the player selecting five numbers between 1-70 and one Mega Ball number between 1-24. Pay tables and probabilities linked herein, from my state's lottery website. I presume it's the same for all other states.

Would someone be willing to analyze the new rules and tell as how bad a play this game still is? Thanks in advance.

Gene

https://www.masslottery.com/games/draw-and-instants/mega-millions

Quote: GenoDRPh

So changes to the Mega Millions multistate lottery take effect today. It's now $5 a play, with the player selecting five numbers between 1-70 and one Mega Ball number between 1-24. Pay tables and probabilities linked herein, from my state's lottery website. I presume it's the same for all other states.

Would someone be willing to analyze the new rules and tell as how bad a play this game still is? Thanks in advance.

Gene

https://www.masslottery.com/games/draw-and-instants/mega-millions
link to original post

I did not realize that it was changing. That explains something that happened to me. A few weeks back a friend of mine from Las Vegas asked me to buy him some tickets. He wanted one ticket for each drawing for the next 10 drawings. The computer kept rejecting the ticket. At the time I had no idea why it would reject it as I had bought these tickets for him multiple times in the past. It appears that they didn't want to sell $2 tickets into what was becoming a $5 drawing.

Here is what it looks like changed:

1. 24 Megaballs instead of 25.
2. A Multiplier is included in the base price.
3. Seed increased from 10 million to 50 million.
4. Cost of ticket increased from $2 to $5.

As a reminder, there are 70 white balls and now 24 Mega balls. The player and game draw 5 white numbers and one Mega number.

Here are the weights for the multiplier. The lower right cell shows an average multiplier of 3x. The multiplier applies to all the wins except the jackpot.

Multiplier	Weight	Actual Probability	Expected multiplier
10	1	0.031250	0.312500
5	2	0.062500	0.312500
4	4	0.125000	0.500000
3	10	0.312500	0.937500
2	15	0.468750	0.937500
Total	32	1.000000	3.000000

Here is my math of the fixed wins. The lower right cell shows a return of 22.37% from fixed prizes.

Match	Mega Ball	Combinations	Probability	Inverse Probability	Base Win	Total Win	Expected Win
5	Yes	1	0.0000000034	290472336	0	0	0.000000
5	No	23	0.0000000792	12629232	1000000	3000000	0.047509
4	Yes	325	0.0000011189	893761	10000	30000	0.006713
4	No	7,475	0.0000257339	38859	500	1500	0.007720
3	Yes	20,800	0.0000716075	13965	200	600	0.008593
3	No	478,400	0.0016469727	607	10	30	0.009882
2	Yes	436,800	0.0015037577	665	10	30	0.009023
2	No	10,046,400	0.0345864262	29	0	0	0.000000
1	Yes	3,385,200	0.0116541219	86	7	21	0.048947
1	No	77,859,600	0.2680448027	3.73	0	0	0.000000
0	Yes	8,259,888	0.0284360573	35	5	15	0.085308
0	No	189,977,424	0.6540293186	1.53	0	0	0.000000
Total		290,472,336	1.0000000000				0.223695

The additional return per 100 million in the jackpot is 6.89%.

The breakeven jackpot, without considering taxes, annuity or jackpot sharing, is $1,127,475,660.

The "lump sum" option generally cuts the win by half, so I would double that to adjust for the annuity.