I'm not sure that there even is a specific liability cap. They may have a rough idea, but what they can pay with an acceptable loss will depend on sales for the affected drawing, and what they have in reserve accounts, and probably several things I can't think of.
Suppose they actually draw 1,2,3,4,5, +7? There will be thousands of 5+0 winners, which would require a payout of billions at the usual 1 million prize value. In that case there's absolutely no question that the prize will be paid on a parimutuel basis, and the total amount will probably be limited to what's in the accounts used for paying an unexpectedly large number of winners. It may have changed under newer versions of the rules, but as of 2013 the reserve account was supposed to have a maximum of $40 million. For 1000 5+0 winners that means they'd each get a modest amount from the regular prize pool account, perhaps $40k from the reserve account, and maybe a bit from other accounts. MUSL could decide to kick in some extra money as they did for the fortune cookie payout, but tit wouldn't be much. Paying an extra $100 million to honor the set prize with the fortune cookie payout didn't really cost them much in the scheme of things, but they can't pay out anywhere near an extra billion. Maybe they'd pick an arbitrary amount that makes each prize a round number, such as 50 or 60k.
Ticket sales for that drawing, and possibly previous drawings may be a major factor. A drawing that sells $15 million tickets can be expected to result in about 1 5+0 winner, and to contribute about $1 million to the prize pool. That's all of $1000 for each of 1000 winning tickets. OTOH, the record jackpot had sales of about 630 million tickets. That could be expected to result in about 54 5+0 winners, and puts $54 million in the prize pool. Obviously the same 1000 winners would get about $54,000 from the funds already intended for the normal prize payout. Add in $40 million from the reserve account, and the actual payout might be anything between $40k and $100k.
Of course the odds of having a parimutuel payout for any of the smaller prizes is pretty small, and the fortune cookie incident is the only time they've had an unusually large number of winners. If you knew what the winning numbers were going to be playing them would obviously make sense even though your prize would be much smaller than normal. Since you don't know what the winning numbers will be common sense says you should avoid combinations that are likely to be played by a lot of other people. Then your chances of getting a lot less than the usual prize isn't something worth worrying about.
iOS DeveloperCrested Butte, CO
