My skepticism was based on based on two things. First, I was skeptical that the lottery would allow a situation where they would have to pay an individual Pick 3 ticket such a large payout. Second, briefly, the lottery has caps on payouts for each draw. IIRC it's $15,000,000. That's why sometimes tickets are said to be "sold out," because they hit the cap where the potential payouts hit that dollar limit. The lottery computers are tracking that all the time and controlling the sale of tickets accordingly. Adding Fireball adds yet another wrinkle, because now they have to take Fireball plays into consideration. I'm not smart enough to figure all this out, but common sense dictates that they will have to greatly reduce the quantity of each Pick 3 Trips ticket they sell.
Let's take Twenty$straight's example of 333. The dollar cap is $15,000,000, then the lottery must cap when the equivalent of $15,000,000 in potential winning tickets is sold. That is 15000000/500 = 30,000, so thirty-thousand 333 tickets. But now, introduce this funny wrinkle of the Fireball into the equation and they will have to re-compute based on that crazy payout. This won't happen, but for the sake of discussion, suppose that every ticket sold were a Fireball. The potential payout of a Fireball trip is $1100 then that means that they would have to limit the number of 333 tickets sold to 15000000/1100 = 13,636 tickets. That's a big difference from 30,000! Again, it seems to me like this will cost the Lottery money lost in potential sales of tickets which they will have to incur in order to remain under their self-imposed liability cap. When you think about it that way, it's sort of weird. I'm sure they have highly-paid game-theorists and statisticians who have carefully thought this through, but there is definitely a trade-off here where the cost will be turning potential customers away. Again, I'm sure they've thought this through and the actual explanation will be that they never get close to the cap and therefore moot because my scenario is all highly theoretical.
Of course, it will never happen that all the 333 tickets sold will be Fireball tickets. It will be some mix of regular and FB, so the Lottery computers will have to take that into account and compute the maximum number of 333 tickets on the fly.
Yesterday I failed to apprehend the situation in a very large way because I just did not believe that the Lottery would turn a simple, straightforward lottery game into a game-theory nightmare that requires an app written by a maths wiz just to compute your payout.
My bad. Again!
At the end of the day, really, the only thing I know for sure about Fireball is that I will never have to worry about the payout because my family is not about to let me play a game that costs double what they already don't want me to spend on Lottery.