Man gives $700,000 to psychic

gp2.0

Thu, Jun 25 2015, 5:27 pm

Iymnok wrote:

How many scratch off tickets did she buy that didn't win?

No matter how many she bought, they're still impossible odds. But look what I found:

Quote:

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 calls the the validity of her 'luck' into question.
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.'
First, Ms Ginther 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
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 details 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 difficult to 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.

gp2.0

Thu, Jun 25 2015, 8:35 pm

Even if she bought some extras, she had to have known what she was doing before she tried it.*

The odds of 1 in septillion are literally impossible odds. There are only about 320 million people in the US. If it was actually possible for this to happen randomly to one person who buys a US lottery ticket, the odds would be 1 in 320 million.**

*unless she's actually psychic Wink

*correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a statistics whiz.