HOUSTON – Check your tickets – a $3 million lottery ticket for Tuesday night’s Mega Millions drawing was sold in San Antonio.
The ticket also included the optional Megaplier making it worth $3 million.
The ticket is one of 36 second prize tickets, each matching the five white balls drawn Tuesday night. Eight were in California, four each in Florida and New York, two each in Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey and Virginia, and one each in Arizona, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The Mega Millions jackpot was finally won on Tuesday night, and a single lucky ticket holder in South Carolina can claim a tremendous lottery jackpot – an estimated $1.6 billion, or $913.7 million cash. The winning numbers for Oct. 23 are the white balls the white balls 5, 28, 62, 65 and 70, plus the gold Mega Ball 5.
The history-making Mega Millions jackpot smashed the former Mega Millions record of $656 million set in March 2012, and is close to the $1.586 Powerball prize in January 2016 (final sales are still being compiled).
The jackpot had been rolling since July 24, when a California office pool of 11 co-workers shared a $543 million prize. Three other jackpots have been won this year – $451 million on Jan. 5 (Florida), $533 million on March 30 (New Jersey), and $142 million on May 4 (Ohio).
For matching four white balls plus the Mega Ball, 419 tickets won the game’s $10,000 third prize Tuesday night. Fifty-one of those are actually worth $30,000 each because they included the optional Megaplier.
In total, there were 15,750,013 winning tickets Tuesday night in addition to the jackpot winner. In this 26-draw jackpot run, beginning with the July 27 drawing there were more than 50.2 million winning tickets at all prize levels, including 85 worth $1 million or more and the jackpot winner.
For the next drawing on Friday, Oct. 26, the jackpot resets to its starting value of $40 million ($22.8 million cash).