Best Ways to Win a Million Dollars

Is it easy to win a million dollars?

Obviously, it isn’t, or everyone would do it.

But is it possible to win a million dollars?

Of course, it is. People do it every day.

The question is HOW to win a million dollars. And in this post, I bring you not just one answer to that question, but 7!

Looking to gamble online? Check out one of the sites above!

Here are 7 different ways to become a millionaire by winning money.

1 – Powerball or Mega Millions

Most people know you can win a million dollars playing the lottery. The 2 biggest lottery games where you can win over a million dollars are Powerball and Mega Millions.

Powerball is available in 44 states. The minimum jackpot for Powerball is $40 million, but it’s a progressive jackpot, so it goes up every week until someone wins.

To buy a Powerball ticket costs $2. To play, you choose 5 numbers from a set of 69 white balls. You also choose one number from a set of 26 red balls. (The red balls are the Powerballs.)

To win, you match the numbers that get drawn during the big drawing. During the drawing, the lottery uses a machine to draw 5 numbers from the white balls and another machine to draw a single number from the red balls. You can win a prize amount by matching as few as 3 of the white balls or by just matching the Powerball.

To win the big prize, though, you must match all the numbers.

Mega Millions is also available in 44 states. The minimum prize for Mega Millions is also $40 million, and, like Powerball, that prize amount goes up every week until it’s won.

To buy a Mega Millions ticket costs $2. You choose 5 numbers from between 1 and 70, and you choose 1 number from 1 to 25. If all 6 of your numbers match the 6 numbers during the drawing, you win the jackpot.

The main thing that distinguishes Mega Millions from Powerball is the optional “Megaplier.” This costs an extra dollar per ticket to play, but if you win, you get a multiplier to the jackpot of 2X, 3X, 4X, or 5X.

I should point out that even though you CAN win a million dollars in these games, you probably won’t. In fact, the odds of winning a million dollars in any kind of state-run lottery are painfully low.
The odds of winning either of these are roughly 1 in 300 million. The odds of winning Mega Millions are slightly worse than the odds of winning Powerball.

But when you get into odds that long, there’s no practical difference between 1 in 302 million and 1 in 292 million.

2 – Megabucks

Megabucks sounds like another lottery game, but it’s actually a wide-area progressive slot machine game with a minimum prize starting at $10 million.

A progressive slot machine is a game where the jackpot rises continually until someone hits the jackpot. A “wide-area” progressive slot machine is one which shares a jackpot with multiple machines in a specific geographical area. A tiny percentage of each bet you make on such a slot machine goes toward increasing the size of that jackpot.

You’d expect a slot machine game with a jackpot this big would be complicated, but the opposite is true. Megabucks is a simple 3-reel slot machine game with a single payline. It doesn’t get much more basic than that.

You can bet $1 or $2 per spin, but to have a shot at the jackpot, you must make the maximum bet of $3 per spin. Unlike the lottery games in the previous point, Megabucks is won relatively rarely—on average, just twice a year since the game’s inception in 2005.

The odds of winning Megabucks are better than the odds of winning the lottery by a significant amount. You’re looking at a probability of roughly 1 in 50 million.

You’d think that with significantly better odds, you’d see Megabucks winners more often than Powerball or Mega Millions winners, but the lottery games have more customers over a much larger geographic area.

When discussing a huge progressive jackpot or prize like this, payback percentage becomes practically irrelevant. After all, the payback percentage takes into account an event that’s so unlikely as to be practically impossible.

That being said, it seems as if the payback percentage for Megabucks averages around 89%.

If you like playing for big, life-changing jackpots, Megabucks might be a lot of fun.

On the other hand, if you enjoy frequent small wins, Megabucks is probably best avoided.

3 – Las Vegas

The Megabucks slot machine isn’t the only way to win a million dollars in Las Vegas, although it’s one of the more exciting because of the size of the jackpot.

One way to get a huge positive expected value, even though it will probably be unrealized, is to try the Million Dollar Slot at Harrah’s. It’s a huge positive expected value because you can play it for free. Since the expected value takes into account the probability of winning and losing versus the amount won or lost, when you get a free spin, the expected value goes way up.

To play Million Dollar Slots for free, though, you must become a Total Rewards member. (That’s just the name of the slots club or players club at Harrah’s.)

You can find other progressive slot machine games throughout the city with lower prizes than Megabucks, too.

And a lot of table games have progressive side bets which can reach $1 million or more. A few years ago a player won a million dollars with the 6-card bonus jackpot at the Three Card Poker tables at Paris Las Vegas.

You could even win a million dollars playing keno, which is basically a casino-run lottery with multiple drawings per hour.

4 – Draftkings or Fanduel

Fanduel was one of the earliest players in the daily fantasy sports industry. They launched in 2009.

Draftkings is the other big player in the niche. They launched in 2012.

Draftkings is based in Boston. They offer daily and weekly contests where you win money based on how players and teams that you draft perform. The 5 major American sports are all represented, too:

1. Major League Baseball
2. National Basketball Association
3. National Football League
4. National Hockey League
5. Professional Golf Association

They don’t limit themselves to just those sports, though—they also offer contests based on car racing, mixed martial arts, soccer, and tennis.

Fanduel has a similar business model, and at one point, they were going to merge with Draftkings. That merger was canceled for monopoly concerns, as the 2 companies combined would control 90% of the market. Since then, Fanduel has been acquired by Paddy Power and Betfair, and they’re expanding into sports betting.

Their business model involves hosting tournaments, and some of their tournaments have prize pools in excess of a million dollars. You can find more details about their ongoing and upcoming tournaments on either of their websites.

5- The Price Is Right or Wheel of Fortune

Some people seem to think that you can win a million dollars playing Price Is Right. I base that on Google’s autosuggest feature. When I type in “how to win a million dollars,” one of the suggested searches in “how to win a million dollars price is right.”

The same logic applies to Wheel of Fortune.

I get the same suggested search.

Google bases these auto-completed search strings on actual user searches, so apparently, that’s a pretty common search.

But it’s really tough to win a million dollars on Price Is Right. The biggest prizes on that show tend to be in the 6-figure range, like sports cars in the $150,000 to $300,000 range. In 2008, they did have a Price Is Right night-time special with a million dollar prize.

Winning a million dollars on Wheel of Fortune is a lot easier, but it’s still hard. Of course, you’ll have to become a contestant on the show just to get a shot at it, which isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world. You can apply to become a contestant on their official site.

Then you have to spin the big wheel and hit the million dollar stop. That’s a 71 to 1 proposition by itself. You then need to solve the word puzzle to go into the bonus show, which has another random requirement—you have 23 to 1 odds of hitting the million dollar stop on the wheel during the bonus game, too.

So just the random aspect of the game is 1727 to 1 by itself, and that assumes you have a 100% probability of solving the word puzzle. Realistically, you might not be able to pull that off so easily, which lowers the odds considerably more.

At least 3 people have won a million dollars playing Wheel of Fortune over its 40+ years on the air. You might be able to be the next one.

Honestly, your odds of winning on Wheel of Fortune are probably better than your odds of winning the lottery or a slot machine game.

6 – The World Series of Poker

Almost everyone knows about the World Series of Poker by now. It’s an annual series of Las Vegas poker tournaments run by Caesars Entertainment.

Some people think of the WSOP as just one tournament, but it’s really several dozen tournaments. The Main Event is a $10,000 tournament where first prize is always at least $1 million. It’s not the only poker tournament where you can win a million dollars, but it’s the most prestigious.

What are the odds of winning the WSOP?

It depends on 2 things, but only one of them is objectively quantifiable—the number of entrants. If you and all the other entrants had an equal probability of winning, your chance of winning would be as simple as 1/the number of entrants.

In 2018, 7874 players competed for the top prize of $8.8 million. In fact, everyone at the final table got at least $1 million.

This would mean the probability of winning a million dollars is 10 divided by 7874 players or 1 in 787.4.

But different players are of different skill levels, so that affects the probability of winning.

Even if you’re only half as good as the average player, you’d still have about a 1 in 1500 probability of making it to the final table and winning a million.

The Main Event isn’t the only event where you can win a million dollars at the World Series of Poker, though. In 2018, the $100,000 High Roller Tournament had a top prize of $2.9 million. Of course, with that kind of buy-in, $2.9 million isn’t impressive.

There was also the $565 buy-in Colossus tournament, with a top prize of $1 million even.

If you want the best probability of winning a million dollars gambling, poker is probably your best bet. The World Series of Poker is an obvious option, but you can find other major poker tournaments where you can win a million dollars, too. The World Poker Tour is one obvious place to look.

7- Casino Table Games

Most people don’t think of table games in the casino as an opportunity to make a million, but I’ve already pointed out that the progressive side bets are where it’s at if you want to win a huge prize like that.

Michael Bluejay of VegasClick.com has another strategy for winning a million playing table games, though. The idea is based on compound interest.

You start with a $5 bet with an even-money payout. If you win, you let it ride. And you keep letting your winnings ride until you have a million dollars.

As it turns out, you only have to win 18 times in a row to succeed:

1. $5
2. $10
3. $20
4. $40
5. $80
6. $160
7. $320
8. $640
9. $1280
10. $2560
11. $5120
12. $10240
13. $20480
14. $40960
15. $81920
16. $163840
17. $327680
18. $655360

At this point, you only need to risk $500,000 to hit your $1 million win goal, so you can set aside $155,360 in case you miss it, and you get to take another shot at it.

This sounds almost impossible, but how do the odds really compare to winning one of these lottery games?

As it turns out, the odds are WAY better. If you play roulette, your odds of succeeding at this quest are close to 1 in 266,000.

Conclusion

If there were an easy way to guarantee that you win a million dollars gambling, everyone would do it. Even in the best of scenarios, the probability of winning that much money is slim at best.

Do you have a strategy for winning a fortune at gambling that I didn’t cover? If so, what is it and how does it work?