Lucky lottery winner Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery four times. What are the odds? Well, they’re somewhere in the range of 1 in 8 septillion. Luckily, she also happens to have a PhD in statistics from Stanford University. The people of Texas chalk it up to good luck and divine intervention. One Minute News correspondent Rachelle Akuffo breaks it down:
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 Ms Ginther, which questioned the validity of this ‘luck’ with which she attributes her multiple lottery wins to.
First, he points out, Ms 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 Mr Rich: ‘When something this unlikely happens in a casino, you arrest ‘em first and ask questions later.’
Although Ms 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.
Mr Rich proceeds to detail the myriad ways in which Ms 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 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.
According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all.
The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been ‘born under a lucky star’, and that they don’t suspect foul play.
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