Playing for the Biggest Lotto Jackpot Ever

The Mega Millions lottery jackpot (at the time of writing this) is $500 million, already up from the originally announced $473 million. That’s an all-time world record for a lottery. I typically don’t play lotteries because the odds of winning are so immensely terrible. But since this is a record drawing and you can’t win if you don’t play, I’m going to go buy some tickets.

While researching lottery taxes I found something interesting. In an odd quirk, Nevada doesn’t have any state lotteries. I read that for the last drawing people were flocking to Primm on the California Nevada state line to buy tickets. The article said that they are one of the top grossing cities for the lottery in California. Which begs an interesting question, why would Nevada give up lottery revenue to other states?

The best answer I can think up is that since gambling is everywhere in Nevada, they don’t think there would be much to gain by offering a lottery. The amount people are willing to wager is a firm amount and offering a lottery wouldn’t change that. Since casinos offer better odds, I doubt anyone would really even play lottery games in Nevada except when jackpots get as big as Friday’s drawing.

I would not be surprised at all to see that jackpot grow over the week. Large jackpots draw more players, and more players mean even bigger jackpots. Either way, it’s pretty exciting that the Mega Millions lottery has grown to such a large jackpot. I’ll be very curious to see who wins. Can you imagine if the lottery doesn’t hit on Friday? We could very easily see a lottery jackpot that breaks $1 billion. Now wouldn’t that be a story.

ED: The closest this Nevada has to a lottery is the Megabucks slot machine. Megabucks has the poorest payouts of any slot machine in Vegas (Check NGC), but people play hoping for the big million dollar payouts – kinda like the lottery.