The Georgia Lottery Commission said it will announce at 3:45 p.m. who bought a winning Mega-Millions ticket in Atlanta.
At a newsstand in the affluent Buckhead area of Atlanta, shop owner Young Soolee grinned as she arrived to work Wednesday morning.
One of the two winning tickets in Tuesday night's $648 million Mega Millions jackpot was sold in her shop.
"I'm so excited and nervous too," Soolee told Atlanta's Fox 5 News. That's understandable. Soolee, who said she sold about 1,300 tickets at the store on the day of the drawing, will receive about $1 million for selling a winning ticket..
The other winning ticket was sold at a gift shop in San Jose, Calif., where owner Thuy Nguyen was equally thrilled.
"The lottery called me and let me know... Whoa!" Nguyen told the San Jose Mercury News. "I am so happy, I feel good."
The jackpot winners themselves will be splitting the second-largest of all time. The odds of winning were about 1 in 259 million, but the drawing also created 20 more millionaires -- if the winners weren't sharing their tickets. In addition to 20 $1 million tickets, and scores of tickets won lesser prizes, Mega Millions officials said.
"It was a great run," said Paula Otto, Virginia Lottery Executive Director and Lead Director for Mega Millions. He said the jackpot's 22-drawing run generated more than $300 million in profits for programs in states that participate.
The lump sum is about $174 million for each of the jackpot-winning tickets. If there had been no winner, the next jackpot could have surged past $825 million, easily outpacing the $656 million record jackpot split by three winners in March 2012.
The winning numbers Tuesday were 8, 20, 14, 17, 39 and 7.
Ticket sales — the topic of TV, radio, social media and burgeoning office pools — surged in the hours leading up to the drawing, even though up to 75% of the possible number combinations were expected to be picked.
"Even though the odds are against you, it's just the excitement of, 'Hey, I might wake up one day and be a millionaire,' " says Chris Scales, 31, of Nashville. The hot dog vendor says he earns about $35,000 a year "if I really hustle."
The incredibly remote odds don't really sink in for people, says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University who has researched the motives of lottery ticket buyers."People don't really understand probabilities at all," he says. "Once you have a bunch of zeroes, it doesn't matter how many you have — one in 10,000, one in a million or one in a billion. … People do understand the meaning of the word 'largest.' They overreact to one dimension and underreact to the other."
Tuesday's drawing aside, Mega Millions jackpots are likely to continue swelling after lottery officials boosted their potential payouts.
Originally, customers chose five numbers from 1-56 and one number from 1-46. The new structure has customers choosing five numbers from 1-75 and one number from 1-15. That sliced the odds of winning from 1 in 176 million to 1 in 259 million.
Longtime lottery watcher Gail Howard says that with the odds of hitting the jackpot so small, ticket buyers should buy no more than one.
"Your odds are not going to improve that much if you buy 1 ticket or 1,000,'' says Howard, author of Lottery Master Guide. "I also think you should pick your own numbers rather than let a (point of sale) computer do it."
The current jackpot started at $12 million Oct. 4. By last week, it was up to $425 million, then $586 million on Monday before being raised to $636 million Tuesday morning.
The jackpot resets to $15 million for the next drawing, which is on Friday night.
