Got the state lists for $10 HG, and Super Millions. Out of curiosity, tallied up the number of books active, in transit, and listed as received. I'll hold off on posting this as Oldghost is planning on sharing it with you all soon in a more user friendly format.
$10 Holiday Gifts
Active: 190
In Transit: 6
Received: 510
Glancing over the list, I noticed alot of places I've never seen on the list as having it in stock. There's a decent number of active books in the Middleburg/Jacksonville/Orange Park area. Although I'm still very doubtful of the final prize being out there, with this number in stock I think it is possible.
$20 Super Millions
Active: 68
In Transit: 0
Received: 217
This number hasn't changed that much. There's a store in Orlando with 15 books (confirmed). This number has been pretty steady because it looks like some books from the warehouse ended up surfacing, so the total number of active books and received hasn't budged much.
According to recent Instant Liability Reports from December 22:
Super Millions should have: 111247 prizes remaining, with 8,550 tickets remaining (or 285 books) even if all were winners that's still an alarming 102,697 prizes that are unaccounted for. Absolutely disgusting considering the discrepancy between the ILR and the inventory reports. Where did those 102,697 prizes go? To me, continuing to play Super Millions at this point is pretty pointless. The game could be bought out for $171,000, which would yield an incredible return if the final jackpot were out there. There's still 3 $20k prizes, several $10k, $5k, and 40+ $1k prizes remaining as well.
Holiday Gifts should have: 130714 prizes remaining. With 706 books or 42,360 tickets remaining, there would still be 88,354 prizes unclaimed or unaccounted for assuming all of the remaining tickets were winners.
Most, if not all of the Super Millions books remaining are "in the range" for where the jackpot could be. There's plenty of 680k- 720k books, with books in the 730k+ range being the most scarce at this point. With $10 Holiday Gifts, there's alot more books in the 100k+ range, and books under 70k seem quite a bit more scarce. Even if there were only 200 out of the 706 books from the HG game in the 70k or under range, I'd wager $10 Holiday Gifts being more likely to still have the final winner out there than Super Millions overall. Of course, there's huge margins of error here and the likelihood of either final jackpot being out there is just very slim.
I'm personally done playing any scratchoffs and have been on lottery hiatus for over a week, but I'd recommend $10 HG over Super Millions at the moment also because the minimum payout for $10 Holiday Gifts is higher. $245/$600 books are very common on Super Millions due to the prize payout structure accounting for all those larger prizes ($20k, $100k, $3M) whereas the prize payout structure on $2M Holiday Gifts includes ($5k, $10k, and then $2M) resulting in the average book of $10 HG being better.
What do you all think?