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You have to be extremely lucky to win the top prize of any lottery game. Astronomically lucky.
And yet, it does happen. Sometimes more than once to the same person.
For example, how lucky would you have to be to find a $20 bill just laying on the ground at a gas station. That right there is a stroke of luck.
Now, what if you took that $20 bill and went inside the gas station, bought yourself a lottery ticket, and won something? The odds of both of those things happening have to be pretty low, right?
So, how lucky would have to be to find a $20 bill laying on the ground at a gas station, buy a lottery ticket inside that same gas station, and win $1 million?
Considering the odds of winning $1 million playing that particular lottery game is 1 in 2,017,650, the chances of that happening are almost zero.
Now tell that to Jerry Hicks of Banner Elk, North Carolina, because that is exactly what happened to him earlier this month.
“I found $20 in the parking lot outside the Speedway,” Hicks told North Carolina Education Lottery officials. “I used that to buy the ticket.”
Plus, if you didn’t already envy this guy’s ridiculous luck, he also said, “They actually didn’t have the ticket I was looking for so I bought that one instead.”
Instead of choosing to receive his $1 million in prize money as an annuity of $50,000 over 20 years, he went with the lump sum of $600,000 and, after tax withholdings, went home with $429,007.
“We are going to head straight to Golden Corral and eat everything they’ve got,” he said after collecting his dough.
Just three days after North Carolina Education Lottery officials announced the big win by Jerry Hicks, they also revealed that a woman named Cynthia Moore of Smithfield, North Carolina played a $10 scratch-off ticket and won the first $1 million top prize in their new Cashword game.
She too chose to take the lump sum payment and walked out of the North Carolina Education Lottery headquarters with $429,003.