Lucky Monkey – Chinese Lottery Winner
Gabriel Ting and John Wong, on the eve of the Chinese 2004 New Year (the Year of
the Monkey) came up with what they considered to be the next winning lottery
numbers.
Friends had advised them to use the principles of Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese
art of enhancing positive energies. Lucky number 13 could be used to take
advantage of New Year’s luck. Or use the Chinese culture’s ultimate lucky number
8 (because its pronunciation of ‘Fa’ in Cantonese means to “make a great fortune
in the future”). But the number eight is one of five numbers (1, 6, 7, 8 and 9)
in Feng Shui… placing 1, 6 and 8 together is considered especially fortunate.
But Gabe and John thought, “Why use numbers that all our other Chinese friends
will use – then we’d just have to split the jackpot with them?”
So they looked into a statistics book and found out that the odds of winning
Canada’s Lotto Super 7 – the chance of matching 7 out of 7 numbers (from 1 to
47) – is 62,891,499 to one! “Hold on,” said Gabe, “we normally play the Lotto
649!” They felt relieved to find out that the