A White Rock man’s bizarre gambling strategy ended up winning him $400,000 USD in a Washington State lottery game.
Thomas Grimme travelled to Blaine, WA., last Dec. 28 and purchased 40 tickets of the Match 4 lottery game. To participate in the lottery, a player purchases a $2 ticket and selects four numbers between 1 and 24. If those four numbers match the winning numbers, the winner receives $10,000.
Grimme purchased 40 tickets, picking the same four numbers for each ticket – resulting in a $10,000 win for each winning ticket.
The Washington Lottery did not make a public announcement of Grimme’s winnings. It was only made public last week after reporter Jim Camden, of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, followed up on a inquiry from one of his readers, wondering about 42 payouts on the Dec. 28 lottery.
“I checked and found out that 40 of them went to one person, and under the public records act I just asked and they told me his name and the city. I got a copy of the investigation (it’s not very long) but it doesn’t have an address or phone number,” Camden explained to Peace Arch News in an email.
Camden reported Oct. 24 that in the lottery investigation, Grimme explained that he picked the numbers 4, 8, 17 and 24, based on his children’s birthdays, and had been playing them for several months after receiving money from a relative.
In the previous three months, Grimme had spent $8,250 on Match 4 tickets with those four numbers, often buying multiple tickets for a single day, according to the Spokesman-Review.
Winners are asked to fill out a Winner’s Survey, asking the winners what the money would allow them to do, or what he could now check off his bucket list. Grimme didn’t answer either, and asked that the agency not share his photograph.
Grimme, who has his phone number listed in White Rock, did not respond to a voice message left by PAN. His address is unlisted.
Camden told PAN he also found a phone number for Grimme, “and nobody answered it for a couple weeks, and when it was answered the person said he was Grimme’s landlord, that Grimme had moved and hadn’t left a forwarding address.”
“He sounds like a fairly private person.”
Stephen Wade, research and development manager for the lottery, told Camden that the investigation convinced the agency there was “nothing fishy” about the win.
“It’s just an unusual case.”
A media-relations representative of Washington Lottery confirmed the details of Grimme’s win to PAN.
