Did anyone else read the current News Story on the LP main page about the IL Lottery not awarding jackpots for some of its largest jackpot games?
This has me concerned. Apparently it was mentioned in the article that FL has a 100% jackpot release rate for all of it's games, but I'm not buying that. Yes, it's true winners will get tossed in the trash because people aren't being careful.
But with what's going on the past few years. The 100X game, did the FL Lottery ever really release the last $5M Jackpot or did they just sell nearly the entire batch of the last ticket pool and claim the game undersold? Same for 50X,200MS, SM, or 2MJ. How do we (or anyone else for that matter) know that the Lotto didn't flood a vast majority of a ticket-batch-pool into retail while deliberately holding back the winning prizes during the game's waning months?
For example, when Dracos won his SM $100K prize, we knew back in July that this game was nearly 98% sold and had only 1 of these prizes left. People were have been buying up this ticket right and left for months. I'm having a hard time believing the ticket was in the marketplace for that long and that by the time the lottery releases it, they're hoping retailers won't prioritize/stock it since new games will have come out and the tickets will sit in a stockroom waiting to be returned to the manufacture, so the FL Lottery can profit more.
Looking at the roll number information available for SM and 2MJ, there is no reason that the grand prizes shouldn't be available for sale right now because we've all encountered books/rolls in the zone that they're expected to be in. But how do we know these have actually been released to the retailers for sale (not just sent to them, only to be returned b/c the retailer no longer prioritizes that game.
This brings me back to my question about the need to fully audit a game once it's run has been completed and prizes for it can no longer be redeemed. One should be done for 100X so we can find out exactly whether the 1 $5M was actually released for sale and activated or just sitting in a retail shop waiting to be picked up by the lottery, or never released from the manufacture warehouse. I've seen the documentaries on GTech and SciGames on YT and it's clear these guys do have the data to identify every ticket on every roll that was ever printed, as well as determining if the roll was activiated for sale.
Otherwise, I'm starting to think that even if we "know" there should be a jackpot coming for these dwinding games, the odds look closer to 0 than they do to 1 in whatever.