A Mega Millions jackpot of over $1 billion is at stake in Tuesday night's drawing

Updated August 1, 2023 at 4:19 PM ET

After no winner was selected Friday evening, the Mega Millions lottery jackpot has reached more than a billion dollars for the fifth time in the game's history. Numbers will be drawn again Tuesday evening at 11 p.m. EDT.

If a winner is selected, they'll have the option to have the estimated $1.1 billion paid out over the course of 30 years, or get $550.2 million paid to them right away in a lump sum.

Other smaller jackpots have already been won, including a $5 million winner in Pennsylvania, and four $1 million jackpots in Arizona, California, New York, and Pennsylvania.

This comes just two weeks after a Powerball winner from California got $1.08 billion. The largest lottery jackpot ever won was also Powerball, with a $2.04 billion win going to a different Californian in November 2022.

Want a guaranteed win? Buy every ticket.

Any purchaser of a single Mega Millions lottery ticket will have just over a 1 in 300 million chance of winning. This technically means there is a way to a certain jackpot. You'd just need to buy 3oo million tickets.

At a cost of $2 per ticket, it would take over $600 million to buy that many tickets. But with $1 billion in winnings, you'd technically profit.

"It seems like that's a great strategy," Harvard statistician Mark Glickman said in an interview with WCVB Channel 5 in Boston. But there's a catch. If just one other person wins the lottery at the same time, the winnings would be cut in half and those profits would be gone. Glickman says it would take a jackpot of $5 or 10 billion for this strategy to be worth considering.

You'd also have to fill out all 303 million tickets individually... which would take a while. [Copyright 2023 NPR]