Playing both Mega Millions and Powerball? Here’s your odds of winning both.
Because if you’re going to dream of winning a lottery fortune, why not dream of winning two?
“You see more people in line buying both tickets when both games are over $300 million, ” said Jeff Lenard, spokesman for National Association of Convenience Stores, whose members sell about two-thirds of the nation’s lottery tickets.
Related: The reason there are such long odds against winning Powerball
But the odds of winning both are absolutely staggering: A bit worse than 1 in 75.6 quadrillion, or 1 in 75,648,252,765,957,300 to be precise. On a percentage basis, you have only a 0.000000000000000013% chance of holding both winning tickets.
To put that in perspective, those odds are about 6,000 times worse than the odds experts have calculated of being killed by a meteorite strike — at the same time you’re being attacked by a shark.
Of course, it’s pretty long odds to win just one of this week’s drawings — either Wednesday night’s $307 million Powerball game, or Friday’s $382 Mega Millions drawing.
Related: How Powerball finds winning tickets
But that doesn’t stop people from trying. Americans spend more than $73 billion on lottery tickets each year. That’s more than they spend on movies, video games, music, sports tickets and books — combined.
The odds of winning Powerball are 1 in 292 million. The Mega Million odds are slightly better — only 1 in 259 million.
“If you buy both tickets, you’ve doubled your odds of winning, ” said Ben Auerbach, lead data strategist for Allstate, but they’re still pretty close to zero.
Auerbach, who said he never buys lottery tickets himself, calculated the very long odds of a double win not for work but because “it’s fun to do this rather than run numbers about premiums and insurance.”
