Stanford vs. the Casino: How a Female Mathematician Beat the Lottery 4 Times for $21 Million (4 Photos)
While millions of people around the world burn through cash hoping for a lucky break, professional mathematicians have proven that luck is really just probability at work. 
American Joan Ginther became the living embodiment of this theory when she accomplished the unthinkable: winning scratch-off lotteries four separate times, taking home a total of $20.4 million.
Lottery executives and state investigators put her under a microscope, suspecting foul play or insider collusion, but came up empty-handed. Everything was entirely legal—Joan had simply put her brain to work.
Ginther was no ordinary housewife stumbling into fortune. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Stanford University, and at some point, she decided to put her academic background to practical use. 
Her winning streak sounds like something out of fiction:
1993: $5.4 million jackpot in a traditional draw lottery (odds: 1 in 15.8 million);
2006: $2 million on a scratch-off ticket;
2008: $3 million on another scratch card;
2010: The grand finale—a $10 million scratch-off payout.
The odds of pulling off a streak like this purely by chance are astronomical—estimated at one in eighteen septillion (that’s a one followed by 24 zeros).
While it's impossible to literally hack a scratch card, Ginther spotted a flaw in the system. Scratch-off games are printed in massive batches. The Texas Lottery Commission releases public reports detailing total tickets printed, top prizes offered, and how many jackpots have already been claimed. 
Ginther meticulously tracked this data in spreadsheets. Whenever she saw that most of a game's run had been sold, but the multi-million-dollar grand prizes remained unclaimed, the game shifted into "positive expected value." In plain English: the odds of hitting the jackpot suddenly swung in her favor.
Yet Ginther took it even further. Investigative reporters discovered that she bought three of her four winning tickets at the exact same tiny convenience store, Times Market, in the remote town of Beeville. Ginther had cracked the lottery’s distribution algorithm. She figured out the shipping patterns and timing used to distribute winning batches across the state to keep local interest alive. 
Times Market owner Sun Bae stands next to lottery tickets in her store in Bishop, Texas, where the last two winning tickets were purchased by Joan Ginther.
Math aside, Ginther wouldn't have won if she wasn't willing to bet big. For her strategy to work, she had to buy tickets in bulk. Beeville locals recalled shipment boxes filled with thousands of lottery tickets arriving at the store, all bought directly by Ginther. She plowed hundreds of thousands of dollars from her earlier winnings right back into purchases.
Lottery investigators ultimately admitted that there was no fraud or insider help. Joan Ginther was simply smarter than the entire Texas lottery system. She eventually passed away in Texas, taking the precise secrets of her mathematical calculations to the grave.
