Lottery winners can be forgiven for their funny reactions to suddenly getting rich, and Elisa Chapman may count as an example.
She discovered her win in the Virginia Lottery just after waking up for the day.
“I jumped up. I ran outside in my pajamas to tell my daughter!” she told lottery officials. “I was so excited!”
Her reaction was due partly due to the way she won, which was not your typical big ticket victory. Chapman bought 54 tickets in the Pick 4 game — all with the same four-digit combination: 1-4-0-6, Virginia Lottery officials said in a news release.
Forty of her tickets gambled on hitting those numbers in “exact order,” while 14 were for getting the numbers in any order.
The end result was 40 top prizes of $5,000 and 14 prizes of $2,600 for a total of $236,400, lottery officials said.
Odds of winning even once in the game are 1 in 10,000, according to the Pick 4 website. Chapman, who lives in Smithfield, bought the tickets at a Harris Teeter store in nearby Suffolk. The drawing was May 17 and she learned of her win the next morning.
“I still can’t believe it!” she says. “It feels awesome!”
Chapman works at a business run by her family and told lottery officials she intends to keep showing up. As for how she’ll spend the money, Chapman intends “to take care of her family.”
Pick 4 tickets range from 50 cents to $1 and allow players to pick any four numbers between 0000 and 9999.
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