New Hamburg resident Gene Ferris' dream would be to buy a motor boat to cruise and fish on the Hudson River, if he won a piece of the $355 million in Mega Millions prizes.
As the pot of cash has grown, so has the interest and the sales, despite the steep odds. You have a better chance of getting hit by lightning a couple hundred times than winning the first-place jackpot of $223.65 million (the lump-sum cash option, or 63 percent of the jackpot total)
The winning numbers Tuesday night were: 4-8-15-25-47 with the Mega Ball: 42.
According to the National Weather Service, the odds of getting struck by lightning in a given year are 1 in 150,000. The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 175,711,536, according to the New York Lottery website.
Benjamin Lotto, dean of freshmen and a professor of mathematics at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, put the numbers in perspective: He said getting struck by lightning is 350 times more likely than winning the Mega Millions jackpot; the odds of winning the jackpot are about the same as flipping a coin 27 or 28 times and getting heads each time.
Lotto said someone is 270 times more likely to be dealt a royal flush in a five-card poker hand than they are to win the Mega Millions jackpot.
The odds of winning the jackpot are roughly the same as the odds of rolling a seven in 11 consecutive rolls of a pair of dice, he added.
He said the odds of dialing your own phone number by randomly dialing seven digits on a phone is roughly 20 times more likely to occur than winning the jackpot.US News Paper
