The Philippines defies odds with 433 lottery winners

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The news that the $4m jackpot in the Philippines has fallen would have made for a good headline overall. But the news that 433 people have hit that jackpot was in itself a better windfall for the media than it was for the actual winners. The Grand Lotto, which produced a series of nines as the winning numbers, was immediately put to public and regulatory scrutiny, with the hundreds of "lucky" winners being part of the biggest number of collective claimants the lottery has produced in its history.

Philippines senate minority leader Koko Pimentel has already called for further scrutiny into the lottery’s operations, questioning the veracity of the results, the BBC reported, detailing the unusual case. The odds of this actually happening – winning, not conducting an inquiry – are actually quite slim. In order for 433 people to have won, they would have all had to pick the same six numbers (out of 55) at the same time and put a ticket in.

Pimentel, though, is committed to the cause and made a public statement in which he said that the integrity of the lottery mattered the most and that authorities had a duty to ensure that there had been no foul play. He has been faced with criticism from Melquiades Robles, the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office general manager, who argued that there was no way for the Grand Lotto Numbers to be fudged in the first place.

"Many have held on to their numbers. It's not only good to be loyal to your wives and husbands, but also to be loyal to your numbers," Robles said with a mix of fact and edification. The BBC reached out to a professor from the University of California in Los Angeles, who commented on the bizarre occurrence. In short, Professor Terence Tao said that with so many lotteries going around the world all the time, it’s a statistical probability that something such as this would happen.

But people do not really enjoy winning if they have to divvy up their winnings. In fact, any cases of people winning the same jackpot have been subject to the outcry. Then again, there have been repeating lottery winners around the world, so winning the lottery is definitely down to pure, blind, unadulterated luck. It’s just amusing that all of this luck was concentrated in the 433 people who posted the same numbers and won the latest drawing of the Grand Lotto.