As we all sit here patiently waiting for our turn to ‘hit it big’ with the lottery, it’s fair to wonder if anybody has ever won the lottery more than once. Unimaginable! Especially since most of us are having so much trouble getting around to our first win.
But it’s coming, right? We all just know it’s coming . . . I digress.
So I poked around a little, and I found out that not only have people won lottery jackpots more than once, I found that it was more common than I would have imagined. Now when I say people have won it more than once, I don’t mean that they won the Powerball jackpot on Saturday, and then won the Mega Millions jackpot the following Tuesday. I plan to be the first person in history to pull that feat off. But I am referring to people who have won substantial, and sometimes life-changing sums of money on more than one occasion.
Check this out:
In 2019 a woman named Deborah Brown purchased 20 Pick 4 tickets. All 20 of the Pick 4 tickets had the same number combination on them. Brown was banking that her pick 4 number would come out that day, and if it did, all 20 tickets would be winners. The odd part of the story is this: after purchasing the 20 tickets, Ms.Brown reported that she kept seeing the number all day, everywhere she went. Because of this, she went back to the same store and purchased 10 more tickets with that same number combination. Can you guess where I’m going with this? Her number came out that day. Each ticket was worth $5,000 so she ended up winning $150,000 total.
A Virginia man named Melvyn Wilson went on a scratch-off winning streak starting in 2004 and ending in 2013. The streak started with scratching off a modest win of $25,000 (if you can call $25,000 modest). But then the next year, Mr. Wilson won with 2 separate scratch-off tickets. One ticket paid him $500,000, and the second ticket paid him $1,000,000. Unfortunately, he hit a dry spell and didn’t win anything again until 2013. That year he scratched off a ticket that paid him another $500,000. When he was asked what he does with all of his winnings, Mr. Wilson replied with a classic line. He said, “I invest in Melvyn!”
Our next winner is one who carries with her a very interesting story. Joan R Ginther has a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University, and she is a former math professor. Ginther has been called the luckiest woman in the world. She’s also seen by some as delving into shady tactics. Ginther won the Texas State Lottery an impossible 4 times. She won $5.4 million in 1993. 10 years later she won another $2 million. Three years after that Ginther hit a $3 million jackpot. And then she wrapped up her winning streak in 2008 when she won $10 million. Some people believe that she is proof that it pays to be a statistics genius.
Finally, we come to a somewhat less shady-feeling winner who netted huge profits from the lottery. Racy Pel wasn’t necessarily in it for the money. He liked the fact that the money raised by the lottery was used for funding education. He strolled in a store one day back in 2013 and purchased $20 in Super Lotto Plus tickets. His first ticket was a winner. It paid him $32,000. His second ticket was also a winner. It paid him $50 million. Here’s the most amazing (or odd) part of this story: Pel waited a week to cash the tickets. He wanted to do it on his day off from work. Personally, I might have called in sick the next day, but that’s just me.