WINNING THE LOTTERY TIME AFTER TIME AFTER TIME. Here is an article about a person who has won 252 prizes in six years in the Florida lottery for a total of $719,000. (There are other names which show up a number of times on the list of winners). When questioned by Lawrence Mower, the investigative reporter who discovered the 252 wins, a Florida lottery official said that the person could just be lucky. Mower took the lottery official’s response to three mathematicians, who calculated that the probability of the 752 wins would be less than one in 20 trillion. Even then, the “lucky” winner would have had to spend an estimated minimum of $2.07 million to have his one-in-20-trillion shot at his 252 wins and winnings of $719,051, for a net loss of about $2.35 million.
The most interesting question is how it happened. One possible lead is that “Six of the 10 top winners in the lottery records were store clerks and owners who sold lottery tickets.”