Virginia woman wins lottery 30 times in one day — using the same 4-digit number to earn $150,000

Although people do get lucky once in a while, it's very rare for someone to sail through life without their luck running out. But things turned out to be different for a woman from Virginia, who kept winning the lottery not once, twice, or thrice, but a whopping 30 times in a single day. Deborah Brown's lucky numbers for 30 of her Pick 4 tickets netted her a massive prize of $150,000 in total, NBC News reported.

Incredible Odds

The Richmond resident initially bought 20 tickets from a gas station in Chesterfield County to try her luck. She picked the same combination of 1-0-3-1 for all of her tickets.

However, Brown had an intuition later in the day. "A couple of times during the day, I saw those numbers," Brown told the lottery in a statement. Thus, she went back and bought 10 more tickets with the same combination.

She then had to wait and see if her hunch was right. The Pick 4 tickets for $1 each carry a top prize of $5,000 and the draw is held daily at 1:59 pm and 11 pm.

Finally on the night of the drawing, Brown found out that each of her 30 plays had won the top prize, winning her $150,000. "I nearly had a heart attack," Brown told the lottery.

What makes Brown's win incredible is how she was able to cash in on the microscopic chance that she had. In the Pick 4 lottery game, the odds of matching all four numbers in order are 1 in 10,000, John Hagerty, Virginia Lottery's spokesperson, told The New York Times. The chances of picking 30 tickets with the matching numbers are even tougher.

Hagerty also noted that Brown's case was an anomaly as buying more than one ticket with the same series of numbers does not improve the chance of winning since only one series can win in each drawing. This means that Brown had more chances of losing it all.

“In general, people who buy multiple tickets will spread the numbers around,” the spokesperson said. He did admit that getting multiple tickets with the same number is a common practice as it increases the payout. 

With similar odds, a man from Melbourne Australia earned the title of 'the luckiest man alive' after he cheated death and won the lottery twice. Bill Morgan, who has now become a viral sensation, was declared dead 14 minutes, following a heart attack that he suffered in a horrific car crash.

When he came out of the COMA, doctors called it a 'medical miracle', as per the Daily Mail Australia. However, his luck wasn't close to running out. Thinking that he got a second chance in life, Morgan decided to try his hand at the lottery and ended up winning a $17,000 Toyota Corolla car. 

His amazing return from the dead and lottery win drew the attention of the local press. While being recorded, Morgan went into a store, bought a ticket, and scratched it off the counter. To everyone's shock, Morgan hit the jackpot again, winning AUD250,000 ( ~$170,000) this time. 

In 2020, at 59, Morgan told Daily Mail Australia that he took out a cheque for AUD200,000 from his win and bought a house in which he still lives.