Weekend Lottery Prizes Almost $1 Billion for Louisiana Players

By this time next Tuesday, October 18th I can almost guarantee you that a ticket sold in Louisiana for the Powerball Lottery game or the Mega Millions Lottery game will produce a winner of more than $10,000. No, I don't have a crystal ball but I do have math and statistics and both of those applied sciences tell me to tell you, this is the weekend to buy a lottery ticket if you don't normally buy them.

Tonight's Mega Millions drawing will unfold at 9:59 this evening. The estimated top prize in the multi-state lottery game is $494 million. Mega Millions has not had a jackpot winner since late July. Based on history, that game is "due to produce a big winner" in either tonight's drawing or the drawing next Wednesday.

The reason for that hypothesis is based on current trends and the fact that the game will be getting a lot more media attention now that the jackpot is basically half of a billion dollars. Our unscientific method for predicting lottery winners tells us that Mega Millions gets a jackpot winner about every 22 to 26 drawings. Tonight's drawing will be the 22nd drawing since the game got a big winner.

Our not-so-big wins but still big enough to be excited about winning ratio is a lot more compact. What that means is this, a Louisiana ticket wins a prize of more than $10,000 in the Mega Millions game on average every 2.6 weeks.

The last Mega Millions "big win" in Louisiana was October 4th, ten days away. So, we are a little outside that window for winning but with the increased hype about the game, I feel pretty confident that we'll be reporting about a big-money winner by at least next Wednesday with Mega Millions.

Oddly enough, there has never been a Mega Millions jackpot-winning ticket sold in Louisiana since the game was approved for playback in 2011. To say we are overdue is an understatement.

Louisiana has been playing Powerball since 1995 and the state has had more than a couple of big jackpot winners. The largest jackpot won playing Powerball in Louisiana is $191.1 million. That was one by the 292 Family Partnership back in 2017. If I recall, that ticket was purchased in St. Landry Parish.

Saturday's Powerball jackpot will be an estimated $454 million dollars. The last time Powerball got a jackpot winner was about the same time Mega Millions got a winner. It was August 3rd of this year.

The average time span between Powerball jackpot winners, again based on our unscientific science, is 22 to 26 weeks, just like Mega Millions. But the Powerball jackpots tend to be larger because the game now does three drawings a week. Over time, because of that extra drawing, we should also expect the window for winning to shrink as well.

Louisiana tickets usually generate a prize of more than $10,000 for Powerball players every 1.7 weeks. The last big money Powerball winners were on October 1st so a big money ticket will likely be sold on Saturday or on Monday or maybe even both.

Okay, we can't actually guarantee that this weekend will generate a big money winner in Louisiana but the math and statistics would certainly suggest that someone who is feeling lucky and has a few bucks they can afford to lose, might just take a chance.

It could change your life. Now, whether it changes for better or worse will be up to you.