Value vs Heat

Every lottery site shows you the jackpot. That number is the worst available guide to whether a ticket is worth buying, for two reasons: it is an annuity figure that drifts with interest rates, and it says nothing about how many other people are buying — which is what decides whether you'd keep the prize or split it.

So we run two dials instead, and deliberately never blend them into one score.

• Value is a maths index — what a ticket actually returns per dollar once the jackpot is taken at its cash value and discounted for the chance of sharing it, ranked against that game's own draw history.
• Heat is a mania index — how much attention this draw is getting, from the rollover run, how fast tickets are selling against normal, and how big the advertised prize is.

When a jackpot run pushes Heat toward 100 while Value sinks, that is not a contradiction. It is the model telling you the draw is getting bigger and worse at the same time.

Why value falls as the jackpot grows

This is the counterintuitive part, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

A bigger jackpot sells more tickets. More tickets mean more ways for two people to hold the same numbers, so the prize you'd actually receive is the jackpot divided by however many others also won it. The expected share of a jackpot you win is (1 − e^−λ) / λ, where λ is the number of tickets in play divided by the jackpot odds.

At small jackpots λ is tiny and you'd keep essentially all of it. At a billion-dollar jackpot, λ passes 1 and your expected share drops below two thirds. Past a certain point each extra dollar of advertised jackpot pulls in more than a dollar's worth of new tickets, and value per dollar declines even as the headline number climbs. Swept against Powerball's own record since 2015, that turning point currently sits near $1.8 billion advertised.

Treat that figure as soft. Only a handful of draws in history have ever exceeded $1 billion, so the top of the sales curve rests on very few observations. The shape — rise, turn, decline — is robust; the precise turning point is not.

How the numbers are built

Value per dollar is the summed expected value of every fixed prize tier, plus the jackpot's cash value divided by the jackpot odds and multiplied by the expected share you would keep, all divided by the ticket price. It is shown after tax, using the same flat factor as the rest of this site.

Estimated tickets are not a guess. For every past draw we invert the lottery's own published per-tier winner counts against that tier's odds: if 700,000 people matched a prize whose odds are 1 in 38, roughly 27 million tickets were in play. Pooling every tier gives a maximum-likelihood estimate of participation, and the relationship between jackpot size and tickets sold is then read off the game's own history.

Percentiles are matrix-aware. A prize matrix change makes earlier draws a different game, so each game is ranked only within its current matrix — Powerball since its 2015 change, Mega Millions since its April 2025 relaunch to a $5 ticket. Comparing across those dates would be comparing two different products.

Full detail, including what we deliberately do not compute, is on the methodology page. The participation model behind these figures has its own page: will the jackpot be split?

What this is not

It is not a tip, and a high Value reading is not a signal to buy. Every game here returns less than it costs; the dial measures which draw is least bad, never which is good. Expected value also says nothing about your actual chance of winning, which stays around 1 in 292 million for Powerball whatever the dial reads. Play for entertainment or not at all.