Did 4-time lottery winner pull to an inside straight?

The e-mails used to come regularly, and they were brief. Often they would say only something like:

$240 million

It was understood that the Power Ball jackpot was getting high, and it was time to pool resources, buy 25 or 30 tickets, and hopefully cash in.

So I ponied up a buck or two. The idea was that we would hit it, rent a limo for the ride to the lottery office to get photographed in front of that huge check, stop back at work to give our two-week notices, then head to the local upscale steakhouse and party the night away.

We never hit big, of course, and over my protests even small winnings were used to buy even more losing tickets. It was a story played out in thousands of offices across North America.

Eventually I grew tired and decided smaller wins at casinos were better than chasing an unattainable jackpot, so I dropped out of the office pool. Since then I have not paid much attention to lotteries. I look at them kind of like an NBA no-call – if a lot of people want to try to buck ridiculous odds for the high likelihood of allowing a truck driver from Nebraska to get rich beyond his wildest dreams and blowing it in a few years, knock yourself out. I’ll try to grind out a hundred here or there at the blackjack table, and probably have a lot more fun doing it.

But a recent story about a Texas native who had hit it big four times – for total winnings of $25 million – got my attention. Joan Ginther is her name, and she now lives in Las Vegas, which leads you to wonder how much she has left. Anyway, some folks in Texas are calling her the luckiest woman in the world (the odds are too staggering to even list), and others are saying that that God has somehow involved in the drawings.

Turns out it might be neither. The 63-year-old Ginther is actually a former Stanford University statistics professor, and people who know a lot about lotteries say that it’s likely that she has been able to use her math skills to increase her chances of winning, using an algorithm to determine at which point in each run of tickets winners are placed. People in the know also think that Ginther may be traveling back and forth to her hometown of Bishop just to buy tickets at just the right time, with perhaps knowledge of when shipments arrive at the stores where she buys the tickets.

Despite calls for an investigation, the Texas Lottery Commission says that Ginther won the money fair and square, and there are no plans to look into the matter.

So to everyone who plays the lottery – good luck. You now know where your money might be going.

Yeah, it was scratchers...here's more:

She was called the luckiest woman in the world.

But now that luck is being called into question by some who think that winning the lottery four times is more than just a coincidental spell of good fortune.

Joan R. Ginther, 63, from Texas, won multiple million dollar payouts each time.

First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2 million, then two years later $3 million and finally, in the spring of 2008, she hit a $10 million jackpot.

The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years.

Harper's reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ginther, which questioned the validity of this 'luck' with which she attributes her multiple lottery wins to.

First, he points out, Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics.

A professor at the Institute for the Study of Gambling & Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Rich, "When something this unlikely happens in a casino, you arrest 'em first and ask questions later."

Although Ginther now lives in Las Vegas, she won all four of her lotteries in Texas.

Three of her wins, all in two-year intervals, were by scratch-off tickets bought at the same mini mart in the town of Bishop.

Rich proceeds to detail the myriad ways in which Ginther could have gamed the system — including the fact that she may have figured out the algorithm that determines where a winner is placed in each run of scratch-off tickets.

He believes that after Ginther figured out the algorithm, it wouldn't be too difficult to then determine where the tickets would be shipped, as the shipping schedule is apparently fixed, and there were a few sources she could have found it out from.

According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all.

The Texas Lottery Commission told Rich that Ginther must have been 'born under a lucky star', and that they don't suspect foul play.

https://www.lotterypost.com/news/235095

i bet there are odds on what numbers get sucked up more. strange world. i know.