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Tuesday night's Mega Millions drawing could bring $363M jackpot

Posted at 10:46 AM, Jan 02, 2018
and last updated 2018-01-03 00:41:11-05

UPDATE: Here are the winning numbers for the Mega Millions Jackpot:

1 42 47 64 70 Mega Ball 22 Megaplier 4

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LEE COUNTY, Fla. -- If you play the lottery, Tuesday night just may be your night to win big.  The Mega Millions jackpot for Tuesday night's drawing is up to $361 million.

It's a huge amount of money, but the big jackpots are more common than they used to be.  Mega millions made a change in October, giving you more numbers to choose from -- and making it harder to win.

Be sure to watch Fox 4 News, the only station in Southwest Florida with live lottery results.

There were also no winners in Saturday night's Powerball drawing, so the grand prize in that game has now reached $440 million ahead of another drawing Wednesday.

The combined total for those two prizes: $783 million.

While the chance of winning either game is very low, and the chance of winning both is very, very, very low -- 1 in 88 quadrillion, or 1 in 88,412,922,115,183,000 to be precise. In percentages terms, that means you have a 0.0000000000000011% chance of winning both games.

But that didn't stop people from buying tickets to both games in recent days.

"It's something we often see, particularly when there are two big jackpots - people buying both tickets, " said Jeff Lenard, spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, whose members sell about two-thirds of the nation's lottery tickets. "There's not much loyalty to a specific games. They're sold in the same places, so you might as well double down on the number of days that you can dream."

And Americans do love buying lottery tickets. They spent more than $80 billion on them in 2016. That's more than they spent on movies, video games, music, sports tickets and books -- combined.