'Lucky' woman who won lottery four times outed as Stanford University statistics PhD

begone

Probably got someone on the inside, but they'll keep their eyes on her and her alone because of her background.

She's American. The state will take a massive chunk of her winnings.

>assuming she only bought those four tickets
So you're saying the answer is, "incompetently".

This. Old fashioned cheating is 100 million times more likely than she found a pattern in the distribution of tickets.

The chance of winning depends on how many tickets you buy.

philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/Lotterys_luckiest_woman_Joan_Ginther_bet_flabbergasting_sums_on_scratch-offs.html?mobi=true

You're just evading because you have no answer

And people say gambling is an idiot tax. How many of them have a PhD? Gambling is for winners in life

>chance exists

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With scratch off tickets, you can keep track of what prizes paid out. They may keep the same tickets out for weeks, but i'm sure you could use statistics to increase your odds of winning.

quick summary of how she did it.

The lottery company spaces out the prizes in batches. This is to ensure that all of the prizes don't get sent in the first batch, so that the lottery can last for a couple months.

This would would buy out all of the tickets from her local store, which causes them to send a new batch to that store. Because the prizes are distributed by batches, and not by individual tickets, this greatly increased her odds of winning.

Basically, the prizes are not truly randomly distributed, and this woman figured out a way to use this in her favor.

Don't forget the fact that she (well, her father) won the first one by pure luck, giving her plenty of money to spend on lotto tickets, she won back much of what she spent with small winnings, and the rest was tax deductible.

Not him but
>'Lucky' woman who won lottery four times outed as Stanford University statistics PhD
The cheater is the statistician. So it doesn't make sense.
She "figured out" (ie. social engineering and a friend inside the company) the distribution among batches. (Actually, I think some places legislation on gambling forces them to explain the statistics of each of their games, so it's "fair". Maybe it's public information somewhere, well hidden under the pages of a purposefully confusing website.)

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I checked a local scratch card game.
71.5% of price is given back (when said like that, gambling sounds incredibly stupid.)
Each block is 15 000 000 tickets. 5€ per ticket.
From 3 tickets winning 1 500 000€ to 1 500 000 tickets winning 5€, there is a total of 3 906 769 winning tickets for a total of 53 625 000€.

So yeah, statistics don't help much from here.

>the same mini mart in the town of Bishop.

Error with the program used to randomize, not taking into account location of previous purchases. It is like those bottom barrel RNGs that keep repeating the same shit a billions times.

>people who suck at math and regurgitate journalist bullshit
She paid off employees for extra information.

I can't win $100 off a slot machine without security suspecting foul play. Wtf is this story.

>She paid off employees for extra information.
yes... the information being that the prizes are distributed by batches, not truly random.

No, like Batch 23 which is going to X, Y, Z stores is more likely to have a big winner. She probably has access to the literal distributional algorithm.

>idiot

this, probably. she may have found some flaw in the algorithm used to distribute numbers or something.

anyway, I've read lots of stuff similar to this before. for example: wired.com/2011/01/ff-lottery/
newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/

>No, like Batch 23 which is going to X, Y, Z stores is more likely to have a big winner.
She didn't go around to different stores, though, she kept ordering them from the same one. After initial stock for a new game, the distribution isn't randomized, they just send more batches to whatever place runs out first.

She bought huge numbers of cards. The lottery runners released information on when the big prizes had been won. This gives the public information similar to that gained by card counting. On top of that, the distribution wasn't fully random. They spaced out big prizes roughly evenly, to ensure that they wouldn't all go early, and that there wouldn't be long gaps with no news of a big win.

Based on public information alone, she could know when a win was due, when buying the tickets went from a bad bet to a good bet, and then she bought huge numbers until she won.

Thanks for the link but that website has spend an obscene amount too much time 'investigating' lottery business They have like 50 articles. What kind of news is that-

elementary statistics

philly.com/philly/news/lottery/265261001.html

>Massive
If 35% is massive, you aren't very First World. In a country that refuses to tax itself enough on a general basis to fund the services it wants, needs, and provides, I have zero problem taxing the shit out of people who just got rich enough to be set for life if they don't fuck it up and go some small way towards plugging that gap.

Only the first batch was controlled, after that it was random

Here's a guess. If you already know the odds of winning 4 jackpots (as calculated by other anons), and you know how many people play the lottery every year, then assuming that the number of people playing the lottery doesn't change year to year, you can calculate how many years would have to pass, on average, before enough people have played so that at least ONE of them wins 4 jackpots.

Maybe it's meant like if she only played a lottery once every year? Isn't that how often lotteries come up with new stuff and jackpots anyway?

Those aren’t the odds of such an event ever happening. Those are the odds for this particular individual if she bought exactly four tickets.

Also the main reason other countries don't tax lottery winnings is that the lottery is nationalized so they already get their cut from the proceeds.

So she buys 4 tickets, and after septillions of years they gradually have a 100% win chance? Are you silly?

Redditors have ruined this board.

She didn't buy 4 tickets. She bought every ticket in the store.

>tfw you will never be so educated that you can see trough everything

Scratch-offs have a set number of winners on a roll. They are by far the easiest to predict. Albeit it’s almost impossible to predict the jackpot

are you just insecure and jealous that a woman has a PhD in stats and has millions of dollars while you're in your basement living off of no name cheetos and using the empty bags to wipe your ass?

why does the fake news media say they "scammed" the lotto? the lotto itself is the scam

I don't think there's any way to be so lucky, even if buying in massive quantities and being a statistician. There had to be some way to find knowledge of the winning ticket before it was distributed or purchased, OR the ticket was able to be custom made, in or outside the factory.

Interesting.

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protip: journalists aren't there to defend them, her, you, or anyone but the companies they. you can assume they will always defend the ones who have the most power, or, at the very least, that they work for/are sponsored by the companies they talk about.

No,
philly.com/philly/news/16_schemes_lottery_legend_Joan_Ginther_likely_didnt_use.html

Read the first paragraph