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'Lucky' woman who won lottery four times

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by YankeeFan, Aug 8, 2011.

  1. deskslave

    deskslave Active Member

    Michael Larson is pretty impressed. (Well, he would be, anyway.)


     
  2. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Love that movie...
     
  3. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    See, but I'm still curious about this.

    If the pattern is that predictable, and she's been able to figure it out, it would be worth buying thousands of dollars worth of tickets to ensure you got the winner.

    I'd like to know if that's what she did or if the store owner has let her go through the tickets in return for a cut.
     
  4. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    It's something to do with the coded numbers on the ticket itself. If you could buy thousands of dollars worth of tickets to win millions of dollars, the game would go broke pretty fast.
     
  5. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    I think that was the dude in Canada. She figured out how often this store received winning tickets -- and when.

    At least as I read the article.

    Am I wrong. I very well could be. She figured out how to game the lottery. I can't even understand how she did it.
     
  6. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    Unless they print the winners on an exact schedule and ship them in a very predictable way without any deviation ever, she probably took a baited hook ticket (the ones with some info showing, which you then have to complete by scratching off squares) and used the algorithm she had figured out to reverse engineer winning tickets. That kind of reverse engineering would be right up the alley of a statistics PhD.

    That would probably have meant that she got them from a place where she was able to look at all of their tickets and choose the ones she wanted to buy based on what was showing, the way the guy in the Wired story did. Given that she bought three of her winning tickets at the same mini-mart, that was probably the case.
     
  7. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member

    More than one group has cleaned house playing Keno in Vegas by noting long-term (computer-generated) patterns of numbers generated, and playing accordingly (while not being overtly obvious about it) . . . you don't have to hit many 7-, 8-, 10- number tickets to make quite a haul in that game.
     
  8. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member

    Yep. And the great ethical flaw within Nevada is that legally, casinos within the state actually views counting as cheating.

    Given casinos' status as "private property", properties thus reserve the right to escort off the premises anyone they deem to be . . . in their view . . . "cheating".

    Lame horseshit, related to 21, but it is what it is. Vegas ain't what it used to be. Can you imagine how you could have cleaned house in Vegas 50-60 years ago by being fully aware of modern counting techniques?
     
  9. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Back in high school, my best friend and I made $$$ by selling baseball cards at baseball card shows. Some of the card companies had a clear pattern to the order the cards and you could buy cellophane packs accordingly. This was back in the day where Gregg Jeffries was being billed as the next Mantle and we'd use the pattern to buy cell packs for $1 and then turn around and sell the Jeffries for $10, which amazingly was less that what the other dealers were selling them for...

    I bought my first car largely from money I made that way.
     
  10. I remember those cellphane pack patterns as well; for Canseco and the Mark McGwire Olympic card.
     
  11. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    Nice. Buy the 100-play ticket, take it to the hotel room and watch the Keno channel all day.
     
  12. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Fleer was the easiest to check. My best friend (still is to this day) and I would ride our bikes to Price Club on Tuesday mornings during the summer and we had our lists of which players were ahead of the Jeffries, Mark Grace rookie and a couple others...

    What's funny is you can buy the complete set today for less that what we were selling the Jeffries rookies for in 1988 and we were completely undercutting the other dealers at every show we worked.
     
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