The only thing I hope for is when the person who will be blessed with this astronomical amount of money will be smart and use good judgement when handling it. I say this because I notice when the jackpot gets this big and someone wins, their fortune always seem to end up in turmoil.

Good Luck to Everyone who plays tonight!!!

Aw, come on, I hope I win it so I can go spend a lot of money!

Well at least we beat the record out right now....we always had it with the cash option but now MM is the ruler once again!

 There is no way no one is going to win tonight.  I will be very suprised it only 1 ticket matches all the numbers.

B-rad

If I win, I will have to hop into my car and drive around, screaming, just so that no one hears me and thinks there's a crime being committed!

I can see the headlines now:

370 Quick Pick Tickets Matched All 6 Numbers on Last Nights MegaMillions Drawing! LOL!

Well I just did the math and they are selling about $150,000,000 worth of tickets for this drawing.  I believe that might be a record in itself but the May 2000 draw might have actually sold more.  So I highly doubt someone is not going to win this drawing and if by a very slim chance no one does it will be amazing to see the next jackpot numbers.

B-rad

Multiple Winners!!!

I wasn't gonna get on board but the talked about it on Today's show. I thought I better do something.

Since I got my tickets over the internet, maybe after I come out of jail I will enjoy the money.

hey todd.if i win i'll buy you a new vet......

You know they have to be lowballing the estimate.  How embarrassing would that be..."Well, we thought we had snatched the record from PB, but the jackpot was really $362 million, so we didn't even beat the Big Game."

Dare I mention it....when the dust settles, could tonight reach the $400,000,000 level??? 

Bradly_60...my figures show if the jackpot stays at $370 million in ticket sales will be at $173.4 million for this drawing.  Either way that is a lot of tickets.

Anywhere on the net where you can find sales for the May 2000 draw?

Odds are now if favor (i.e. greater then 50%) that someome will win on this draw.

I think there will have to be a recalculation on the lump sum after the draw. Oh, lets call it a hunch.

Multiple JP winners for sure.

At least 3 is my prediction.

I'm sure they're still lowballing the estimate by a bit, but I'm guessing sales will come pretty close to whatever their real estimate is. They may not have much data for sales at this level, but they have an enormous amount of data on buying patterns over the time between drawings. That data tells them that over the long term n% of tickets are sold from 6AM  until noon the day afetr a roll,  n2% are sold from noon to 6PM , n3% are sold from 6PM until midnight, and so on.

When they made their first estimate of 340 they knew they were being conservative and they did it based on an estimate of overall sales for the  whole 4 day period. Whatever time somebody started working on the most recent estimate, they already knew how many tickets were sold in the first  85% of the total sales period. By modeling the current estimate on the pattern of previous sales they're probably going to come very close. How conservative they were is probably a bigger factor than how close the real estimate will be. I'd guess it will finish off close to 375, with a reasonable chance of hitting 380.

The only way it will hit 400 is if an enormous number of peolpe who virtually never buy tickets  and haven't shown up in previosu data stop on the way home from work to buy tickets. Assuming the real estimate is 375, boosting it to 400 would require selling almost 50 million more tickets.

Probability almost certainly suggest a single winner for tonight.  The uncertainty is in how many combinations aren't picked randomly. Fewer random picks favors a roll. Unless sales do push it quite a bit higher multiple winners is less likely than a roll.

We will see.  Before noon, it wasn't the largest jackpot in North American history.  New lottery pools are being formed left and right this afternoon at workplaces.

This is fun!