"It appears many do not understand the jackpot has only been growing by the minimum $10 million per draw in order for sales to fully support the jackpot. "
For a place that's all about the lottery a lot of people here don't seem to know much about how things work.
"The jackpot for the Friday, August 1 draw will probably be around $140 million and will be fully supported by sales (or very close at least). "
It will be $140, and the supported jackpot is $139,672,438 (I love how the estimated sales and supported jackpot are reported down to the nearest dollar). Based on the last Friday > Tuesday sales I'll guess that next Tuesday's supported jackpot will be a bit over $153.5 million. Figuring sales should be up a bit as the jackpot gets a little bit bigger maybe it will be advertised at 154.
"this is a far fetched idea. "
It' is far-fetched. As of next Saturday's drawing, when the annuity shortfall will only be $328k (about $147k in cash, and I suspect the actual cash payment would be the real cash on hand at that point) total ticket sales will have been 44.8 million. The chances of having a winner by that point is no more than 1 in 6, depending on how early it happens. The chance of two in a row is no more than 1 in 36, and 3 in a row is no more than 1 in 108. It's not impossible, but the chances that they get stuck with a shortfall of more than $10 or 20 million, and even if they "lose" $50 million it's extremely unlikely that sales wouldn't be enough that it's really just a reduction in the 50% profit they skim off the top. Except that as already noted, there's a reserve fund to (help) pay for the possibility of the game not doing what probability suggests.
As for doing what probability suggests, in the long term the game will definitely be close, and the occasional small jackpot wins will be offset by the occasional huge jackpots. We won't know what sales will be like for a $1 billion jackpot under the new game, but so far per-drawing sales revenue has been a bit ahead of the old game, so it's a pretty safe bet that the revenue for a single $1 billion drawing will be 7 or 8 times as much as the revenue for any the drawings before the jackpot reaches 2 or 3 hundred million. In the long run the lottery will always win big.
"There have been a lot of complaints about the Mega Millions jackpot growing very slowly. But this is not just a Mega Millions problem. Sales in general for lotteries is down. "
And while MM did say "faster growing jackpots" they didn't say it will reach $150 or $300 million faster. Even if tickets sales are still lower at $1 billion than they used to be, each ticket contributes roughly twice as much to the jackpot as it did under the old format. If a very large jackpot results in selling 60 or 65% as many tickets as under the old format then about 1.2 to 1.3 times as much money will be added to the jackpot, and the drawing to drawing increase will be faster.
"There was so much liquidity in the market and people gambled more. "
I don't think general economic factors have much to do with the steady decline in sales. Ten and 15 years ago a jackpot of $350 million was huge and attracted a lot of attention. 4 months ago, at the end of MM's old format, $350 million wasn't even the average jackpot. Some of the huge sales were no doubt the result of regular players buying more tickets, but a lot of it was the people who only played when the jackpot got really big. As "really big" changes, the threshold for those irregular players to start buying tickets increases. It's easy to dream about the possibility of winning that huge jackpot, but maybe the people who don't play regularly absorb reality more easily when they spend $10 or $20 and don't win a dime, and reset their threshold for joining the frenzy. I probably qualify as a regular player, but I won't be buying a PB ticket until the cash value reaches $200 million. At $5 per ticket for essentially the same odds I won't be buying a MM ticket unless the jackpot is 2 to 2.5 times as big as PB or the cash value is $500 million. Right now I'm figuring the soonest I might buy a MM ticket is sometime in October.
