In this world, there are those people who are lucky and then there are those who are super lucky! The latter of these people are the ones who have won big on more than a single occasion. Luck just seems to keep coming around for them, and while that makes the rest of us quite envious of their fortune, it also poses a query. Are these people simply the outliers on the graph or is there some sort of pattern they follow that correlates with their multiple winning outcomes?
Whatever the case may be, there have been some exceptionally lucky people around the world, and this isn’t simply a recent occurrence either, but something that has occurred in history, too. It seems that fortune follows some people around, but could there be more to it than that?
The Story of Richard Lustig’s Multiple Lottery Wins
It would be fairly ignorant of us not to enter Richard Lustig into proceedings as a multiple large jackpot winner. This American man rose to prominence for winning various large prizes from playing lottery-style games in seven state-sponsored lottery games. His big victories occurred from 1993 through to 2010, and in total, his winnings equated to over $1 million. This even led to him writing a book entitled Learn How to Increase Your Chances of Winning the Lottery. Take the information in that book as you wish, but the fact remains that he’s a multi-time winner.
Granted, two of the prizes that he won within that time frame were holidays rather than specific cash prizes, although these did have values in the thousands themselves. From 1993 onwards, Lustig’s lucky wins were as follows:
- Scrachcard win of $10,000 in January 1993
- Florida Fantasy 5 win of £13,696.03 in August 1997
- Wheel of Fortune scratchcard win holiday to Los Angeles valued at $3,594.66 in June 2000
- Elves scratchcard win holiday to Memphis valued at $4,966 in October 2001
- Florida Mega Money win of $842,152.91 in January 2002
- Florida Fantasy 5 win of $73,658.06 in November 2008
- Florida Fantasy 5 win of $98,992.92 in August 2010
Lustig described his strategy when gambling as being to re-invest all of his winnings back into the lottery, when speaking with ABC News. He also went on to suggest that hand-picked sequential numbers and using the same numbers repeatedly work much better than changing each time. Yet, his methods were marked as being “dangerous” by various finance experts, noting that he could have spent more on lottery tickets with his re-investments than he actually won.
Double EuroMillions Winners from Scunthorpe
The EuroMillions lottery is a game that can be played by people from multiple European countries, including France, Spain, Austria, Belgium and Ireland. Yet, it was a couple from Scunthorpe in the United Kingdom that came up trumps twice when playing this lottery.
David and Kathleen Long won a large prize pay-out of £1 million after playing the EuroMillions in 2013. However, the luck didn’t stop there for the couple, as they banked a second £1 million as well as a dream car after winning for a second time on the same lottery. David mentioned that the secret to his success on the EuroMillions is that he only plays when he knows that there are lots of prizes available. The 2013 win saw the couple as just one of 100 ticket purchasers become millionaires in a single night. Their success saw them become the first double millionaire winners on The National Lottery to go public with it.
The EuroMillions lottery has actually been responsible for a number of large wins throughout the years, although not necessarily multiple wins by the same person. The largest three of these were actually recorded in the month of October from 2014, 2017 and 2019, respectively. Each time, a player was awarded a prize of €190,000,000, with recipients of such coming from Portugal, Spain and Great Britain. The first huge jackpot from the EuroMillions lottery was awarded to an Irish lady – Dolores McNamara in July of 2005. At that time, she won €115.4 million.
30 Wins in One Day and 16 Wins Over Two Years?
If you want to talk about multiple wins, then you may want to direct your attention towards Deborah Brown, who had quite the incredible stroke of luck in 2019. She proceeded to win the lottery 30 times in a single day. Initially, she bought herself 20 Pick 4 tickets, all of which had the same combination of numbers on them – 1, 0, 3 and 1. After seeing those numbers multiple times throughout the day, she bought herself another 10 tickets of the same type from the same location.
When playing Pick 4, the highest prize that can be won is $5,000, and Brown proceeded to win that maximum on all 30 of the tickets that she had purchased. That brought her an amazing total win of $150,000 and netted her the title of most consecutive lottery wins. Despite the fact that each of these was only worth $5k, they tallied up to make a huge win in the end.
Armand Paganelli may not possess the title of largest number of consecutive wins in such a short time period, but he did purchase 16 winning lottery tickets in the space of two years. The businessman from the Bronx, New York bought his tickets between 2013 and 2014 from his own drugstore, which he runs with his brothers. Now, that did lead some people to become exceptionally suspicious of the legitimacy of the wins. However, there is no law that says retailers cannot buy lottery tickets from their own place of business.
Throughout the two years of buying winning tickets, Paganelli has managed to secure himself a total of $625,000 in jackpot pay-outs. Yet, these weren’t just random ticket purchases at different times. The businessman said that he likes to gamble and that he actually buys a large number of lottery tickets. Most of his winnings were spent on his children’s education, with numerous charitable donations alongside.
Powerball Victory of Astonishing Proportions
Imagine that you have the chance to win a massive jackpot of $768.4 million by playing the Powerball lottery. Well, someone actually did win that amount in March of 2019, and that was only the third largest in the history of US lotteries and the second largest Powerball ever. The victor from Wisconsin netted the massive prize, which diminished significantly to $477 million after taxes were deducted.
Things work slightly differently in the US, with winners having the opportunity to receive a lump sum of their money or taking an estimated annuity of such, which would be paid out over several years. Yet, it wasn’t the aforementioned jackpot that is marked in history as the biggest from the Powerball game. That goes to a $1.586 billion pay-out, occurring in January of 2016. Actually, winning tickets were sold in the states of California, Tennessee and Florida, giving an annuitized amount as $528.8 million for the victors.
The Tennessee family known as The Robinson’s claimed their prize with their dog in tow, while he Floridian jackpot recipient took her prize via a trust. She said that she had been playing the same Powerball number for many years before it finally brought her a huge win. With regard to the Californian winners, they did not wish to become public figures and announced that most of their win had been designated to a trust in order to benefit charity.
An Insight into Jackpot Winners
Can it really be said that these huge winners have experienced a great level of success solely due to their luck or has something else caused the victories? Well, you’d be forgiven for thinking that some alternate being was casting its fortune over people in October for them to all win big amounts on the EuroMillions as mentioned before. October certainly seems to have been a lucky month for that particular lottery, as two other additional large wins from Belgium and Switzerland have been recorded via the EuroMillions then.
Of course, with regard to the double EuroMillions winners, there’s bound to be more of a chance to win something if you’re only buying tickets when more prizes are on offer. Granted, there is such a large ratio of people playing the lottery that those odds don’t specifically increase on such a dramatic scale that you’re guaranteed a win. Yet, clearly David Long felt the luck coursing through his veins when he purchased tickets for the lottery and won £1 million both times.
It’s not always about pure luck though, as the multiple wins by Stefan Mandel prove. He won $27 million in the Virginia jackpot in 1992 on behalf of an Australian syndicate. Mandel specifically planned and plotted for that win, though. How? Well, he bought every single combination of numbers possible to ensure that a win came through in one way or another.
Oddly enough, that was his 14th jackpot win. Mandell never went out and bought random tickets for these games. Instead, he would spend time within the library reading maths paper after maths paper and then come up with a formula for buying blocks of tickets that he believes will guarantee a prize pay-out. Of course, back in 1992, the lottery featured less numbers (and in turn, number combinations) than it does today. So, you’d need to spend a fortune in order to win a fortune today.
Of course, it just goes to show that mathematics and formulas can come into play when it comes to winning jackpots. Most people don’t really have the time or the ability to work something like that out, though. So, the likelihood in the vast majority of huge wins is that it is simply luck that has played its part in providing jackpot victories. It seems as though in a lot of these cases, people simply spent a lot of money on buying multiple tickets frequently, thereby ensuring themselves more of an advantage at winning over someone who buys a single ticket each week, for example.
The fact remains that lotteries are played by a large number of people around the world, so there’s virtually no sure-fire way (beyond obvious cheating) to guarantee yourself a huge jackpot win. Who knows, though? Maybe your turn will come around and luck will shine on you!