"Be nice to see a breakout of the 89 winners as to how many were QP's "
Without knowing the actual breakdown we won't know for sure, but we can see what the probabilities are. There were about 9.5 million tickets sold and it's fairly safe to assume that no more than 80%, or a maximum of 7.55 million, were QP. For that many tickets the chances of selling 1 to 5 5+0 winners are, respectively, 33.82%, 10.89%, 2.34%, 0.38%, and 0.05%. I deliberately rounded up in a few places so the actual chances would have been slightly lower. For comparison, the chance of a jackpot winner with 9.5 million tickets is about 3.2% and that happened this time around. 1 or 2 QP winners (each being a good bit more likely than a jackpot winner) is somewhat unlikely, but certainly possible. Even a 3rd winner isn't terribly unlikely. While only 20 to 30% of tickets are self-picks I'd think almost all the winners were people who chose those numbers based on some common factor, and only 1 or 2 people happened to get those numbers on a QP.
"It's a pattern on the playslip. "
That seems almost certain, and probably give us some insights into how people play different patterns. I didn't find a decent image of an IN bet slip, but the LA slips increment by 8 with each line. The winning numbers would be a vertical skip one row pattern resulting in numbers in lines 1,3,5,7 and 9, but I'm curious how that pattern compares with straight across or down, and diagonal patterns. I'm sure a diagonal starting 3 spaces in gets played a lot less than a diagonal from a corner, but is it so much less common than the skip a row starting with 3 that seems to explain LA. CA, NY and TX all had a decent chance of selling a QP, while none of them have a slip lets you get the numbers from a sensible pattern. Based on that I strongly suspect the CA winner was a one of the QP tickets.
If it's another fortune cookie scenario (or something similar) it would mean that whatever company sold cookies used that set of numbers happened to distribute the cookies very disproportionately relative to state populations. While possible, it seems very unlikely.
"Approximately 75% of all lottery tickets sold are QP's Therefore I'd expect 67 of the 89 second place prizes to be QP's. "
You know you're saying the high number of winners is mostly just chance, right? This was either the result of a non-random common factor or it's probably in the top 10 list of unlikely coincidences in the history of the universe. The probability of 67 5+0 winners with 7.55 million QP tickets has at well over 20 zeros after the decimal point, so Open Office Calc can't give me an actual probability. It also can't do it for "only" 50 winners. Or 40. Or 20. I finally get an actual result for 19 winners, with the last 2 digits being 10. Rounding means more significant digits could make the last 2 digits 15, so lets flip it around to a number that's probably more meaningful. The chance of "only" 19 winners is no more than 1 in 6,666,666,666,666,666,666.67. That's almost 23 billion times more likely than winning PB once and 79 times as likely was winning twice (in 2 drawings with 1 ticket in each drawing). Having almost 4 times as many winners probably has about 100 zeros after the decimal point.
"Anyone find it odd. This is going on right before they add another country to the game? "
Nobody with a bit of sense.
"There is no prize pool for second place prizes nationwide. Each state has its own prize pool. "
That's true for typical drawings, but when they payed $1 million to all 110 of the winners for the 2006 fortune cookie incident I believe it was from a reserve pool, and all states were definitely involved in the decision. Again using old sales data, Indiana probably only got about 2% of the $18.9 million in total sales, so their $19 million plus any $2 million winners payout would be "supported" by sales of perhaps 400k. While it's unlikely, I'd expect that to be accounted for or smaller states wouldn't be in the game.
