Jackpots, the Lottery, Gambling, etc

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Lottery winner

The winner of a $1.13 billion Mega Millions jackpot has finally come forward to claim their staggering windfall nearly nine months since the ticket was drawn, according to the New Jersey Lottery. Officials say the jaw-dropping prize is the fifth-highest in the game’s nearly three-decade history. The winning ticket was drawn on March 26 at a ShopRite supermarket in the coastal township of Neptune, according to the Lottery. The next Mega Millions drawing is tonight, with a jackpot estimated at $970 million. That's quite a Christmas bonus!

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? Lottery dreaming gets pricey

Illustration: Maura Losch/Axios

The steepest inflation of all can be found in the rising price of a dream, Axios Markets co-author Felix Salmon writes. Why it matters: When the Mega Millions lottery was launched in May 2002, a ticket was one of America's real bargains. For a mere $1, you could buy days' worth of hopes and dreams of what you might do were you to become stupendously wealthy. In April, the cost of such escapist contemplation will rise to a gulp-inducing $5. The next drawing, tonight at 11 p.m. ET, is expected to be near $970 million, one of the 10 richest jackpots in the game's history. ? By the numbers: Consumer prices have risen 75% since 2002. The $1 that a lottery ticket cost back then is worth the equivalent of $1.75 today. A $5 ticket represents a 285% price hike in real, inflation-adjusted terms — for an item that has almost no supply-chain costs.

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? Charted: Billion-dollar holiday jackpot

Data: Mega Millions. Chart: Axios Visuals The Mega Millions jackpot surged to an estimated $1.15 billion yesterday — the fifth largest in the game's history. Why it matters: Lottery tickets are classic last-minute stocking stuffer purchases. "We know that many people will likely receive tickets to Friday's drawing as holiday gifts, and what a gift that would turn out to be," said Joshua Johnston, lead director for the Mega Millions Consortium. Go deeper.

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Powerball jackpot

Two winning tickets for Saturday's nearly $1.8 billion Powerball jackpot were sold in Missouri and Texas. "With final ticket sales, the Powerball jackpot came in at $1.787 billion — making it the second-largest US lottery jackpot ever won," the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the Powerball game, said in a news release. The largest Powerball jackpot on record remains the $2.04 billion prize won in California on November 7, 2022. As for the lucky ticket holders, each can choose either an annuitized prize of $893.5 million or a lump sum payment of $410.3 million — both before taxes. The wins end a streak of 42 consecutive drawings with no one claiming the jackpot.

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NCAA bans 3 college basketball players for betting on their own games at Fresno St, San Jose St

The NCAA banned three men’s college basketball players for sports betting on Wednesday, saying they had bet on their own games at Fresno State and San Jose State and were able to share thousands of dollars in payouts.

https://apnews.com/article/gambling-ncaa-fresno-state-san-jose-state-79cb4a2a1f9f23a2cb22902a9694aca1?

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The Same Trap (H. Armstrong Roberts / Retrofile / Getty)

View in browser Gambling is a numbers game, so here are a few: The pitcher Emmanuel Clase’s 2025 salary from Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians is $4.5 million dollars. This weekend, prosecutors unveiled charges that he had made just $12,000 from two recent rigged pitches. And he could face as many as 65 years in prison (though such a stiff sentence seems unlikely). Clase and the fellow Guardians hurler Luis Ortiz were indicted last week for their involvement in the scheme, which allegedly netted bettors hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Attorneys for Clase and Ortiz have denied the allegations.) The scheme outlined in the indictment is the latest instance of legalized gambling’s corrosive influence on professional sports. Major leagues have welcomed the industry with open arms and greedy palms, signing contracts with betting companies and bringing casinos into stadiums and arenas, but they act astonished when gambling starts to corrupt their own players. Traditional sports fandom involves rooting for your team to win; traditional sports gambling involves putting money on the game results too. The most notorious baseball-gambling episode was the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox (including “Shoeless Joe” Jackson) were accused of intentionally losing the World Series as part of a mob betting scheme and banned from the sport. The indictment against Clase and Ortiz alleges something that is both less directly threatening to the game’s integrity and somehow even bleaker. Nothing in the charges suggests that Clase, a fearsome closer and three-time All-Star, intentionally lost any games. Instead, prosecutors say, he and Ortiz agreed to throw balls on particular pitches. The gamblers then placed prop bets—wagers on specific outcomes—and won money. In other words, this was gambling for gambling’s sake, staking money on things that no one would care about for any independent reason, and then concocting elaborate methods of cheating to make those things happen. For decades after the Black Sox scandal, MLB rigorously pushed gambling away. Pete Rose, the sport’s all-time-hits leader, was permanently banned when he was revealed to have placed bets on baseball, though he claimed this didn’t taint the game, because he bet only on his teams to win. (Rose’s ban was repealed earlier this year, after his death, following pressure from President Donald Trump, a longtime casino owner.) Since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling effectively legalized it, betting has been available widely and has shed much of its stigma. Individual problem gamblers are suffering, and Clase and Ortiz seem likely to pay for their involvement if found guilty. Yet the big corporations of the sports world are doubling down on gambling. Last week, ESPN announced that it was ending ESPN Bet, a gambling foray with Penn Entertainment that failed to capture many users. But the network isn’t abandoning its hopes: It’s signing a new deal with DraftKings, one of the two biggest industry players. The big sports leagues are way out ahead. Hard figures on how much revenue their involvement with betting has brought them aren’t available, but it’s safe to say the numbers are large. A 2018 projection from an industry group suggested MLB would make $1.1 billion and the NFL would make $2.3 billion annually. And if those estimates aren’t exactly impartial, anyone who’s watched a game, looked at the ESPN app, or driven past innumerable billboards for DraftKings and FanDuel can surmise that a lot of cash is washing around—whether from direct agreements or indirect effects such as ad spending and more attention. The answer from the leagues has been to try to cut back on prop bets. Keith O’Brien argued in The Atlantic last month—after another depressing gambling scandal, this time in the NBA—that “prop bets pose a particular threat to the integrity of the game.” Any individual athlete has only so much control over whether his or her team wins or loses. But prop bets focus on smaller outcomes over which one player can have a great deal of influence, such as their point total (in basketball) and yardage (in football). As a result, players are particularly susceptible to manipulation, and that in turn corrupts their sport as a whole. After the Clase and Ortiz indictment, MLB said that its partners would limit bets on specific pitches, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver earlier asked platforms to “pull back some of the prop bets.” That seems better than nothing, but barely. As Charles Fain Lehman wrote in The Atlantic last fall, the problem is not particular kinds of sports gambling—it’s sports gambling more broadly. “The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households,” he argued, citing research that has found that less saving, more bank overdrafts, and greater rates of bankruptcy are associated with looser gambling laws. These problems are particularly common among young men, who are becoming dangerously addicted, as my colleague Hana Kiros has reported. Young men also, of course, make up the rosters of MLB, the NFL, and the NBA. No one should be naive about how money suffuses professional sports—the leagues exist to turn a profit—but it’s easy to see why putting intensely competitive men in situations where gambling is celebrated and advertised is going to create temptations they can’t all resist, even if the payoff likely amounts to a rounding error on their paychecks, as in the Clase and Ortiz indictment. Prohibition has a bad reputation, and American society seems to be turning against regulating vices. I tend to agree that banning everything that is socially undesirable just creates opportunities for overweening enforcement, but gambling still brings out my most puritanical impulses. (You can make a good policy case against banning betting and other vices while still disapproving of them; a principled libertarianism need not be libertine.) Before the 2018 Supreme Court ruling, though, betting wasn’t completely banned. In addition to friendly leagues among friends, gambling was legal in a few select places: Las Vegas, Atlantic City, certain Native American lands. That provided enough of an outlet for people to be able to indulge in gambling from time to time yet ensured that it was viewed as an irregular indulgence, faintly improper. The past month has seen the best of baseball, in the epochal World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays, and some of the worst, in this indictment. MLB should think hard about the lessons of the latter. Sports leagues think that they’re in on the deal, but they’re really the mark, falling for the same trap that every gambler does. They see money on the table and can’t resist trying for it, forgetting that the house always comes out ahead. Related: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake. (From 2024) “I’m treating guys who would never be caught dead in a casino”

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Billion-dollar jackpots

If it seems like lottery jackpots have been getting larger over the past few years, they have. And the odds of winning any prize — while still a long shot — have slightly improved. Here’s why.

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? New betting battleground

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

The battle to dominate prediction markets — a fast-growing alternative to traditional online gambling — is heating up, Axios' Nathan Bomey reports. Catch up quick: Polymarket and Kalshi pioneered the space and have been the most aggressive, offering markets like sports and politics and irking regulators. Now, competitors are arriving. DraftKings, one of the nation's largest sportsbooks, launched its long-anticipated prediction market yesterday in 38 states. It comes about two weeks after rival sportsbook Fanatics debuted its own prediction market app. Robinhood lets users trade bets in its app. Crypto exchange Coinbase is set to offer prediction markets soon. ? Stunning stat: Prediction markets could hit a trillion dollars in annual trading volume by 2030, CNBC reports, citing data from research firm Eilers & Krejcik. Sports — which E&K projects will make up 44% of the volume — is expected to drive the growth.

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? A Powerball player who bought a lucky ticket outside Little Rock, Ark., won $1.82 billion in the Christmas Eve drawing — the second-largest jackpot in U.S. history. It's the first Powerball jackpot winner since September. Get the latest.

? Charted: Second-biggest jackpot

Data: Powerball and Mega Millions. Chart: Axios Visuals The holder of a Powerball ticket purchased at a gas station outside Little Rock, Ark., on Christmas Eve won the second-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history. To get the full $1.82 billion prize, the winner would receive one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments that increase by 5% each year. The jackpot also has a lump sum cash payment option worth $834.9 million. Go deeper.

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When I was in the USA, I knew many people who played the lottery, including multi-millionaires.  I guess you can never have too much. 

I am sure there are more now. They dream of an endless supply of money. 

I had a client with about 100 employees. One of the employees brother or sister won a lottery.  There were so many stories about how the family behaved after that. It was an eye-opener for many, including me. Money changes people. 

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📈 Monster game for prediction markets

Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios

Prediction market Kalshi registered over $1 billion in Super Bowl bets — hosting a record $871 million in activity on Sunday alone, Bloomberg reports. That topped its previous single-day record by 60%, according to a Bank of America estimate. Kalshi and rival Polymarket "saw nearly $1.2 billion in total trading" on Super Bowl Sunday. 🎲 By contrast, Super Bowl betting at Nevada sportsbooks, where most betting took place before prediction markets, fell for the second straight year to $134 million — a 10-year low. Keep reading (Bloomberg gift link) ... Explore Nevada data.

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💰 A Powerball ticket sold at a western Illinois gas station was the sole winner of last night's $1 billion jackpot. Go deeper.