That’s the name of a fascinating story in the current edition of “Harper’s Magazine” about Joan Ginther, the woman who has won million-dollar jackpots four times playing the Texas lottery. (No link: the article is behind a pay wall. But you can find it online if you want to. And here is some of the Statesman’s recent lottery coverage.) The take-way? If the odds of her winning so many times by pure chance are so astronomical as to defy belief, there might be some reasons to not believe it.
To be clear, the article does not accuse Ginther, who could not be reached for the story, of a crime. But it does suggest that the odds of someone gaming the system to win multiple jackpots are probably better than a person winning the same jackpots through dumb luck.
Ginther’s story hit the news just about a year ago, when it was revealed that the then-63-year-old native of Bishop — about 35 miles southwest of Corpus Christi — had won $10 million in one of the lottery’s scratch-off games. And that it was her fourth multi-million jackpot playing the state lottery.
Together, the big wins had paid her $20.4 million. All four tickets had been purchased in the immediate area; three in Bishop, one in nearby Kingsville. A Texas Lottery Commission spokesman said the agency suspected no wrong-doing, and that Ginther had “been born under a lucky star.”
Just how lucky was her star? One of the journalists following the story asked a math professor to run the numbers. They are mind-bending: one in 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The odds could dwindle some, depending on how often Ginther played. Still, if winning the state’s largest legal game of chance four separate times is essentially mathematically unbelievable, Harper’s author Nathaniel Rich wonders, what are the alternatives?
One is that Ginther somehow cracked the lottery’s code. That’s extremely difficult: After all, the Texas Lottery Commission and its game contractors, GTech (runs the operations) and Scientific Games (makes the tickets), take great pains to keep such information random and secret, not just in terms of which tickets are winners, but also where they might be distributed.
That said, it’s also not impossible.
Two weeks ago, the Boston Globe ran a great story about a small group of math and computer whizzes who cracked one of the Massachusetts Lottery’s games by figuring out that if they purchased $100,000-worth of tickets under certain circumstances, they were almost assured of making a generous profit from the winners.
Here it is worth nothing that Ginther holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University.
Rich also ponders the possibility of Ginther being part of a scheme that, by necessity, would have involved help from others with inside information, such as the store owner or clerk. It’s happened before in Texas, although typically such scams benefit the clerks and not the ticket purchasers.
Hale also postulates that, say, an unscrupulous GTech worker would be a valuable accomplice in a lottery scheme. In the article, he doesn’t accuse anyone of this of course. But he does note that the owner and clerk at the Bishop store where Ginther purchased three of her winners were unusually evasive and defensive.
Moreover, as the story was going to press, Hale reports, the Times Market suddenly closed. When I asked this week, the lottery commission said the store closed voluntarily with its license in good standing.