luckiest person ever in history of universe?

This is amazing. She has won the multi-million dollar texas lottery FOUR times....


surely the luckiest person to have ever stepped foot on earth (or maybe anywhere in the universe)

I admit I didn't read this Huffington Post article, but I've seen several similar stories recently and assume they're about the same person.

Anyways, I suspect she is a compulsive lottery gambler and spends a great deal of her winnings on new lottery tickets. To make an analogy, learning someone "hit a royal flush 50 times in video poker" is impressive until you learn they played hundreds of thousands of hands without winning.

She wins the lottery 4 times and doesn't give out interviews.

Stories like this make me think about people who have a "system" for winning the lottery, beating the roulette wheel, beating the craps table, etc, etc, and they'll sell you that system for a low, low price. I always figure that if somebody REALLY had a system, why would they share it? Wouldn't they just use their system to make money? And if they really had a system that allowed them to win thousands or millions of dollars, why do they need $19.95 to sell the system to someone else?

Anyway, maybe this lady really does have a system? But instead of being stupid and selling her system, she just uses it to win more money for herself. Which is the smart thing to do and what I would do if I had a system.

Someone did the math and there is less of chance to be hit by lighting then her four wins. I thought I was luckiy when a car hit another car 2 feet beside me to my right side and bounced around me. I was standing there and not in a car. I didn't even see it until it stop to my left side.

You dig into this and you find two contradicting factors. First, she has a Phd. in mathematics from Stanford. Then, she was hooked beyond belief on buying lottery tickets after she hit her first big winner. I'm sure she's way ahead because of all that continued good fortune, but almost by definition math wizards do not play the lottery. Her next act of confusion? She left Texas to live in Las Vegas as soon as she had the coin to do so. That tells me right there that she's a major candidate for Gambler's Anonymous. It wouldn't surprise me to be reading about her big downfall and bankruptcy somewhere in the future.

Good analogy on the 50 royal flushes point. I find the years when I hit my most royals are the ones where I lose the most. I wouldn't be tricked by all those self-announced vp geniuses either. The more they play the more they lose, and you can easily decipher that on the vp forums like on videopoker.com, where some GA-headed yahoo posts a stack of pictures of $1 then $2 then $5 jackpot winning hands from some Indian casino, then he disappears for a month or two at a time until he does it all over again. I wonder if he just sits on his hands then.....

Quote: konceptum

Anyway, maybe this lady really does have a system?

I don't see how. The article says three fo her wins came from scratch-off tickets. I'm willing to believe in biased lotto drawings, it's plausible albeit extremely unlikely, but the only system that might conceivably work for scratchers is inside info and collusion.

Quote: Nareed

the only system that might conceivably work for scratchers is inside info and collusion.

There is another option. She is buying in bulk. If the jackpot is $4,000,000 USD and she purchases $1,000,000 worth of tickets, it is not luck. She is genuinely increasing her odds of winning a major prize by purchasing a large share of the limited (but large) number of available chances. Once she hits the big one, she could even (illegally) sell the unscratched leftovers to recoup some of her investment. Also, she would pick up hundreds of thousands in smaller prizes. Many scratch off games have about a 1:7 or better chance of winning any prize, so if the tickets were $1 each, she might have 143,000 winners of at least $1. If the big prize was revealed within the first 500,000 tickets, she would be in a pretty good position.

Moving to Nevada is a good move for income tax purposes.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Moving to Nevada is a good move for income tax purposes.

texas doesn't have a state income tax