Thousands win lottery after 1-1-1 picked for third time in two weeks in North Carolina
Thousands scored prizes in the North Carolina lottery as players tried their luck on a set of familiar numbers.
More than 6,500 tickets won after the people who bought them all chose the combination 1-1-1, the N.C. Education Lottery said Sunday. Those numbers were drawn in the Carolina Pick 3 game on Easter.
It’s not the first time those numbers turned out to be lucky.
Officials said it was the third time in less than a month that the combination 1-1-1 was picked in North Carolina. The last two times were on March 23 and March 28, when thousands of other tickets won prizes.
“In any drawing, any set of numbers have the same chance of being drawn as any other set of numbers no matter how often they have come out before,” the N.C. Education Lottery said in a news release.
This time around, winners racked up $2.4 million in prize money. Most players won either $250 or $500, depending on how much they spent on their tickets, spokesperson Van Denton wrote in an email to McClatchy News.
“The rest of the prize money went (to) those players who added either the Sum It Up feature or the I-Off feature,” options that allow players to win even if their tickets don’t have the exact combination picked in a drawing, officials said.
Each ticket that matched all three winning numbers beat 1-in-1,000 odds.
The 1-1-1 isn’t the only number combination that has led to multiple windfalls.
In South Carolina, a line stretched down the sidewalk near a lottery claim center after a record number of Pick 4 players chose the numbers 2-2-2-2 in September 2019.
And just before Christmas, more than 11,000 people in the state won prizes after picking the numbers 3-3-3, McClatchy News reported.
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