Mega Millions Jackpot Winner! Odds-Defying 7th Jackpot Win Of 2014 Goes To One Michigan Ticket

Mega Millions Saw its seventh jackpot winner of 2014 Friday, when a single ticket purchased at a gas station in the Detroit suburb of Mount Clemens, Michigan matched all six numbers, winning the $66 million top prize.

There have been six Mega Millions jackpots won in 2014, but a massive March 18 jackpot of $414 million — the seventh largest U.S. lottery prize of all time, and third largest ever awarded in the Mega Millions game — was split by two winning tickets, one in Maryland and one in Florida.

The identity of the latest Mega Millions winner is not yet known. The ticket was purchased at a gas station near the intersection of Market Street and Gratiot Avenue in Mount Clemens, a city of about 16,000 just outside of Detroit.

Of the six Mega Millions winners so far in 2014, four have claimed jackpot prizes of under $100 million. In fact, the Mega Millions jackpots have been won more than one-and-a-half times as often as they should, according to the odds.

The chances of all six numbers coming up in any given combination are one in 258,890,000, but so far — with seven winners out of a total 1,202,096,299 tickets sold in 2014 — there has been one jackpot winning combination for every 171,748,042 tickets sold.

In other words, going by the odds, for every two winning tickets that should have been sold, there have actually been approximately three. To be exact, if only one winning jackpot combination turned up for ever 258,890,000 Mega Millions tickets sold, there should have been between four and five — 4.64, actually — winning tickets sold.

Instead, there have been seven.

So, long story short, 2014 has been a lucky one for Mega Millions so far.

Compare that pace to the cousin of Mega Millions, the Powerball lottery in 2014. The chances of winning Powerball, numerically speaking, are better than Mega Millions. The the odds of any single six-number combination turning up are one in 175,223,510. But there have been four jackpot winners so far this year — out of 905,456,688 tickets sold.

That’s a rate of one jackpot winner for every 226,364,172 tickets sold. According to the odds, there should have been about five jackpot winners.

But here’s a stat the really seems to defy the odds. The Michigan winner Friday was the third Mega Millions jackpot winning ticket in that state to be drawn on Friday the 13th. On Friday, May 13, 2011 and Friday, June 13, 2008, Michigan Mega Millions players also won the jackpot. In Mega Millions history, there have now been four jackpot winning tickets sold on Friday the 13, three of them in Michigan — the fourth was sold in New York on March 13, 2009.

What are the odds of that?

Even if you didn’t win the jackpot, there was one million-dollar second prize winner and 1,173,969 other winning tickets sold for Friday’s drawing. Was yours one of them? Check your Mega Millions ticket against these numbers, drawn at 10:59 pm in Atlanta, Georgia.

7 — 38 — 46 — 49 — 56 Mega Ball 1

If Friday’s Mega Millions winner takes the jackpot as one single cash payment, he or she will take home a pre-tax check for $37.6 million. The jackpot starts all over again at $15 million for Tuesday’s Mega Millions drawing.