Four-time lottery winner (probably) gamed the system
Winning a large jackpot is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for most lottery winners. Winning over a million dollars four times? Yeah, that’s not luck.
Houston Press summarizes a subscription-only Harper’s Magazine story on Joan Ginther, the “serial lottery winner” who just happens to have a PhD in math from Stanford University:
He says she’s figured out the algorithm used in printing scratch-offs, and the lottery’s method of delivering cards to stores, to greatly increase her chance of buying a winner.
[Rich] believes that after Ms 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.Scratch-off tickets aren’t manufactured randomly, since the state has to guarantee a certain percentage of winners. So some formula has to be devised to create them. Two of the winning tickets were sold at the same convenience store.
