I saw that article and didn't link to it because it was rife with ridiculous statements and mathematically dubious speculation. They certainly didn't "figure it out".
One particular gem: they said that a game returning 66.9% of the money spent on it has a "remarkable" return - that's a loss of 33.1 cents on every dollar and would quickly render anyone playing it without a mathematical advantage bankrupt. They also suggested that such a return reduced variance in the game, apparently not understanding that this return includes the top, multi-million dollar prizes. They confused hit frequency with the return of the game.
The tax incentive thing is also ridiculous. While it is true that one may deduct their losses up to the amount of their taxable winnings, if she were playing without an advantage, she would still lose and this offered no help on beating odds of 1 in 18 septillion.
Finally, they could have handed her tickets for free all day and she should have only hit what she did every quadrillion years. There are literally not enough raw materials available on our planet to produce the 18 septillion tickets that should have been necessary to hit what she did - even if mankind devoted all of its resources to the project.
The best speculative theory is that she was able to deduce an approximation of the algorithm used to distribute the tickets, but again that is only speculation. She clearly figured something out; to say that this article nailed it, however, is a serious misstatement.