If that is true, I wonder how many tickets she had to buy to figure out the algorithm.
Next to ever lottery vendor is a waste basked where losers toss all their losing tickets. It is quite easy to collect many thousands of tickets. If they have a bar code the computer can easily narrow down the winning combinations to a small number. You then play each of those combinations.
Buy 20 tickets and win $1,000 in a scratch off.
She bought thousands of tickets, IIRC.
She was able to deduce which stores would get the winning scratch-off lottery ticket. Although the store selection was ostensibly randomized, she was able to identify a recurrent pattern that was reliably predictive. She still had to buy thousands of tickets from the selected store to ensure that she had a winning ticket.