A customer purchases Mega Millions lottery tickets in Tallapoosa, Ga., Tuesday.(Photo: Erik S. Lesser, EPA)

Story Highlights

  • The jackpot was $636 million, the second-biggest of all time
  • One ticket was sold at Jennifer's Gift Shop in San Jose
  • Another was sold at Gateway Newstand in Atlanta
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At least two winning tickets have been sold in the $636 million Mega Millions jackpot, officials in California and Georgia announced.

One lucky costumer bought a winning ticket at Jennifer's Gift Shop in San Jose, according to California Lottery spokesman Alex Traverso. That winner will be sharing the second-largest lottery jackpot of all time with the holder of a ticket bought at the Gateway Newstand in Atlanta, 11 Alive News reports.

It is possible that winners in other states will be announced.

"For us, the main thing we'd like to get across is the level of excitement we saw all across California," Traverso told the Associated Press. "At one point, we were selling about 25,000 tickets per minute."

"It's been an amazing experience. It's unbelievable," he said.

The odds of winning were about 1 in 259 million.

Jennifer's Gift Shop owner Thuy Nguyen will receive a prize of about $1 million for selling the winning ticket, lottery officials told the San Jose Mercury News.

"I am so happy, I feel good," Nguyen told the Mercury News after learning his store had sold the winning ticket.

Tuesday's jackpot had rolled over 21 straight drawings since Oct. 4, worth a lump, sum, pre-tax payout worth $314.2 million. If there's no winner, Friday night's jackpot could surge past $825 million, eviscerating the $656 million record jackpot split by three winners in March 2012.

The winning numbers were 8, 20, 14, 17, 39 and 7.

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Ticket sales — the topic of TV, radio, social media and burgeoning office pools — surged in the hours leading up to the drawing, even though up to 75% of the possible number combinations were expected to be picked.

"Even though the odds are against you, it's just the excitement of, 'Hey, I might wake up one day and be a millionaire,' " says Chris Scales, 31, of Nashville. The hot dog vendor says he earns about $35,000 a year "if I really hustle."

The incredibly remote odds don't really sink in for people, says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University who has researched the motives of lottery ticket buyers."People don't really understand probabilities at all," he says. "Once you have a bunch of zeroes, it doesn't matter how many you have — one in 10,000, one in a million or one in a billion. … People do understand the meaning of the word 'largest.' They overreact to one dimension and underreact to the other."

Tuesday's drawing aside, Mega Millions jackpots are likely to continue swelling after lottery officials boosted their potential payouts.

Originally, customers chose five numbers from 1-56 and one number from 1-46. The new structure has customers choosing five numbers from 1-75 and one number from 1-15. That sliced the odds of winning from 1 in 176 million to 1 in 259 million.

Longtime lottery watcher Gail Howard says that with the odds of hitting the jackpot so small, ticket buyers should buy no more than one.

"Your odds are not going to improve that much if you buy 1 ticket or 1,000,'' says Howard, author of Lottery Master Guide. "I also think you should pick your own numbers rather than let a (point of sale) computer do it."

The current jackpot started at $12 million Oct. 4. By last week, it was up to $425 million, then $586 million on Monday before being raised to $636 million Tuesday morning.

Contributing: The Associated Press

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