Is this luck (and good or bad luck?), is it Karma, is it divine/non-divine intervention?
American woman wins lottery for a fourth time
An American woman has been named the luckiest lottery winner in the world after scooping her fourth multi million pound jackpot
Joan Ginther won £6.2m with the top prize from a scratch card bought from a store in Texas, pushing her total winnings to more than £14m
Her first multi million payout came in 1993 when she won £8m from a £20 scratch card.
Mrs Ginther chose to take £180,000 a year for 19 years after paying tax on her win to give her a total prize of £3.6m. In 2006 she won a further £1.4m and again opted for a lump-sum payment of £1m after paying tax on the winnings.
Two years later the 63 year-old who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, scooped a further £2m.
Incredibly, three of the tickets were bought from the same small convenience store in the town of Bishop, Texas.
Friends said Mrs Ginther would return to her home town to visit her father and would drop in at the local store to buy a scratch card.
Store manager Bob Solis said they sell 1,000 lottery tickets a day, adding: “This is a very lucky store.”
Experts said the chances of winning four lottery jackpots was more than 200 million to one.
“This final bit of winning lottery must confirm Mrs Ginther as the world’s luckiest lottery player,” said a spokesman for World Lottery News.
“We would be interested to see just how much she spends on lottery tickets and scratch-offs.”
Officials with the Texas lottery said Ms Ginther had chosen not to talk about her winning streak but said the odds of winning four times were many millions to one.
“We have had multiple winners before,” said spokesman Bobby Heith.
“But she’s obviously been born under a lucky star.”
I guess the important question would be: Is she happy? Although she bought the winning tickets on occasional visits to her father, she lives in Las Vegas and could well be a slot-machine zombie. I don’t think I’ve been in a slot-machine hall but Japan’s pachinko parlours are surely a modern-day hell-realm.
If you plot everyone’s random luck on a chart it will probably look like a standard distribution curve (a.k.a. bell curve) in which a few people are at one end having no luck at all and a few others are at the other end having recurring good luck. Some would say that those on the wrong end of the curve are working off a truckload of bad karma.
Ajahn Chah always used to criticize reliance on good luck and magical charms, preferring people to invest in something which would truly serve them. But it happened that he died on January 16th and his funeral was on the 16th. The memorial stupa had 16 pillars, was 32 metres high and had foundations 16 metres deep. Consequently a huge number of people in Ubon province bought lottery tickets with ones and sixes mixed together – and won. The next day the newspaper headline read “LUANG POR’S LAST GIFT TO HIS DISCIPLES” and a couple of local bookies went bankrupt.
hehe. I had not heard that story before…. As well as the bell curve, which sounds perfectly reasonable to me, we might note that the slot machine zombie (etc.. for scratch cards) must number in the millions of people, who would also have a bell curve graph – some of whom would win. But being ‘in’ the game would give them more chance.
I bet she whittles away that money gambling more over the years.
A bit like the joke of the guy who asks God to help him by making him win the lottery. God replies in a booming voice from the clouds “ok, I will”
Months later the guy has not won, and complains. The voice from the coulds appears again “meet me half way, and buy a ticket”.
The odds that Joan Ginther would hit four Texas Lottery jackpots for a combined nearly $21 million are astronomical. Mathematicians say the chances are as slim as 1 in 18 septillion – that’s 18 and 24 zeros.