Can You Win the Lottery More Than Once? Lottery Winner Statistics
Winning the lottery would be a dream come true, wouldn’t it? Hitting that jackpot would just be awesome. You would be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want. You would be able to buy all the greatest things – Big houses, yachts, fancy clothes, luxury cars, all the latest gadgets. But, of course, winning the lottery is hard to do. After all, the odds are bad and statistically, it probably won’t happen. Why then, do some people win more than once? If other people can do it, then why can’t you win the lottery more than once?
Let’s first look at some lottery winner statistics. Take one of the most popular lottery formats in the world – Lotto 649. To win a 649 lottery, you need to match six numbers, out of a possible forty-nine. The odds of doing that are approximately 1-in-14-million. That means that you have to buy seven million tickets to just have a 50% chance of winning. That’s just simply not doable. But some people do win. Why? It’s all based on statistics law called the law-of-large-numbers – Get enough people to play and some of them will get lucky enough to win.
Now, some of those people that do end up winning the lottery will end up spending a lot more money on lottery tickets because, after winning a lot of money, they will be able to afford it. So, for example, instead of buying one ticket per draw, like they might have done before winning the jackpot, they might buy fifty tickets per draw. Buying a lot more tickets will vastly improve people’s chances of winning the lottery and, hence, we sometimes see people that win more than once. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should go spending more money than you could afford to just because it increases your chances of winning.
There are documented stories of people actually winning the lotto more than once. For example, a man named Erik Martineau won $20,000 on an instant scratchoff ticket from Connecticut Lottery; less than one month later, he won on another scratchoff ticket, this time $1 million. In another example, a Canadian man won $340,000 from Lotto 649 in April of 2007; in November of the same year, he won a $15 million Lotto 649 jackpot. Nobody knows for sure, but it is highly likely that these two lottery winners spent more on tickets after their first big win.
Can you win the lottery more than once, then? As I explained, winning the lottery the first time is highly unlikely. But if you do get lucky and win, you might just win again soon after that.