McDonald's kicked off its annual Monopoly sweepstakes this week, so of course we are thrilled to devour the stats.

Courtney of "Business Insider", here's what you need to know to play and, if you are really lucky, win something.

Here's how it works. Every time you purchase certain items at McDonald's over the next couple weeks — any one of 26 different menu items — you'll get to peel off a game piece comprised of two stamps.

These game stamps can correspond to either an instant prize, or they can correlate to a space on the Monopoly board. For spaces on the Monopoly board, if you get all the properties of a single color — or the Railroads — you win a prize.

So, let's take a look at your odds of winning prizes by buying McDonald's.

The Basics

Before we get into the stats, there are a few basic elements of the game you need to know.

There are approximately 602,490,060 game pieces in play.

This means that there are 1.2 billion game stamps, or individual attempts at victory.

There are 135,540,995 food prizes

There are 15,838,729 instant win prizes.

The odds of winning a prize at the in-store game are 1 in 4, or a 25% probability.

If you win a prize on McDonald's Monopoly, it is probably going to be a food prize.

There's 1 in 4.45 odds — a 22.5% chance — you win a food prize when you get a McDonald's game piece.

As we mentioned earlier, the odds you win any prize is approximately 1 in 4, a probability of 25%.

So what does this mean? Well, comparing the two probabilities, 89.9% of the prizes will be food prizes. Hope you're hungry.

In fact, 4 out of every 11 prizes allocated will be a medium fries.

So here are the only game pieces that are actually very valuable. Don't trade these away:

BROWN: Mediterranean Ave, odds 1 in 30 million wins $1,000.

LIGHT BLUE: Vermont Ave, odds 1 in 40 million, wins $5,000.

PINK: Virginia Ave, odds 1 in 200 million, wins $10,000

ORANGE: Tennessee Ave, odds 1 in 602 million, wins Super Bowl tickets.

RED: Kentucky Ave, odds 1 in 15 million, wins one of 40 plane tickets for two.

YELLOW: Ventnor Ave, odds 1 in 300 million, wins $20,000

GREEN: Pennsylvania Ave, odds 1 in 40 million, wins one of 15 Fiat cars.

BLUE: Boardwalk, 1 in 602 million, wins $1,000,000 in $50,000 annual payments.

RAILROADS: Short Line railroad, 1 in 150 million, wins a year's supply of gas.

So, if you find one of those pieces, you're actually special. If you find any other piece, it's basically worthless, unless you can find a guy with an actually valuable piece to sell it to.

 

 

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