'Lucky' woman who won lottery four times outed as Stanford University statistics PhD [Millions]

Daily Mail ^ | 08/07/11 | RACHEL QUIGLEY

[BunnySlippers]

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.

--

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.'

[Avery Iota Kracker]

It’s nice to hear there’s a competent professor somewhere out there.

[xzins]

If she won, she won. What’s the beef?

[BunnySlippers]

The math prof in question.

[BunnySlippers]

I don’t think there’s a beef. It’s a “hey looky here” kinda thing.

[pyx]

The obvious question is;

What series of formulas was she using ?

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The lottery is for the mathematically impaired, but when jackpots get high enough, playing the lottery is a mathematically reasonable risk/benefit proposition.

The trick is to only play when the jackpots get high.

[Durus]

"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."

A casino doesn't have arrest powers, they can only ask a person to leave. One wonders what the professor actually does for a living that he doesn't know that.

[Revolting cat!]

I’ve been telling ya that there is a method!

[BunnySlippers]

You are right. The casinos ban them big time. But not arrest as there is no [apparent] crime.

[American in Israel]

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.

Mr Rich sounds like sour grapes. I highly doubt the delivered the winning tickets so many times to the same market.

[xzins]

my guess would be she looked for patterns that showed when they weren’t remixing the balls after a drawing. I can’t think of anything that would help prediction other than some failure to achieve pure randomness prior to a drawing.

Do the drawing. Turn the machine off. Do the drawing turn the machine off.

Of course, she could also be proof that insiders can fix the lottery.

[Misterioso]

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

No more questions.

[Revolting cat!]

[max americana]

This happened quite some time ago back in canada where I’m from. The BC lottery corporation were suspicious how a guy kept winning the Keno and Daily 3 PLUS the BC/49. He turned out to be a statistics major and they paid him a lot of money to shut up about the “equation”.

[BunnySlippers]

... and the theory at the link. =:o)

[1066AD]

Three of the wins were from scratch-offs.

[max americana]

There IS a method, supposedly. Like my previous post, one guy in my backwoods of canada kept winning. There are books even in the library that teaches the “wheels” method of even getting close to 5 numbers of 6 in a 49 number combination. That’s what my cousin did, which is keep recording the numbers every week, then run the “equation” (even in MS Excel) and you are bound to hit even 4 of 6.

[xzins]

... and the theory at the link. =:o)

I probably should read the articles every now and then, huh? :>)

My next guess at here quadrillion year luck is that she actually started scratching tickets in an earlier life some 2 quadrillion years ago.

Is that better? LOL.

[Blood of Tyrants]

If she had won picking numbers I would say that her degree in statistics had something to do with it. But since she won scratch off cards, it is just dumb luck. BTW, how many thousands of cards has she bought?