I can’t help it if I’m lucky, say a handful of Virginians who won big in a unicorn whiskey lottery. They were suspiciously way too lucky. Like “finding a single atom in our entire solar system.” Officials admit something went wrong but they assure everyone that it wasn’t on purpose. There aren’t any indications of a fraudulent scheme behind it.
Whiskey lottery ‘wildly skewed’
The lottery run by the state of Virginia was meant to fairly give local unicorn whiskey hunters a chance to bag a highly demanded bottle of trendy blends and vintages. Officials are calling what happened “likely a human-induced flaw.”
The mistake “wildly skewed the results, allowing several lucky participants to win multiple times.” That’s not fair, the losers declare. They’re right but it still wasn’t a rigged drawing, they insist. At least, not rigged intentionally.
A statement issued by the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority on Monday May 22, explains what happened. The first thing they noted was an admission that the results were definitely “statistically abnormal.”
A state-run lottery to give Virginians first dibs on pricey whiskeys suffered from what was likely a human-induced flaw that wildly skewed the results, allowing several lucky participants to win multiple times. https://t.co/kzY3yue6mp
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 23, 2023
They learned of the incident “after several bourbon aficionados had flagged the irregularities following last month’s drawing.” Somehow, the whiskey collectors complained, “two entrants had won all four bottles in a single drawing of bottles of George T. Stagg Bourbon and other choice whiskeys.”
On top of that, “50 entrants had won three apiece.” How could that possibly happen? They demanded to know. The winners were just as surprised.
Something “seemed awry” in the rare whiskey world “as the winners posted about their good fortune online or discussed it in online chats.” It didn’t take long to catch the attention of Gus Guimond. The 30-year-old Chantilly resident happens to belong to the “DMV Bourbon Drinkers” club on Facebook.
You’re so lucky
At first, they “started to notice people saying, ‘Hey, I won two bottles.‘” The initial reaction was “Oh, that’s awesome. You’re so lucky.” Then it happened again. Unicorns of the whiskey variety didn’t suddenly start breeding like hamsters.
“Now this is starting to get really, really unlikely,” Guimond exclaims. “And so that was the biggest red flag.” They were several signposts into the Twilight Zone by that time.
The odds, Guimond points out, against “not just one but several people winning the lottery to buy multiple bottles” are astronomical. It “almost broke his calculator. He figured it to be about 1 in a tredecillion. That’s 42 zeros.” Nobody can get their head around a number that big so to put it into terms you can cope with, “the chances of this happening is equivalent to finding a single atom in our entire solar system.”
Virginia lottery for rare whiskey sours, as flaw lets same people win repeatedly https://t.co/J6MoJMAsOm
— Neal Augenstein (@AugensteinWTOP) May 24, 2023
Scoring a single bottle of a whiskey like the ones made available is a big deal. “A fifth of George T. Stagg bourbon, which has been aged 15 years and retails in Virginia ABC stores for $99.99, can sell for as much as $1,482 elsewhere.”
Even though this looks really bad, “Virginia ABC has found no evidence of inappropriate administration of the lottery drawing, or intentional manipulation by staff or customers.” They have controls in place. “Drawings were witnessed by a member of the authority’s internal audit division. A subsequent review by Internal Audit identified an issue in the sorting of the lottery entry data in our software. The manner in which the entries were sorted contributed to the statistically abnormal results.”
Basically, it was a mistake, they assure, while promising whiskey lovers in the state not to let it happen again. According to spokesman Pat Kane, “additional steps had been added to the lottery’s procedures to try to remove any chance for error. He also said the agency was testing an electronic lottery system in its Management of Inventory and Product Sales system, to further reduce the possibility for introducing human error.“
