Countries all over the world are involved in hosting Lotteries. A lottery is a form of gambling that involves the drawing of numbers at random for a prize. Lotteries are outlawed by some governments, while others endorse it to the extent of organizing a national or state lottery. Lotteries are susceptible to being subject to just as many myths and mysteries as any other form of gambling that exists.
One interesting thing about the lottery is that there are actually amazing tales of coincidence that will leave you wondering if everything is as random as we like to think.The odds of any of the following events actually occurring are so low as to be virtually impossible. However, you have to remember the law of big numbers. Hundreds of lottery drawings take place every single day around the world – and have been taking place for decades. When this many people participate in something, there are bound to be weird coincidences.
In fact, it would be truly strange if nothing weird ever happened. The world is a big place and with so many lotteries running every day, year after year, weird things will happen. Keep that in mind when questions such as “Are these coincidences or conspiracies?” pops up in your mind.
This article will centre on the some of the most amazing coincidences in winning the Lottery.
The Luckiest Fortune Cookies Ever
By the time the results began coming in from the 30 March 2005 Powerball drawing, lottery officials suspected fraud lurked underway. Although only one winner qualified for the $13.8 million jackpot, about 110 players were claiming second prizes of either $100,000 or $500,000 (depending on whether they’d paid an extra dollar for the Power Play option that multiplies a win) for having matched the first five of the six numbers drawn. Normally the lottery, which is held across 29 states, pays out only about four or five second-place prizes.
Having 110 claimants of second-place money became highly suspicious. Yet it turned out no chicanery had been afoot: the unexpected result had been just the way the cookie crumbled.
The roughly one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, and 39 had been selected by so many hopeful lotto players because it had been the set of “lucky numbers” given to them in their fortune cookies. (The cookies missed on having all six winning numbers by a mere matter of recommending 40 rather than 42 as the red Powerball number.)
The sagacious confections had been manufactured at Wonton Food Inc. of Long Island City in Queens, New York. That factory produces four million fortune cookies a day vended under a variety of brands, which is how the cookies came to influence lottery players in so many states.
Stunned lottery officials heard time and again from the second-place winners that they’d gotten their numbers from cookies. Additional confirmation of the claim came from the lottery tickets themselves: nearly all of them listed “40” as the Powerball number, and 40 had been the final of the six numbers given on the fortune cookie slips.
While not everyone plays numbers that are suggested to them by external sources, a great many do. A March 2005 episode of television’s Lost included a sequence of lottery numbers, and hundreds of viewers subsequently played that combination. It didn’t win, though.
While fortune hunting via fortune cookie might now seem a prime idea, it needs be kept in mind that the lone winning combination that grabbed the $13.8 million Powerball jackpot on 31 March 2005 came not from an after-dinner amusement at a Chinese restaurant, but rather from a computer: it had been a computer-generated quick pick.
One Woman – Four Lottery wins
Somewhere in Texas, One Woman has thrived in lotteries. She won, not once, not twice… Four different times! For more than $20 million in prize money .Will this also be rightly considered a coincidence too?
You would reasonably think that winning the lottery once would be enough, and that maybe twice is amazingly lucky. But this woman went on to win the lottery a third and then a fourth time. Now, there are some people out there who sell various “how to win the lottery” books who claim they have won the lottery dozens of times. What those people don’t tell you is that they win small amounts and buy thousands of tickets. I’ve read through some of their lottery advice and it’s all gibberish.
This woman seems different because she’s not out selling books and giving interviews. Plus, we know that she actually won substantial money. We can verify that she has won millions of dollars.
The awkwardness of this event is really so difficult to ascertain that even I have a hard time chalking this one up to coincidence. It also doesn’t help that this lady has a PhD from Stanford University with a specialization in statistics, this feels like enough ego for her person. Certainly, There just might be more to this story.
Anyone with an advanced statistics degree knows better than to play the lottery. Yet despite her knowledge, this woman played the lottery and won. And even after she won once, twice and three times she continued to play and win one more time.
Bulgarian Lottery Coincidence
The national lottery in Bulgaria experienced a major coincidence that left people across the nation wondering if the game was fixed. In September of 2009, the lottery was drawn live on national television.By the time all the six numbers were revealed, the nation was taken aback.
The six numbers were the same exact numbers drawn during the previous national drawing. Last time around, nobody hit the jackpot. This time, 18 people won. Something appeared fishy at first, but lottery officials did an investigation and racked it up just to coincidence.
Lottery officials said that with a drawing happening every week for the past 52 years and with just six numbers in the sequence, something like this happening are very possible. It’s rare to see it in action, but if you look at a long sequence of numbers long enough, you’ll eventually notice funny things. The 18 winners of this lottery were simply people who decided to play the same numbers as last week’s drawing.
Oregon Lottery Predicted in Advance
This coincidence almost got the Columbian newspaper in Vancouver in a heap of trouble. The newspaper printed the winning numbers for the Oregon lottery a day in advance of the drawing.
A Vancouver resident noticed the eerie prediction after the lottery and gave Oregon lottery officials a call. Officials checked and double-checked the man’s story and found he was right. The Columbian had printed the winning numbers of the Oregon lottery (6-8-5-5) a few hours before the lottery was actually hosted. Lottery officials couldn’t figure out what happened, so they got help from a detective with the Oregon State Police.
The detective visited the newspaper for interrogation, to find out what really went wrong. The computers used by the Columbian had crashed at the last minute before being printed, so a copy editor was assigned to redo certain pages. Crunched for time on the lottery predictions page, the copy editor simply grabbed Virginia’s previous Pick-4 numbers and used those for the next day’s prediction. It just so happened that Oregon went on to pick those numbers. I think we can chalk this one up to coincidence. With only four numbers in the sequence and a police detective checking things out, this was probably just a long shot lucky guess.
Illinois Lottery 666 the Day After the 2008 Presidential Election
This might be the creepiest or funniest story of them all depending on how it appeals to your sense of humor . It was the day after the 2008 Presidential Election and Barack Obama was about to become the newest President of the United States.Exactly one day after the election, President Elect Obama’s home-state of Illinois hosted its usual daily Pick 3 lotto. The winning numbers were 666, the number of the beast, the anti-Christ or the devil (whichever you prefer).
