$940M Mega Millions Jackpot: What To Know In WA

WASHINGTON — The odds of winning an estimated $940 million Mega Millions jackpot are long, but so is the hope among ticket buyers in Puget Sound for Friday night’s drawing.

No jackpot-winning tickets were sold for Tuesday night’s drawing. The winning numbers were: 25, 29, 33, 41 and 44, plus the gold Mega Ball 18. Drawings are held at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesdays and Fridays.

To be included in Friday's drawing, players in Washington must buy their tickets by 7:45 p.m.

The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot — about 1 in 302.6 million — don’t increase with a flurry of ticket sales. But they are better than the odds a meteor will hit your house, according to a report from Business Insider. And the odds of a perfect NCAA basketball bracket chosen by a coin flip are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

Long streaks without a winner allow jackpots to grow larger week after week. The last time the Mega Millions jackpot was claimed was Oct. 14, when two winners in San Jose, California, and Fort Myers, Florida, shared in a $502 million jackpot.

More than 2.9 million winning tickets were sold in Tuesday's drawing, with prizes ranging from $2 to $4 million. Six tickets matched the five white balls to win the second-tier prize. Three, sold in Arizona, Mississippi and South Dakota, included the Megaplier and netted $4 million each. The other three, sold in Maryland, Texas and Virginia, claimed a $1 million prize.

Although jackpot winners can choose to be paid through an annuity, with annual checks over 29 years, nearly all take the cash payout. For Friday's drawing, that’s an estimated $483.5 million.

The huge Mega Millions jackpot comes less than two months after a record $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot was won in California on Nov. 8. The player has yet to come forward to claim the prize.

Mega Millions said its jackpot has gone over $700 million only three other times, “and all three times those rolls continued on past $1 billion.”

Mega Millions is played in 45 states as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

>> Learn more about playing Mega Millions via WA Lottery.