by Ben Perks
Senior NASA scientist Norma Farr has revealed how she chose her numbers to win $1 million playing the Virginia Lottery in August.
Farr of Newport News won the large cash prize playing the state lottery game Mega Millions. The lab leader at the NASA Langley Research Center bought her winning ticket online and used the lottery computer to choose her numbers, officials said.
Her approach to picking numbers was not what you might expect from someone with degrees in mathematics and computer science. However, as formulas and calculations are useless when playing a random lottery, using the “Easy Pick” random number generator to select her numbers makes sense when considering her job.
A NASA Research News profile of Farr states that she and her team work with “Computer-Aided Design (CAD) geometry, whether that is to support Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the creation of test articles or the development of CAD from measured data.”
The scientist matched five numbers in the Mega Millions draw last weekend. Despite winning $1 million, she failed to get the Mega Ball number. If the lottery computer had also picked this number, she could have won a jackpot of $242 million. The Mega Ball that eluded her in that week’s draw was the number 1.
Still, by having five winning numbers, she beat the odds of 1 in 12,607,306 – the likelihood of choosing six winning numbers is 1 in 302,575,350.
Using Maths to Win the Lottery
Although Farr didn’t use an ingenious formula when playing the lottery, other people have exploited mathematical flaws in lottery games to win big. In the mid-2000s, MIT students figured out that the game WinFall offered by the Massachusetts Lottery could be beaten.
This game limited its jackpots and used a roll-down system – when no one landed the main prize, it was added to the next draw’s jackpot. The students concluded that the expected payoff could sometimes be positive. The MIT syndicate exploited this flaw by carefully choosing when to play and by purchasing tickets in bulk. By doing this, they made a total of $8 million from an initial $1,000 stake.
Around the same time as the MIT student’s success, Michigan couple Marge and Jerry Selby also spotted flaws in the same game. After Jerry Selby tested the theory by buying over $2,200 on tickets to see if it was correct, the couple set up a company to increase their buying power and win more. This approach was highly successful and earned the couple a total of $27 million.
Lottery System Turns Into Ponzi Scheme
Although there have been some success stories, theories on how to win the lottery don’t always reap the rewards. In September this year, a real estate guru went to prison for defrauding investors in his company to buy tickets using a system that he believed would win large sums from playing the Michigan Lottery.
Michigan resident Victor Gonjaj was so convinced that his lottery system worked that he spent over $1 million a week on tickets. To fund this habit, he had to con investors of a bogus company that he had set up out of $23 million.
Ben is a sports journalist & part-time trader with a passion for finding +EV bets. Ben lives in Madrid, Spain where he enjoys the live poker scene, and sunshine where he covers UFC, MLB, NHL, NBA, as well as tennis betting.
