Meg keeps the notebook in a kitchen drawer, under a stack of takeaway menus. It’s a spiral-bound A5 with a coffee ring on the cover, and it contains every draw she’s played since a rainy Saturday in March 2002. Six numbers, circled in blue biro, week after week after week.
“I wasn’t being superstitious,” she tells me. “I just didn’t want to think about it anymore.”
A ritual, not a strategy
The numbers themselves are unremarkable — three birthdays, a wedding anniversary, and the day her mother passed. Most lottery researchers would tell Meg her ticket was statistically mediocre: heavy on low numbers (birthday bias), clustered around sentimentally weighted dates, likely to share the pot if it ever won.
“It was never about winning. It was about having one thing I did on Tuesdays, for me.”
For 23 years, the numbers didn’t come up. Meg estimates she spent around $6,400 in that time — the price, she says, of “a decent second-hand car I never bought.”
The Tuesday she stopped checking
On March 11, 2025, Meg’s numbers finally came up. She didn’t find out until Thursday. “I’d started skipping the checking bit years ago. The ritual was in the buying.”
The prize was $12.4 million, split with no one. She still buys her ticket every Tuesday.