I’m sure we have all seen the CNN story describing how to tell if a Pepsi bottle has a winning iTunes cap or not. The trick certainly worked, since, when I could actually find them, I somehow acquired six pepsi bottles…all winners.

However, I’ve noticed that the iTunes branded bottles are hard to find. Very hard. So hard, that I only found 3 street venders in Manhattan and a Target in the Palisades Mall that actually carried them. A USA Today article describes how they were delayed and may not make it into many areas until mid march.

I have the answer.

I finally managed to find a few bottles in a CVS. I grabbed a bunch and started trying to weed out the winners from the fakers. Such a suprise I got: the trick doesn’t work anymore. It seems that crafty peeps at Pepsi modified the caps. While I can only vouch for the two that I opened, it seems that the blue gasket in the cap now pushes away from the inside of the cap. Not being flush against the cap, the optical integrity of the system is lost and the key phrases are now obsured. The security of the game is again safe. The bottle must now be opened to discover if it is worth anything (it is a Pepsi, so it isn’t worth much to start with). Could the delay have been this ingenious cap redesign?

Damn you Pepsi for ruining a sure thing for me. Damn you all. Then again, I’ve only opened 2 of the 6 that I bought today and they were both winners. Maybe I don’t need to cheat to win. Nah….I’ll still try to cheat. After all, they have 50 years worth of Billboard charts to buy. Plus, I’ve got to get the complete works of Vanilla Ice, Bell Biv Devoe, and New Edition and I don’t want to pay for it (for obvious reason).