Do you feel lucky?

According to Rod Stetzer, it doesn't matter. By the time you feel like dealing with your gambling itch by scratching, the prize is gone.

The lottery’s Web site, Wilottery.com, lists 46 current scratch-off tickets, which the lottery also calls instant tickets.

Of those, four games have all of their top prizes gobbled up. You can’t win the $250,000 top prize in Cash Blockbuster, or the $2,000 jackpot of Bacon and Eggs, the $25,000 top prize of Monopoly or the $50,000 offered by Poker Showdown.

Those top prizes including three for Cash Blockbuster, four for Bacon and Eggs, three for Monopoly and two for Poker Showdown have been given out. Gone and done.

And other states do much the same thing. USA Today reported on June 29 that about half of the 42 states having lotteries sell tickets after the top prizes are given out.

A professor, Scott Hoover of Washington and Lee University, is suing the Virginia Lottery. He bought a $5 “Beginner’s Luck” ticket in August 2007. But the top prize had been given out the previous month.

Hoover used public records to calculate that Virginia sold about $20 million a year each year for three years in tickets after the top prize had been given out. That lottery now ends a game after the top prize has been given out.

Yes, there are other prizes, but the smaller dollar amounts are not what is used to promote the sale of the ticket.