1 in 18 Septillion Could Joan Ginther just be the luckiest woman
alive?
Her multi-million dollar jackpot wins seem just too incredible.
Between 1993 and 2010, Joan Ginther won over $20 Million dollars playing the Texas lottery.
She won the lottery FOUR different times, playing scratch off tickets valued at $30
and $50 each.
The odds of her winning that many times are 1 in 18 Septillion!
That’s a huge number to imagine.
To put that number in perspective, that’s 18 followed by twenty-four 0’s.
You have a better chance of winning the lottery while getting struck by lightning on your
100th birthday!
So, is Joan Ginther the luckiest woman alive, or is there something else going on?
Did she learn how to game the system? Rig the Lottery?
Was she able to identify winning tickets before having to scratch them and then returned them
to the store?
Skeptics and doubters have their theories, but credible statisticians and professional
gamblers have a handful of mathematical answers.
Joan Ginther, PhD In 1976, long before becoming a multi-million
dollar lottery winner, Joan was a Ph.D. student at Stanford University.
Her apparent knowledge of numbers and odds led many people to assume that she had a Ph.D.
in Mathematics or Statistics.
In fact, most articles written about Joan refer to her as a Ph.D. in Stats or Math.
However, Joan's Stanford dissertation proves she was actually a PhD in the school of education.
However, her paper was about pre-training students for mathematical tests.
Therefore, Joan knew what she was talking about when it came to math and stats.
Joan remained low-key after graduation.
She went on to teach math at several universities.
However, one fateful day in 1993 changed Joan's life forever.
She won her first giant jackpot after picking the numbers 1, 4, 7, 10, and 47.
Joan won $5.4 Million dollars in the Texas Lottery.
It just so happens that Joan's birthday is 04/1/47.
This is most likely proof that this first lottery win was just complete luck.
Birthday Strategy It's common practice for casual lottery players
to pick the numbers that coincide with their birthday.
However, it's a strategy serious lottery players stray away from.
Here's why:
If you play using your birthdate as your lottery numbers, you can only go as high as 31.
In Texas, where Joan played the lottery, players can pick numbers between 1 and 54.
The flaw should be obvious.
The other thing is, you also share your birthday with a lot of people.
Simply put, the chance that you share your birthday with someone is 1 in three hundred
and sixty five.
With seven and a half billion people in the world, you and roughly 20 Million other people
share a birthday.
So, if the winning numbers happen to be your birthday numbers, you may just be splitting
the prize pool with everybody else that picked their birthday.
After that big win, Joan wasn’t satisfied.
She didn’t just stop playing after winning $5.4 Million.
She ended up winning the Texas Lottery three more times from playing scratch off tickets.
In 2006, she won $2 Million dollars from a scratch off called Holiday Millionaire.
Two years later, she struck gold again, winning $3 Million on a scratch off game called Millions
& Millions.
Then again, in 2010, Joan hit her biggest prize ever, with $10 Million dollars playing
a game called Extreme Payout.
This was the first scratch off game in the US and Canada with a 10 million dollar grand
prize!
Life in the Shadow Just how did she do it?
It’s something many people have been trying to figure out.
Many people have tried to interview here.
But Joan has never conducted a formal interview about her lottery winnings or strategy.
It's her under-the-radar lifestyle that's led skeptics to believe she has something
to hide.
However, it's not unreasonable that "The Luckiest Woman in the World," according to Forbes Magazine,
would want to be left alone.
The only people that truly know about Joan of course, are the people closest to her.
Joan lived in Las Vegas at the time of her big winnings, but she would fly back to Texas
to buy lottery tickets in her hometown of Bishop, Texas.
She would buy most of her lottery tickets from a single store called Times Market.
House Money Why did Joan keep playing the lottery?
What strategies did she employ?
One big factor is that Ginther was playing with house money.
Basically, she didn’t have any strategy.
She just gambled with her winnings and got lucky again.
Hitting big in 1993 gave Joan yearly payments of $270,000 dollars in her bank account every
July until 2012.
Joan liked to play her $30 scratch tickets and she would have been able to buy 9,000
tickets if she only used her lottery money.
And that's ONLY if she bought the $30 tickets, which didn't exist in Texas until 2004.
Of course, not all of those tickets would be losers.
She'd likely win back a large chunk of change to ultimately re-invest those winnings until
she hit the jackpot.
For example, not counting the top prizes, a game called Run the Table paid out 66.9%
of the time.
Joan could have easily calculated the odds of winning Run the Table by visiting their
website provided by the Texas lottery..
It's not foolproof, and it makes sense that it took Joan until 2006 to hit another big
multi-million dollar jackpot.
With a bigger bankroll, Joan could have doubled the number of tickets she bought yearly, thus
increasing her odds of finding another winning ticket.
Texas Prize Pool In the year 2000, the largest instant-payout
prize in Texas was $80,000 thousand dollars.
By 2003, that number skyrocketed to $2 Million.
After Joan won big in 2006, Texas continued to inflate the prize pool, eventually launching
the first $50 dollar scratch off ticket in the US and Canada for a game called $130 Million
Spectacular in 2007.
Just three years later, Joan would win her largest prize of $10 Million on a $50 dollar
scratch game!
The games kept getting bigger and may have been a factor to keep Joan playing.
Lump Sum Joan, as we mentioned earlier, chose to have
her first lottery win paid out annually over 19 years.
However, she opted to take her next three wins in lump sum.
Because of her low-key lifestyle, nobody but Joan can say for sure why she took the three
prizes in tax-heavy lump sums.
We can speculate that since she was still receiving yearly payments of $270,000 at the
time, she'd rather roll the money right back into buying more tickets.
However, we can't forget about Joan's age at the time of her $10 Million jackpot.
Joan was 63 when she won.
Had she opted for a 30-year annuity payment, she'd be 93 by the time she got everything.
In her mind, she felt like she was getting old and might not live long enough to get
all her money.
Doing Her Homework In 2006, Texas became one of the first states
to publish how many winning tickets were still in circulation compared to how many were still
available.
All Joan had to do was wait for the overall ticket pool to go down while keeping track
of how many grand prizes were still in play.
Basically, she let other people scratch the losing tickets while she waited to pounce
on the winners.
That’s a huge edge for advantage players, a name given to people that only play when
it’s positive EV for them to play.
That means for every dollar they play, they should bring back more than one dollar in
the long run.
Let's use Joan's biggest win, Extreme Payout, as an example.
Out of 3.6 Million tickets available, only 3 held the grand prize of $10 Million.
The odds of winning were 1 in 1.2 Million.
Joan won the second of three grand prizes after almost half the tickets had been scratched.
Her odds were 1 in 800,000.
Actually, the odds were better than that.
Scratch-off tickets AREN’T randomly distributed.
Lotteries try to distribute their grand prizes as "randomly" and "evenly" as possible, even
though that’s a contradiction.
True randomness means that prizes can be won together, such as 2 winning tickets right
next to each other.
But the lottery doesn’t want that.
Instead, they distribute the prizes evenly through all their tickets.
So let’s Imagine if the tickets were broken up into three decks of cards.
Each one is then shuffled and then released to the appropriate regions.
While there are technically three grand prizes among all the cards, the odds of winning in
each deck isn’t the same.
Although with these factors, there’s still not enough information to make the lotteries
she played to have a positive return on investment all the time.
Although buying a ton of tickets would have improved her odds dramatically, winning millions
was never guaranteed.
Of course, the skeptics still believe that Joan is gamed the Texas Lottery or is just
simply a cheater.
Needle in a Haystack The most popular of these theories is that
Joan cracked the lottery by figuring out the odds.
She was somehow able to figure out where the winning tickets were shipped.
However, that would have required Joan to travel all over Texas to buy scratch tickets.
Instead, remember, Joan purchased most of her tickets from the Times Market in her hometown
of Bishop.
And Times Market had to keep ordering tickets at the rate Joan was buying them.
It would spell disaster if all the lottery tickets were distributed at the same time.
Most tickets are instead held back.
First, demand at a particular store is tough to predict.
Instead, they are held back while computers track sales throughout the state.
When one store gets low, they’re automatically re-supplied with new tickets.
It makes sense that the store selling the most tickets would turn up the most winners.
That store happened to be Times Market in Bishop, Texas, thanks to Joan.
So Joan didn’t have to travel all over the state to buy tickets.
Second, Shipping tickets all at once would be extremely risky for the state.
Every top prize could get hit the first week and gamblers would of course just stop playing!
This would force the game to close, costing the state millions.
Other people believe Joan practiced large-scale data collection and analysis to learn as much
as she could about patterns in the Texas lottery.
However, those theories have been debunked as there’s just no evidence to support them.
Most statisticians agree that Joan's winning streak was mainly due to the massive number
of tickets she could buy.
And remember, she could have easily come up empty.
Other Lotteries What's mostly not reported is that Ginther
has also won other small prizes.
She’s won 25 prizes worth $1,000 to $3,000 dollars from 2005 to 2012 according to lottery
records.
The average scenario for having 28 wins is by buying more than 80,000 tickets.
That would have cost Joan more than two and a half million dollars, according to two statisticians.
Mathematician Skip Garibaldi, who holds positions with Emory University and UCLA, speculates
that Joan either has inside information or she bought way more than $1.7 million dollars
worth of tickets.
This particular calculation was done before another important discovery made the possibilities
balloon.
Joan wasn't the only woman from her hometown of Bishop Texas to claim a remarkable number
of scratch-off prizes.
Best Friends Anna Morales filed claims for 23 prizes worth
$1,000 dollar to $10,000 dollars in seven scratch-off games from 2009 through 2012.
That was about as many as Joan claimed but in half the time.
Another $1,000 ticket was cashed by Morales' husband, Moe, in 2011.
And here’s the kicker.
They’re supposedly best friends.
Records don't show who physically bought each winning ticket.
Obviously only they would know whose money was used.
Eight times in all, Joan and Anna claimed prizes on the same day at the same lottery
office.
The last time that happened was back on February 12th 2012.
They even claimed the same amount that day for $2,000 dollars, from the same game, Ultimate
Casino Jackpot.
Yep, they bought the tickets from the same store in Bishop.
They even stopped playing around the same time it seemed.
Not a single claim has been made by Joan or Anna after 2012, the last year Joan collected
her last $270,000 dollar check from her first giant win.
Was Joan simply bankrolling Anna and having her help her buy tickets?
If this is true, then estimates for Joan’s purchases would total more than 100,000 tickets!
That would mean spending $3 million dollars or more according to Skip Garibaldi!
Overall Winner?
Ever since her last big win in 2010 of 10 million dollars that brings her total wins
to $20.4 million, she's been out of the lottery limelight since.
There have been no reports of her striking gold again.
Has Joan stopped playing?
Does she have a gambling addiction and lost it all over the past decade?
Remember, she stopped playing after her last annuity check came in.
Through her gambling career, statisticians speculate that Joan could have easily spent
an estimated $3.3 Million on lottery tickets.
The truth is, with all the public information out there, she didn’t have any real "strategy"
where it could be proven that she wasn’t gambling.
She was NOT an advantage player, where each dollar she played should have brought in a
positive return on investment in the long long run.
Whether or not she’s broke, only Joan knows.
And how she won all those times, only she knows as well.
There’s no conclusive evidence to show that she had the odds on her side.
It simply seems that Joan Ginther may just be the luckiest lottery winner ever.
Here’s what’s next!