Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2002 | 11:28 a.m.
IGT has a website for those interested in tracking the total payoff or for finding Megabucks machines close to home. It is www.megajackpots.com
There is also a toll-free number: (888) 448-2WIN or (888) 448-2946
To win the Megabucks top payout, gamblers have to insert $3 per play.
Cheryl Habbyshaw, matriarch of a big family in Ohio, came to Las Vegas to get away from the holiday bustle back home and found what she really wants for Christmas -- the Megabucks jackpot of more than $22 million.
As poinsettias and holiday lights competed with flashing slot machines at the casino Tuesday night, Habbyshaw fed $3 bets into a Megabucks machine while visions of riches danced in her head.
She said she could use some of the money to finish her holiday shopping.
Habbyshaw and her husband, Michael, have 12 children, 15 grandchildren and a great-grandchild in Aurora, Ohio.
"I shop for 50 people, and I've got half the shopping done," Habbyshaw said from her seat at Bally's -- where a Covina, Calif., retiree hit the last Megabucks jackpot, for $22.6 million, on May 27.
Habbyshaw said she was playing the winning machine the night before Johanna Heundl, 74, won the statewide progressive jackpot.
Michael Habbyshaw, who owns a chain-link fence company, said he and his wife know that the Megabucks odds are stacked against them, but it's fun to play because the potential payoff is so high.
Since it started in 1986, there have been only 57 Megabucks winners in Nevada, but the total winnings have been more than $386 million.
"It's a longshot," said Ed Rogich, vice president of marketing for IGT, the company that runs separate Megabucks games in Nevada, California, Iowa, Mississippi, Louisiana, Colorado, Missouri and Detroit.
How much of a longshot is it? Lightning strikes about 100 people in the United States annually and a person has a 1-in-709,260 chance of being hit, according to one study. The odds of winning the Kentucky lottery are 1 in 5.2 million.
The odds of hitting the Megabucks jackpot are 1 in 16.7 million.
But as jackpots get higher, expectations get higher, said Ken Geiger, vice president of slot operations for Paris and Bally's.
"This weekend we expect to get a lot more play," Geiger said, adding that people from California have been calling to ask how high the Megabucks jackpot has grown.
It took more than eight years and 38 jackpots for a Megabucks jackpot to break the $10 million mark, which it did when it was hit at the Gold Coast in 1995, said Connie Fox of IGT.
The Megabucks payoff broke the $20 million barrier with a $27.5 million jackpot at Palace Station on Nov. 15, 1998, Fox said.
Cocktail waitress Cynthia Jay-Brennan won the biggest Megabucks jackpot, $34.9 million, on Jan. 26, 2000, at the Desert Inn.
Jay-Brennan was seriously injured and her sister killed six weeks later when a drunken driver rear-ended her car while it was stopped at a red light on Boulder Highway.
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