Many players swear by dreamt-up numbers when they buy a lottery ticket, but one Michigan man says his long-running picks came from a Zoltar fortune-telling machine.
The chances of hitting the jackpot in the US are often described as roughly one in 300 million. Tim Chartier, a math professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, has compared those odds to landing on heads 28 times in a row when flipping a coin.
Chartier typically encourages people to avoid personally meaningful patterns and instead let randomness do the work.
He said: “If you pick your favorite number or the day of your birthday like the 7th, which is the day of the next drawing, many people can be doing the same and that puts a lot of numbers between 1 and 31.
“Picking your own numbers doesn’t change the odds of winning. But, picking random numbers does increase the odds that if you win, no one else wins.”
Stephen Huesgen, however, took a different approach—sticking with the exact same set of numbers for around 30 years.
The Fraser, Michigan resident traced his number choices back to a decades-old trip to Las Vegas and a Zoltar machine that dispensed a fortune along with “lucky numbers.”
Speaking to the PowerBall after his recent $1,000,000 win, the 56-year-old shared: “About 30 years ago, I was in Las Vegas and got a fortune from a Zoltar machine. On my fortune, there was a set of lucky numbers, so I have been playing those numbers on lottery games ever since.”
Huesgen went on: “The morning after the Powerball drawing, I saw an email from the Lottery, which is when I found out I’d won a $1 million Powerball prize. I yelled to my wife: ‘Is this real?’ I don’t think this is going to fully hit me until I cash the check!”
His win came from the April 22 PowerBall drawing, where he matched all five white balls: 24-29-32-49-63.
As for what he’ll do with the money, Huesgen said he plans to clear his house and car payments, take a vacation, and put some away for retirement.
Even though the odds of winning are famously slim, there are also players who seem to beat them again and again. Robert Bevan, for example, has reportedly won the lottery 18 times, with his largest prize reaching $200,000. Meanwhile, Joan Ginther has won five times, including a headline-making $10 million win.
At that point, you have to wonder if a little of their luck could rub off on everyone else.