In the space of fifteen years Joan Ginther won more than $20 million in four draws. First she won a $5.4 million jackpot, then 10 years later she won a $2 million and a $3 million jackpot in a five year span and finally she bagged a $10 million jackpot in the summer of 2010.
This would certainly make her the luckiest woman to have ever lived. To put this into perspective; the odds of this happening are one in eighteen septillion (that's 24 zeroes!) An event like this would likely take place only once in a quadrillion years.
She won all of the lottery jackpots in Texas of which three where in scratch games where the tickets were all bought from the same mini mart in the small town of Bishop. Residents of the town believe that she was 'born under a lucky star' and that God has blessed her with the winnings.
However, a professor from the Institute for the Study of Gambling & Commercial Gaming disagrees saying that there could have been a multitude of ways she could have gamed the system.
He said that being a highly-trained statistician, she could have determined an algorithm that would have indicated where the winning tickets would be placed in each run of the scratch-off tickets. She would also be able to tell when these winning tickets shipped because the shops would restock their tickets on fixed dates.