Man Picked Same Lottery Numbers for 20 Years and Won
- 10 years ago
One man’s strategy and persistence playing the same Powerball lottery numbers for 20 years finally resulted in a big payout.
The odds of winning just the $1 million payout in the Powerball lottery game are nearly 1 in 5 million but that doesn’t stop people from trying with all sorts of methods from numerology to random number generators. One man’s strategy and persistence for 20 years finally resulted in a big payout.
49-year-old Robert Winburn from Urbandale, Iowa, associated a number with each alphabet letter and then played the numbers assigned to the letters of his last name. In repeatedly playing these same numbers for two decades, Winburn only won $100 one time until now.
From his town’s Git-N-Go convenience store where he bought the winning ticket, Winburn watched the first three tickets he entered into the self-check machine all come up empty. Then with his next ticket, he saw the first five numbers match and, in disbelief, checked again. Though he didn’t get the sixth Powerball to win $330.8 million, the other five matching numbers were good for the second place prize of $1 million.
Winburn went to the Iowa Lottery Headquarters in Des Moines to claim his winnings. Since no one matched all six numbers, the jackpot for the next drawing grew to $400 million.
The odds of winning just the $1 million payout in the Powerball lottery game are nearly 1 in 5 million but that doesn’t stop people from trying with all sorts of methods from numerology to random number generators. One man’s strategy and persistence for 20 years finally resulted in a big payout.
49-year-old Robert Winburn from Urbandale, Iowa, associated a number with each alphabet letter and then played the numbers assigned to the letters of his last name. In repeatedly playing these same numbers for two decades, Winburn only won $100 one time until now.
From his town’s Git-N-Go convenience store where he bought the winning ticket, Winburn watched the first three tickets he entered into the self-check machine all come up empty. Then with his next ticket, he saw the first five numbers match and, in disbelief, checked again. Though he didn’t get the sixth Powerball to win $330.8 million, the other five matching numbers were good for the second place prize of $1 million.
Winburn went to the Iowa Lottery Headquarters in Des Moines to claim his winnings. Since no one matched all six numbers, the jackpot for the next drawing grew to $400 million.