Your Odds Were Three Times Better for Winning the $590 Million Powerball Jackpot Than Winning $1 Million at McDonald’s Monopoly
McDonald's launched its annual Monopoly game this week. If you're somehow not familiar, they put stickers on different menu items. Those stickers feature different Monopoly properties. If you collect the right ones, you win a prize.
But you won't. You're going to win a medium fry. The odds of winning a prize are one in four, but almost ALL of the winning stickers only get you food.
With every game piece, you have a one in nine shot of winning a medium fry. You have a one in 22 shot at a breakfast sandwich. And you have a one in 44 chance for a quarter pounder, McCafe coffee or smoothie, or McFlurry.
For the big prizes . . . and even the not so big ones . . . the odds SKYROCKET up. If you collect Boardwalk and Park Place you win $1 million . . . but the odds of finding Boardwalk are one in 600 MILLION.
To put it in perspective, your odds of winning that $590 million Powerball jackpot earlier this year were about one in 195 million. In other words, your odds were three times as good for that jackpot than the McDonald's one, and the prize was 59,000% better.
Even to win the $1,000 prize for collecting Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues, you'd need to beat one in 30 million odds. In other words . . . play McDonald's Monopoly because you want the food anyway, not to get rich.