I need to say that I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, not New York. However, for family reasons, I travel to New York City several times a year (as I will go to Bronx to visit my relatives the upcoming Christmas). As I don't have too much time in New York, compared to residents, I usually save money to buy tickets strategically when I am present in New York City. I find the drawing game lottery in New York more various and attractive.
I am a fan of Sweet Million. Sweet Million is definitely a superb game if your wish is to be a moderately wealthy person, rather than the super rich. Given its odds and your wish to be a "two-third" millionaire after tax, it is very worthy to save your MM and PB money to spend them on Sweet Million instead. When I was in New York City this August, I used the "Buy-5-get-3-free" promotion to buy a total of $20 of tickets across four drawings. I got a total of 32 lines, with 12 free QP. On one line in the QP ticket on Aug 12, I won $40 for matching 6 + 13 + 25 + 32. That was the highest prize I earned. However, I have not claimed the prize yet because I had to leave New York that night before the drawing. I will definitely claim it in December when I am in New York again. I had also previously won three $3 prizes, and have claimed all of them.
There is no SM game in NC (there is no in-state six-ball game at all). What I would play is Cash 5 only (NY Take 5 equivalent). I am not a big fan of PB or MM because it is too difficult to win anything. In North Carolina Cash 5 it is also pick 5 from 39 balls. While NY Take 5 has no rollover, which means second prize winners will benefit if there is no JP winner that day, NC Cash 5 has a growing JP starting from $50,000 and the highest one reached from 2006 to now is $1.1 million. That means, if there was no other winner in that drawing, you could actually buy all lines to surely win. (The odd is 1:575757). Actually, you could even avoid five consecutive duplicate some lines such as 1,2,3,4,5 to reduce your cost. But I tell you this is only a theoretically possible event but an impractical joke because you may not have enough money (at most $575757) or time (one day) to finish all tasks. Also, even if you were the store owner, your terminal would be shut down by the lottery agency because of inapproporiate use if you used it that way. In addition, because high prizes are pari-mutuel, you would end up losing money if there is more than one winner. Finally, the tax withholding make you lose one-third in the first place.
Another contrast between NY Take 5 and NC Cash 5 is that if you match 3 out of 5 balls in NY, you would normally get $20 or more, but the case is $4 or $5 in NC, given the same probability. This may be attributed to the difference in payout distribution. There is a much lower Take 5 JP in NY, usually lower than $100,000, but in NC it can reach as high as $1.1M, as mentioned before.
The compare and contrast between NC Cash 5 and NY Take 5 may not be relevant to this SM forum, but it draws my attention for so long that I want to share it here. But what I think is that if you are a Take 5 regular player (1:8.8 overall odd ) or Pick 10 player (1:17 overall) , the overall odd of SM (1:29) may not be good enough, and the lower tier prize is definitely not attractive at all. If I just want to win $3 or $40 or $500, I would go either Take 5 or Pick 10, not SM. I play SM just for the "easier but still difficult" wish of winning two-third a million.