Photo Courtesy of VIrginia Lottery Commission
Last month, Alonzo Coleman acted on a hunch, played the lottery and won.
On June 11, the winning numbers of the Virginia Lottery’s Bank a Million were 13-14-15-16-17-18, an ascending numerical sequence. Coleman reportedly had a dream the night before, and, according to Fox29, he played those exact numbers because of it. The retired man won $250,000 after taxes for following his dreams.
“It was hard to believe!” Coleman told lottery officials of the June 11 drawing. “It still hasn’t hit me yet!”
Coleman is unsure of what propelled him to act on such a whim. When he went to Glenside Corner Mart, Coleman spent just $2 on buying his payslip. And per a press release by lottery officials, they affirmed that the sequence itself is highly unusual to show up. The Bank a Million game reveals winning numbers on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and it is played by picking six different numbers on a payslip from 1 to 40. The total cost of play must add up to $2, but the wager can be smaller than that. The prizes range from $250,000 to $500,000 to $1 million.
A lottery spokesperson told WTVR, “Since he split his $2 wager four ways when he bought the ticket, he had four sets of numbers. Using that ‘Play Your Way’ feature, he won $250,000 on one of his sets of numbers.”
The odds of winning a prize like Coleman are 1 in 3.8 million, mathematically speaking.
“It was hard to believe!” Coleman told Virginia Lottery officials. “It still hasn’t hit me yet!”
According to Fox29, “The Virginia Lottery generates more than $2 million per day for Virginia’s K-12 public schools, generating over $765 million in funding for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021, [as said by] officials.”