That's the good news.
Bad news is if you could feed a lottery machine at the HEB, 10 combinations/ticket every 5 seconds, it would take you 1,736 days to do every ticket for the 300,000,000 combinations.
Badder news, that doesn't include the much more onerous task of filling out 300,000,000 combinations on the slips to feed INTO the machine, probably taking about 30 seconds per, or over 1000 days for this task?
Of course, this is for one person doing all the work. And to be honest, I don't know the cost of each combination play --- is it $1 per, so you'd have to put out $300,000,000 ($600,000,000, see my edit below) to guarantee the win, tax deductible expense of course. Oh, and the $1.6 billion is the annuitized value; estimated cash value I believe is about $905 million. (Edit, just checked after posting, it's $2 per play, so parenthetical values in below text reflects $2 cost per ticket instead of $1).
So if you win the $905 million, less cash out of $300 (600) million, you'd net $605 ($305) million before income taxes, about 25-30%, so "take home" about $450 ($225) million.
BUT, if you could put together a team of hundreds of scratchers to get it done before the next drawing, and they ALL did their jobs right, and you'd win, you'd need to split winnings (or pay them some agreed upon rate up front).
Oh, and this assumes no one else wins along with you --- pretty sure the maximum prize is split among the total number of winning tickets.
I think I may buy $5 ($10) worth anyway.
Good luck to all who play!!
P.S., other numbers that might make one pause, assuming the machines take $100 bills (I don't know, but this should be a conservative assumption), you would need 3,000,000 quantity of $100 bills. Assuming each bill weighs 0.5 oz. (just a guess), you'd have to haul about 94,000 pounds of these out of a bank (which wouldn't have them anyway), and then have a bunch of college students wheelbarrow them into the HEB, .... just having fun with all of this. (Edit: I think I may be off on this, considering number of combinations per ticket [10?], you'd pay $20 per ticket of 10 combinations, or 5 tickets per $100 bill, so it may be 18,800 pounds of $100 bills.)
The huge numbers involved in all of this almost assuredly prevent even a professional gambling/investing (is there a difference between the two?) group from doing a guaranteed win.
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