“An American woman has been named the luckiest lottery winner in the world after scooping her fourth multi million pound jackpot.
Joan Ginther won £6.2m with the top prize from a scratch card bought from a store in Texas, pushing her total winnings to more than £14m. Her first multi million payout came in 1993 when she won £8m from a £20 scratch card. Mrs Ginther chose to take £180,000 a year for 19 years after paying tax on her win to give her a total prize of £3.6m. In 2006 she won a further £1.4m and again opted for a lump-sum payment of £1m after paying tax on the winnings. Two years later the 63 year-old who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, scooped a further £2m.
Incredibly, three of the tickets were bought from the same small convenience store in the town of Bishop, Texas. Friends said Mrs Ginther would return to her home town to visit her father and would drop in at the local store to buy a scratch card. Store manager Bob Solis said they sell 1,000 lottery tickets a day, adding: “This is a very lucky store.”
Experts said the chances of winning four lottery jackpots was more than 200 million to one. “This final bit of winning lottery must confirm Mrs Ginther as the world’s luckiest lottery player,” said a spokesman for World Lottery News. “We would be interested to see just how much she spends on lottery tickets and scratch-offs.”"
Read more at The Telegraph
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She’s prob spending the same amount she wins on buying bucketloads of tickets!
Wow! What are the odds!!!
( oh wait – 200M -1).
Yeah, not that surprising then.
“She’s prob spending the same amount she wins on buying bucketloads of tickets!
”
That would be a hell of a spend. It doesnt appear to be the case.
Hmm, I wonder if it’s worth having a wee £1 bet on the odds of her winning a 5th jackpot? I think I’d stand to win more than she would….
LC x
She is better than Derren! get her, her own show! lol.
but seriously this is truly astonishing odds.
She is suspiciously lucky. No wonder Derren published precisely this note.
pscchtt no big deal. Derren could do this every day if he wanted
does anyone know if the statistics for buying lottery tickets increased after Derrens stunt?
would be interesting
Weird enough it really does happen, people winning the lottery or such several times. Big prizes. Makes you wonder huh?!
And how much people that will be on this planet? I know of at least one in Holland. I’m planning to be the next one, although the first big prize did not come in yet .. . I’ll be more modest though .. and will be satisfied with just one big prize.
Derren didn’t, abeo did. Derren just writes the DB Direct posts.
@Lady Claire – The odds against her winning a 5th jackpot are the same as the odds were against winning any of the others. The lotteries have no memory.
Wow! Money really does go to money!, amazingly lucky woman!
After watching hours upon hours of Derren Brown, I’m not all that shocked. I mean it’s improbable but not impossible, right?
I would like to the lottery just once, even £10 would be good atm!! What a lucky lady
THE FIX IS IN!
*cough* “Rigged!” *cough*
Just goes to show that odds do not have a memory.
After all the odds of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 falling in a lottery is just as logical as 9 1 7 3 6 3 5 but since our brain always sees the scrambled numbers we psychologically assume that consecutive numbers are more rare than jumbled numbers.
Not that I do not envy this woman though
These kind of stories always make me think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; there was Veruca Salt who’s father bought hundreds or thousands of boxes of chocolate to find a golden ticket, then again there was Charlie who only bought a few bars.
I believe that everything comes down to probability and factors such as distribution, location and how many scratch cards a store sells are all contributors to the overall outcome.
How does this single store manage to hold all of the winning jackpot tickets that she bought? It doesn’t sound as though the tickets have been distributed all too evenly to me. It’s still amazing that she’s won four times, but the fact that the same store carries many winning tickets perhaps pushes up the bar somewhat in her favour.
@Dave Kahn – I think you may have slightly misunderstood my meaning. She’s won the jackpot 4 times, the odds for anyone doing that is 200 million to one. Now, what would the odds be for anyone doing it collectively 5 times? Much larger surely? I was just saying, about placing a £1 on what the odds would be then. Or am I missing something??
LC x
@Carol, it doesn’t tell us what sorta lotteries they are. There may be many differnt that she competes in maybe it’s a lotto where she can write her own numbers that way you negate distribution as a problem.
There’s too little info to even speculate here. These things just do happen.
Scratch tickets can be a pain to distribute right! Because some big stores buy a whole lot and every 70.000 tickets (I believe) there needs to be a price. Then again those prices are relatively small, 20.000 pounds a scratch ticket costs around a pound… Excellent business venture!
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Wow this woman is lucky maybe I wonder how many lottery tickets she has bought in total?
I think this store should be looked into or more importantly, the distribution policy of the lotto company!