ALBANY - Let's make this clear: Just because one store had a big lottery winner doesn't make it any more likely it will have another one.
But as the Mega Millions jackpot for Friday has now reached $970 million and Saturday's Powerball drawing is for $378 million, it can't hurt to know what stores in New York have produced the largest winners.
So last summer, the USA Today Network's Albany Bureau produced a database and analyzed what lottery stores in New York had the most luck between 2012 and 2017.
The review of the last six years of lottery winnings over $5,000 showed some retailers were indeed more lucky than others.
Put simply: The more sales, the more winners.
The most winners came from the Carlton Cards newsstand in Penn Station in midtown Manhattan.
It is the largest seller of lottery tickets in New York, averaging sales of $246,000 a week. So from 2012 through 2017, it sold 49 tickets worth at least $5,000, including a $59 million Mega Millions jackpot in 2015.
Overall, New York — which has the largest lottery in the nation — had nearly 25,000 lottery tickets that yielded jackpots of at least $5,000, the review found.
The largest jackpot in the state's history was a $321 million Mega Millions jackpot in 2014 near Middletown, Orange County.
So you can peruse all the winners in New York and hope for the best and dream big.
But just remember the reality: Friday night's record-breaking Mega Millions, now the second-largest in U.S. history, has odds of 302,575,350 to 1 to win the jackpot wherever you buy your ticket.
There's good news, though: The odds of winning Powerball are slightly better.
That's a mere 292,201,388 to 1.
