I’m sure someone will win it before then, especially with the increased sales due to the high jackpot amount - currently at $640 million. But I don’t know the rules or whether there are caps or anything (don’t normally follow the lotto). Could it, at least in theory, go over a billion bucks? That would really be something, eh?
The value is based on tickets sold since the last winner so there is no set limit. Considering the jump since the last drawing, $1 billion if there is no winner tonight is very likely.
It’s really interesting that tickets at this point have a positive expected value. The odds of winning are ~ 1 in 175 million, so if you bought every single number combination possible you’d be guaranteed to win for a $175 M investment - the only question is whether you’d have to split the jackpot with another winner(s).
Note that because there are other prizes than the jackpot, you wouldn’t need the jackpot to reach $175 million to guarantee a win by buying all the tickets. I haven’t run all the numbers, but it should be something like a $140 million to break even by buying all the numbers (assuming no splits).
The probability of jackpot splits depend on the number of tickets sold, of course, but with this much action, it gets increasingly likely.
It’s interesting to note that if a jackpot split can be guaranteed, there’s no longer a positive expected value.
So, whether or not there actually is a positive expectation depends heavily on the probability of a split.
The payouts of the other prizes are fixed (they don’t increase with the jackpot increases and aren’t split between winners) and have an expected value of around $0.20 per ticket.
The odds that somebody won’t win tonight are getting low. Lottery officials are saying around 95 percent of the combinations have been played by at least one person.
Yay! Then we can all stop flooding the boards with tons of lottery related threads 
Not that I don’t join in and enjoy them 
I love it how the 95% chance that there will be a winning ticket seems like a virtual certainty, but the 99.9999994309% chance of any particular ticket not being the winner seems like “hey, anything could happen!”
If that’s the case, my previous figure of $140 million is just about spot on.
Why ? even a 3 way split:
Buy $175 million tickets
Win $35 million in secondary prizes
Win $213 million as your share of split
= 73 million x 2/3 (approx tax share) = 48 million profit
Perhaps you are saying that the taxes would kill it, but I believe gambling losses are deductible from gambling winnings, so your taxes should ultimately only be based on your profit. Now how the withholding works might be problematic - you may end up floating the government a few 10s of millions until you get the biggest tax refund ever, if they withhold a straight 1/3 of the whole winning amount.
I’d like to meet that man.
Sorry if my post was confusing, but I was actually commenting on two different things.
- Buying all the tickets.
- When do you get a positive expectation for a single play?
In case (1), you don’t need the jackpot to actually reach $175 million. As long as there are no splits, roughly $140 million is sufficient.
In case (2), if you know ahead of time there will be a split, your one ticket play will be negative expectation.
ETA: There’s at least 1 winner, so the jackpot won’t surpass $1 billion this time.
I assume you are talking because of taxes - I did some more back of the envelope calculations, and it looks like the 3-way split like actually happened is mildly -EV for one ticket, but a 2 way split or no split would still have been +EV.