The California Lottery has announced an exciting promotion for their newest game, MEGA Millions. The promotion will consist of adding money to the 5-of-5 prize in order to make the prize as large as possible.
The MEGA Millions 5-of-5 prize is won when a player matches all 5 numbers without matching the MEGA number. The odds of winning this prize are 1 in 3.9 million. This promotion will run from January 21 through February 17, 2006.
"We’re looking forward to as many Californians winning as much money as possible thanks to this promotion," said Mike Doyle, spokesman for the California Lottery.
The largest 5-of-5 prize, $1.4 million, was won by one ticket in August of 2005 and the second largest, $1.1 million, was split by two tickets in October of 2005. In all, there have been 46 winning tickets for the 5-of-5 prize with a total of nearly $13 million in prizes. California has had nearly 6 million winning MEGA Millions tickets for a total of $460 million.
And if you happen to match all six numbers, don’t feel bad, you may not win a 5-of-5 prize, but instead may win a $315 million jackpot as the "Lucky 7" did on November 15, 2005. Wouldn’t that be a nice consolation?