Has an American woman worked out how to beat the lottery?

A 63 year old American, Joan Ginther, has been dubbed the most lucky woman on planet earth, having collected her fourth multi-million dollar scratch card win in eighteen years. Since her first win of £3.3m in 1993, she has collected subsequent jackpots of £1.4m, £2m and a whopping £6.2m.

To further highlight the scale of her good fortune, 3 of the winning tickets were bought at the local petrol station in her home town of Bishop, which has a population of just over 3000 people… The other ticket was bought in the neighbouring town of Kingsville.

A spokesman for the Texas Lottery commission said that ‘she’s obviously been born under a lucky star’, suggesting they don’t believe that foul play is at work; but others connected to the gambling industry beg to differ…

The first warning sign is that Ginther no longer lives in Bishop, but some 1400 miles away in the home of gambling, Las Vegas. Furthermore she has a PhD in mathematics from the elite Stanford University and is a professional statistician.

When a suspicious writer highlighted the story in Harpers magazine, experts were unanimous that Joan Ginther had pulled a scam… But how has she managed to beat the lottery?

Lotteries are supposed to be a random game, but in reality the winning ticket combination isn’t random; it’s generated by a pseudo-random number generator… So if you can work out the sequence, a pattern in the numbers is revealed, and you can improve the odds of finding the winning ticket.

It’s seems that Ginther would predict the likelihood of when, and where, a winning ticket would be generated and choose a location where there wasn’t huge competition for the tickets; say her small hometown of Hope…

It is alleged that she was ‘tipped off’ by the owner of the Hope store when the batch of new tickets had arrived and would turn up in the dead of night to buy the whole batch at a cost of many thousands of dollars.

If this is how Ginther beat the lottery, she was well equipped to achieve the feat. She continued to research mathematics at college in the mid-eighties but since then no one in her home town seems to know what she has been doing! Perhaps she’s been studying a whole new and more lucrative set of numbers?

Is Joan Ginther dishonest? Has she found a way to beat the lottery, or is she just incredibly lucky? Whichever the case, Ginther has offered no explanation to her extraordinary winning streak…

And before you go rushing off to Bishop to buy your ticket, let me share the odds of repeating Ginther’s success; Imagine every single grain of sand on the planet and multiply that by 18…. Fancy your chances?

Fortunately, the odds of you getting a great deal on ink and toner are much better when you shop at CartridgeMonkey.com.