Woman stopped in a convenience store on her way to work to buy some lottery tickets. She walked out $100K richer

One lucky Missouri woman walked out of a local convenience store $100,000 richer after stopping in on a whim to buy a lottery ticket.

The unnamed woman bought a Merry Money ticket for just $5 at a shop in West Plains, a small town over 161 miles from the state capital.

“I stopped at Casey’s and grabbed a couple of tickets before work,” she said.

When she walked out of the store, she realised how much she had won.

“I have never won anything like this before!” she said.

Lottery officials first launched the game on October 13, just over two weeks before the unnamed woman bought her ticket.

Since then, lucky players have won over $1.1 million, according to lottery executives who spoke to The Kansas City Star.

However, more than $10 million in prizes remains unclaimed, with two additional $100,000 prizes still up for grabs.

Playing the lottery is far from an effective get-rich-quick scheme, though, as the odds are very much against players.

According to Davidson College, the odds of winning the big lottery prize are 1 in 300 million.

According to the academic institution, there are two easy ways of visualizing how unlikely this is.

Tim Chartier, a professor of mathematics at the school, says it is equivalent to flipping a coin 28 times in a row and getting heads each time.

He added that it would be as likely as someone choosing one second from the past nine years and another person correctly guessing which moment was chosen.

Chartier advised players to pick random numbers, since most people prefer their favorite digits or birthdays, which tend to fall between 1 and 31.

The news comes after one man in Kendall County, Illinois, hit the jackpot in the Lucky Day lotto drawing and nearly had to rush his wife to the hospital shortly after.

The unnamed man bagged $550,000 after he matched 3, 4, 6, 26, and 28 on Friday, 18. However, this was not the first time that he had won a big prize in the lottery.

“Would you believe this isn’t my first big win? I actually won $50,000 on Lucky Day Lotto back in 2001, so to win again is just amazing,” he said.

However, things took a turn when he woke up his wife to tell her the good news.

“I woke her up and asked, ‘Honey, where do you want to move? I just won the lottery!’ She started hyperventilating. I almost called 911,” he recalled.

After she recovered and the pair cashed in on their win, they said they planned to use the money for a vacation.

“We’re going to take a dream trip to Hawaii this winter to visit family and make the holidays unforgettable! This also sets us up nicely for retirement,” the lottery winner said.