Originally posted on 03/29/2012:

It's basically impossible to buy the required number of tickets in the time frame before a draw to ensure that you've covered all conbinations.

There are 175,711,536 possible combinations for Mega Millions.

From Friday night - Tuesday night (the longer of the 2 "between draw periods"), there are approximately 96 hours between draws that you can purchase tickets for the Tuesday night draw. A person would have to print 1,830,328.5 tickets per hour during that time in order to cover all combinations.

That comes out to 30505.475 tickets per minute. 508.4245833333333 tickets per second.

I work for a lottery vendor, and as far as I know, there is not a lottery terminal on the market that will print a ticket per second, so you would likely need to tie up several thousand lottery terminals and store employees for 4 consecutive days in order to achieve this. You would also need to allow time for the employee to manually input each combination to ensure tha you're not playing duplicate combinations as well as changing the roll of paper in the machine once it's been used. I suppose you could just keep playing quick picks, but you'll likely print duplicate tickets at some point.

Essentially it's not a matter of being able to afford all of the tickets, but rather having the logistics to be able to find enough people to work with you and enough stores willing to let you take over their machine(s) for those 96 hours.