On Wednesday, April 19, 2023, the Lotto Texas jackpot was seventy-three million dollars. There was no winner that night—there hadn’t been a winner for the past ninety-one drawings—and so the pool of money rolled over. By the next drawing, that Saturday, it had reached ninety-five million. Dawn Nettles started getting worried. For the jackpot to have grown so quickly, sales volume must have been ten times what Nettles thought was normal. “I knew right then,” she told me. “Somebody was buying all the combinations.”
Nettles is seventy-four, with cropped copper hair and the bearing of a gently exasperated elementary-school teacher. She lives in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, with her husband, a flight instructor, and she devotes her days to the Lotto Report, a publication closely tracking the Texas Lottery.
