2
Joan Ginther, who won four times
The most famous lucky person in America, who was almost certainly not being lucky.
4Texas Lottery jackpots, totalling over $20 million.
Between 1993 and 2010 Joan Ginther won four Texas Lottery prizes: $5.4 million, $2 million, $3 million and $10 million. Naive odds on that sequence run to roughly one in eighteen septillion, a number with no meaning.
Which is the tell. Ginther holds a PhD in statistics from Stanford. Her last three wins were scratch-off games, and scratch-offs are not drawn — they are printed, in batches, with winning tickets distributed across the print run by an algorithm. Somebody who understood the algorithm, and who could see which batches had gone where, would not need luck.
That theory was laid out in detail by the journalist Nathaniel Rich in 2011, and the Texas Lottery has never publicly disputed the mechanism. Ginther has never explained anything. She bought tickets by the hundred, in bulk, from one small-town shop.
So: the least lucky person on this list, and the most impressive.