Powerball Jackpot

Customers wait to buy lottery tickets at Gateway Newstands in Cleveland on Wednesday, Feb. 11. The Powerball jackpot was increased to $500 million.

(Associated Press)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- We've got a sure-fire way for you to win what could be a record Powerball jackpot on Saturday should the $500 million top prize go unclaimed Wednesday night.

All you need are cash, time and friends. Lots and lots of all three. Get prepared now. Here's the plan.

Immediately after Wednesday's drawing, start buying every combination possible. (Note to Powerball novices: the game consists of six numbers. Each of five white balls drawn range from 1 to 59; a red ball ranges from 1 to 35.)

The bankroll



There are 175.2 million combinations so, at $2 a play, you'll need to get to an ATM or your mattress and withdraw a little over $350 million to cover all possible draws.

But even if you have that kind of money stashed away, there's a problem.

The clock

There's not enough time for you to place all the bets yourself. This is true even if you prepared all 35.04 million betting slips (five bets per slip) ahead of time in anticipation of such a big jackpot. In Ohio, bets are cut off at 10 p.m. That leaves just 71 hours between the 10:59 p.m. Wednesday drawing and the deadline for buying tickets for the Saturday drawing.

Seventy-one hours is 4,260 minutes. Let's assume you bet slips at a rate of four per minute, or one every 15 seconds, a rate that one efficient gas station clerk tells us is doable.

With five bets per card, you'll be able to place 20 bets per minute. This means it would take 146,020 hours - the equivalent of more than 6,000 24-hour days - to make all the possible bets. But remember, you have only 71 hours.

Don't despair. We have a solution.

Your team

This is where your small army of helpers come into play. You will need 2,057 people at registers around the clock from late Wednesday through Saturday's deadline, placing bets at a rate of 20 per minute (five bets per card, four cards per minute) to cover all the possible combinations.

How big of a deal would this be? If you sent your army west on Interstate 90, you'd have to find available lottery sales agents on average about one per mile all the way from Cleveland to Seattle.

But you might also have to send battalions south and east. We know some clerks will be tied up with trivial tasks like selling people gasoline and food. We'll leave the mapping to you. There are more than 9,000 outlets in Ohio, but many aren't open round-the-clock.

The payout

The graphic from the Ohio Lottery Commission shows the chance of winning, and the payouts, for various combinations of white and red numbers drawn in Powerball.

We don't know yet how big the jackpot could grow by Saturday if the $500 million prize is not won Wednesday night. And we don't know if you'll have to share your jackpot with one or more other winners.

But we do know you'll be a jackpot winner if you play all the combinations, plus be a holder of a lot of other winning tickets. You'll have another 34 near-miss tickets, each worth $1 million. Those will be the tickets matching the five white balls drawn, but not the red ball. And, you'll have another 5.5 million winning tickets worth from $4 to $100 each.

In all, you'll have at least a piece of the jackpot and $63 million in consolation prizes. You'll need that army of friends to cash in all those tickets as well.

A sure moneymaker?

Investing $350 million to win $563 million - the jackpot and secondary prizes - might seem like a no brainer if you can scrape together the money and time.

But not so quick.

You not only might have to share that jackpot if there are multiple winners, there are tax considerations.

The top federal tax rate on incomes over $400,000 is 39.6 percent. Count on some state income taxes as well.

Cushioning the tax blow, however, will be those $340 million worth of losing tickets. Losing lottery tickets can be deducted from the winnings for tax purposes.