Virginia man wins $800,000 with 160 lottery tickets — he played the same numbers on all of them

It's not unusual for people to guess the winning number in a lottery but an individual could get one, two, or three winning tickets in a lifetime. But fate had something special in store for Kwame Cross of Virginia, who won a payout with all 160 tickets, which he bought when he was feeling lucky. Simply based on a strong hunch, the man chose the same number for all the tickets and beat incredible odds to walk away with $800,000.

Trusting his Gut

Cross, a small business owner from Washington, D.C., bought the 160 tickets in 2020, for the popular Pick 4 game. While at the Sunoco gas station in Arlington, he decided to play the same four-digit combination: 7-3-1-4 for each of his tickets. Speaking to the lottery officials, he explained that he saw the numbers in the background of a TV show, and "for some reason" it just stayed in his mind.

"I just had a feeling," he was quoted as saying in the official press release. On the day of the draw, each of Cross's tickets won the top prize of $5,000, which was multiplied 160 times into a six-figure reward.

The lucky winner shared that he was waiting in the drive-thru line at a fast-food restaurant when he found out that he had 160 winning tickets. At first he couldn't believe that it could be possible. "I had to pull over and check like 82 times. It feels surreal!" he said.

The Virginia Lottery added that the chances for Cross to match all four numbers in exact order for just one of his tickets were 1 in 10,000. Thus, matching the numbers in all 160 tickets meant that beat astronomical odds. Cross shared that at the time, he had no immediate plans about spending the money. 

A Common Strategy?

Cross wasn't the first or the only winner to play the same number on multiple tickets. In a similar case, a woman from Virginia, won the lottery 30 times in a single day. Deborah Brown picked the same numbers for all of her 30 Pick 4 tickets and netted her a massive prize of $150,000 in total, NBC News reported. Like Cross, the Richmond resident also revealed that she had an intuition that the number would be a winner.

While these are individual cases, back in 2019, the same happened to a whopping 2,000 lottery participants. The residents of North Carolina,  decided to pick all zeroes in the Carolina Pick 4 lottery and all of them ended up winning the top prize. Hence, instead of multiplying their winnings, this lot of lucky winners shared a prize of $7.8 million, according to the official release. The NC Education Lottery shared a photo on Twitter showing how "too many winners" ended at the doorstep of their headquarters to claim the mega prize.

One of the participants Willie Ward, told CNBC that she decided to pick the four zeroes for her ticket as she simply loved the number. She shared that she plays the same combination everytime was was fully dedicated to the combination. On the other hand, another winner named Stephen Crater shared that it was only his first time playing all zeroes.