The emails used to come regularly, and they were brief. Often they would say only something like:

$240 million

It was understood that the Power Ball jackpot was getting high, and it was time to pool resources, buy 25 or 30 tickets, and hopefully cash in.

So I ponied up a buck or two. The idea was that we would hit it, rent a limo for the ride to the lottery office to get photographed in front of that huge check, stop back at work to give our two-week notices, then head to the local upscale steakhouse and party the night away.

We never hit big, of course, and over my protests even small winnings were used to buy even more losing tickets. It was a story played out in thousands of offices across North America.

Eventually I grew tired and decided smaller wins at casinos were better than chasing an unattainable jackpot, so I dropped out of the office pool. Since then I have not paid much attention to lotteries. I look at them kind of like an NBA no-call – if a lot of people want to try to buck ridiculous odds for the high likelihood of allowing a truck driver from Nebraska to get rich beyond his wildest dreams and blowing it in a few years, knock yourself out. I’ll try to grind out a hundred here or there at the blackjack table, and probably have a lot more fun doing it.

But a recent story about a Texas native who had hit it big four times – for total winnings of $25 million – got my attention. Joan Ginther is her name, and she now lives in Las Vegas, which leads you to wonder how much she has left. Anyway, some folks in Texas are calling her the luckiest woman in the world (the odds are too staggering to even list), and others are saying that that God has somehow involved in the drawings.

Turns out it might be neither. The 63-year-old Ginther is actually a former Stanford University statistics professor, and people who know a lot about lotteries say that it’s likely that she has been able to use her math skills to increase her chances of winning, using an algorithm to determine at which point in each run of tickets winners are placed. People in the know also think that Ginther may be traveling back and forth to her hometown of Bishop just to buy tickets at just the right time, with perhaps knowledge of when shipments arrive at the stores where she buys the tickets.

Despite calls for an investigation, the Texas Lottery Commission says that Ginther won the money fair and square, and there are no plans to look into the matter.

So to everyone who plays the lottery – good luck. You now know where your money might be going.