Who Won the $267M Lottery?

Mar 2, 2006, 7:57 am (10 comments)

Mega Millions

No one has yet to step forward to claim the biggest, single lottery ticket sold in Ohio — worth $267 million — in this tiny town near the Michigan state line, state lottery officials said on Wednesday.

Lottery officials are encouraging the winner to contact a lawyer or financial planner before coming forward publicly to claim the ticket from Tuesday's Mega Millions drawing, spokeswoman Marie Kilbane said at a news conference at Lyons Main Stop, a convenience store in this northwest Ohio town that sold the ticket.

The winner — who beat odds of 176 million to 1 — can take a lump sum of $113.7 million after taxes or 26 annual payments of $7.4 million.

News about the winning ticket set the town of about 500 people — about 30 miles west of Toledo — abuzz.

"It's not the littlest town in Ohio, but darn near," said Jeff Erb, general manager of Saneholtz-McKarns Inc., which owns the convenience store.

A man called the store about 10 a.m. Wednesday claiming to be the winner, Erb said.

"He wouldn't give his name, and he wouldn't come in," Erb said. "Is it the real winner, we don't know."

The store sells a lot of lottery tickets because it's on a busy state road and it's only a few miles from the Michigan state line, Erb said. Michigan doesn't play the Mega Millions game.

Lottery officials said this was the seventh Mega Millions winner in Ohio.

Ohio's previous record winner came in 2003 when a South Euclid woman won $162 million. In July 2005, a group of workers from Painesville split a $170 million jackpot.

Linda Freeworth, a manager at the store, said she received the news from a radio station that called about 4:45 a.m. Wednesday. Radio and television reporters arrived soon after for interviews.

"I've never been a big time winner. People laugh because this is a small town and nothing ever happens here," she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The winning numbers from Tuesday night's drawing were 2, 4, 35, 36 and 48. The Mega Ball number was 22.

In addition to the grand prize winner, 22 tickets, including two sold in Ohio, matched all five numbers but not the Mega Ball. The winners will receive second prizes of $250,000 each.

Another 134 tickets matched four numbers, plus the Mega Ball number - good for third prizes of $10,000 each.

AP

Tags for this story

Other popular tags

Comments

Chewie

"It's not the littlest town in Ohio, but darn near," said Jeff Erb, general manager of Saneholtz-McKarns Inc., which owns the convenience store.

When I lived in Altus, OK, the saying was: Its not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.

tg636

>The winner — who beat odds of 176 million to 1

Those are the odds that any one person with one ticket would win, but if they sold a million tickets there would be a 1 in 176 chance that someone would win, if 2 million tickets sold than a 1 in 88 chance, etc.  Does anyone know how many tickets were sold for this drawing, and the chances someone would win? On the biggest sales week Mega Millions ever had how many of the possible numbers are covered? I find these little facts as interesting as the real odds and jackpot amount.

I hope my small town where nothing ever happens sells the next one.

Chewie

>The winner — who beat odds of 176 million to 1

Those are the odds that any one person with one ticket would win, but if they sold a million tickets there would be a 1 in 176 chance that someone would win, if 2 million tickets sold than a 1 in 88 chance, etc.  Does anyone know how many tickets were sold for this drawing, and the chances someone would win? On the biggest sales week Mega Millions ever had how many of the possible numbers are covered? I find these little facts as interesting as the real odds and jackpot amount.

I hope my small town where nothing ever happens sells the next one.

Buy a membership, Todd has all kinds of interesting links for paid members.  Might be worth your while.

CASH Only

"It's not the littlest town in Ohio, but darn near," said Jeff Erb, general manager of Saneholtz-McKarns Inc., which owns the convenience store.

When I lived in Altus, OK, the saying was: Its not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.

Altus is an anagram of OK's second largest city. Did you know that?

Chewie

Yeah, but Tulsa has to contend with all those hills and traffic.  Altus is flat and no one goes there for vacation.  The cool part of Altus, you can buy a gun, dive a quarter of a mile, and shoot in any direction.  There is no one to hit - or complain!  I've done it.  Love those Gun Shows in Oklahoma that Chucky Schumer dispises!  Buy a gun and ammunition and no one cares. I've bought ammo by the case loads, and not a single piece of paper.  Low crime too.  You could bury a body in those cotton fields, and it would never be found.  That I haven't proven yet!

ryanm

That news story got one thing wrong: Michigan does so play the Mega Millions game.

KY Floyd's avatarKY Floyd

>The winner — who beat odds of 176 million to 1

Those are the odds that any one person with one ticket would win, but if they sold a million tickets there would be a 1 in 176 chance that someone would win, if 2 million tickets sold than a 1 in 88 chance, etc.  Does anyone know how many tickets were sold for this drawing, and the chances someone would win? On the biggest sales week Mega Millions ever had how many of the possible numbers are covered? I find these little facts as interesting as the real odds and jackpot amount.

I hope my small town where nothing ever happens sells the next one.

The bit about beating the odds always annoys me. Nobody ever beats  the odds, but enough people buying enough tickets guarantees that there will eventually be a winning ticket despite the odds against each individual ticket.

As far as how many tickets were sold, it's easy to come up with a decent estimate. The cash value of the previous draw was about 126 million, and the cash value for the next one was about 159 million, so it increased by 33 million. 30% of each ticket goes to the jackpot, so the number of tickets sold is the increase in cash value divided by .30, which in this case works out to 110 million. Since the numbers we normally see for the cash value are just estimates we can't figure out the real number of tickets that are sold, but we'll be pretty close.

The probability that the jackpot will be won isn't proportional to the number of tickets that are sold, though. It's proportional to the number of  the possible combinations that have been picked, and that will always be less than the number of tickets sold. Keeping it simple, once 10% of the combinations have been played we can expect that 10 of the next 100 tickets sold will have a combination that has already been picked, and once 20% have been played it increases to 20 of the next 100, and so on. Based on selling 110 million tickets for the last draw, and assuming that the combination picked for every ticket was picked at random (which is definitely not the case) perhaps 76 million of the possible combinations were played, so the probability of anybody winning the jackpot was somewhere around 76/176, or 43%.  That 43% includes the probability that there would be one winner (about 33%), two winners (about 10%), and so on. Since selling 110 million tickets only uses about 76 million of the possible combinations then there are about 34 million tickets that match combinations already played on theother 76 million tickets.  Most of those 34 million would match only one other ticket, but  some would match 3 or more other tickets. Based on random chance there will be a few combinations that have been played a dozen or more times, but if there are only 176 combinations picked more than 10 times then there's only  a 1 in 1 million chance that the winning combination will be one of the 176. Based on what people really do, there a lot of combinations that are played dozens, hundreds, and possibly thousands (diagonal patterns from the corners) of times. About a year ago 110 Powerball players using numbers from fortune cookies (one of the many reasons that combinations aren't all picked at random) all played the same combination, which happened to hit the 5+0 prize. It's a safe bet that thousands more played different numbers from fortune cookies, resulting in non-winning combinations that were played 50 to 100 times.

Chewie

Todd put up a link a while ago that showed the sales by state.  Can't find it now.  Never can find what I need, when I need it - she said!

Bradly_60's avatarBradly_60

Did you guys notice that the that release said this....

"Michigan doesn't play the Mega Millions game"

HELLO we sold more tickets for that drawing then Ohio did.  haha

Brad

wannaberich!


I did notice it said Michigan doesn't have MegaMillions. I had to laugh about that as I bought 7 plays right here in good ole' MI.

I'm sure it's somone from OH who won...but I guess we will just wait and see.

Now I have to wait another month or so before it gets high enough for me to play again *sigh*

End of comments
Subscribe to this news story
Guest