CLEVELAND, Ohio -- We've got a sure-fire way for you to win what could be a
record Powerball jackpot on Saturday should the $500 million top prize go
unclaimed Wednesday night.
All you need are cash, time and friends. Lots and lots of all three. Get
prepared now. Here's the plan.
Immediately after Wednesday's drawing, start buying every combination
possible. (Note to Powerball novices: the game consists of six numbers. Each
of five white balls drawn range from 1 to 59; a red ball ranges from 1 to
35.)
The bankroll
There are 175.2 million combinations so, at $2 a play, you'll need to get to
an ATM or your mattress and withdraw a little over $350 million to cover
all possible draws.
But even if you have that kind of money stashed away, there's a problem.
The clock
There's not enough time for you to place all the bets yourself. This is true
even if you prepared all 35.04 million betting slips (five bets per slip)
ahead of time in anticipation of such a big jackpot. In Ohio, bets are cut
off at 10 p.m. That leaves just 71 hours between the 10:59 p.m. Wednesday
drawing and the deadline for buying tickets for the Saturday drawing.
Seventy-one hours is 4,260 minutes. Let's assume you bet slips at a rate of
four per minute, or one every 15 seconds, a rate that one efficient gas
station clerk tells us is doable.
With five bets per card, you'll be able to place 20 bets per minute. This
means it would take 146,020 hours - the equivalent of more than 6,000 24-
hour days - to make all the possible bets. But remember, you have only 71
hours.
Don't despair. We have a solution.
Your team
This is where your small army of helpers come into play. You will need 2,057
people at registers around the clock from late Wednesday through Saturday's
deadline, placing bets at a rate of 20 per minute (five bets per card, four
cards per minute) to cover all the possible combinations.
How big of a deal would this be? If you sent your army west on Interstate 90
, you'd have to find available lottery sales agents on average about one per
mile all the way from Cleveland to Seattle.
But you might also have to send battalions south and east. We know some
clerks will be tied up with trivial tasks like selling people gasoline and
food. We'll leave the mapping to you. There are more than 9,000 outlets in
Ohio, but many aren't open round-the-clock.
The payout
We don't know yet how big the jackpot could grow by Saturday if the $500
million prize is not won Wednesday night. And we don't know if you'll have
to share your jackpot with one or more other winners.
But we do know you'll be a jackpot winner if you play all the combinations,
plus be a holder of a lot of other winning tickets. You'll have another 34
near-miss tickets, each worth $1 million. Those will be the tickets matching
the five white balls drawn, but not the red ball. And, you'll have another
5.5 million winning tickets worth from $4 to $100 each.
In all, you'll have at least a piece of the jackpot and $63 million in
consolation prizes. You'll need that army of friends to cash in all those
tickets as well.
A sure moneymaker?
Investing $350 million to win $563 million - the jackpot and secondary
prizes - might seem like a no brainer if you can scrape together the money
and time.
But not so quick.
You not only might have to share that jackpot if there are multiple winners,
there are tax considerations.
The top federal tax rate on incomes over $400,000 is 39.6 percent. Count on
some state income taxes as well.
Cushioning the tax blow, however, will be those $340 million worth of losing
tickets. Losing lottery tickets can be deducted from the winnings for tax
purposes.