Has Anyone Won the Lottery Twice? Repeat Winners and the Real Odds

Has anyone won the lottery twice?

Many people have, and a few have won far more often than that. The cases fall into three groups, and it helps to keep them apart because they have very different explanations.

• Ordinary repeat winners. Someone wins a big prize, keeps playing, and wins another one. Evelyn Adams, Wayne Murray and LuAnn Chico, all covered below, belong here. Luck explains them, together with the fact that they kept buying tickets.
• Systematic players. Stefan Mandel's syndicate bought millions of tickets to cover nearly every combination in a Virginia drawing, and a retired Michigan couple bought hundreds of thousands of tickets in games that paid out unusually well on certain days. They won again and again because they did the math and spent heavily, all within the rules of the time.
• Suspicious "winners". Some people cash hundreds of winning tickets a year because they buy other people's winning tickets at a discount and claim the prizes themselves. Lotteries and prosecutors call this ten-percenting, and it is a tax scheme, not a winning streak.

Before the stories, the numbers. They explain why repeat winners make headlines and why they are less surprising than the headlines suggest.

What are the odds of winning the lottery twice?

It depends entirely on which question you ask, and the gap between the answers is enormous.

Question 1: You buy one ticket in each of two specific drawings. What are the odds both hit the jackpot? The official Powerball prize chart puts the jackpot odds at 1 in 292,201,338 per play. Two specific drawings means multiplying those odds together: about 1 in 85,381,621,928,990,240, or roughly 1 in 85 quadrillion. This is the kind of figure that ends up in news stories.

Question 2: You play Powerball faithfully for 50 years. What are the odds you hit the jackpot twice? Powerball draws three times a week, about 156 drawings a year, or 7,800 over 50 years. With one ticket in every drawing, your chance of winning the jackpot at least once is about 1 in 37,462. Your chance of winning it at least twice is about 1 in 2.8 billion. That's still remote, but it is around 30 million times likelier than the two-drawing figure, simply because you played 7,800 times instead of twice.

Question 3: Out of everyone who plays, what are the odds that somebody, somewhere, wins twice? This is the question that matters, and the answer is "very likely". In 1989 the statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller used Evelyn Adams as their main example in a paper on coincidences, "Methods for Studying Coincidences", published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. They wrote that the "1 in 17 trillion" figure in the press "is the correct answer to a not-very-relevant question", and added: "The woman actually purchased multiple tickets repeatedly."

They cited calculations by Stephen Samuels and George McCabe of Purdue University, who called a double winner somewhere in the United States "practically a sure thing". By their estimate, the odds of a double winner within seven years were better than even, and the chance of one within four months, the gap between Adams's two wins, was better than 1 in 30. Diaconis and Mosteller named the general principle the law of truly large numbers: "With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen."

A worked example

Here is the same idea with round, hypothetical numbers, chosen for easy arithmetic rather than taken from any one game.

No single player in the table has good odds. But put enough heavy players into enough games for enough years and a handful of double winners is the expected outcome, not a freak event. The arithmetic of single-ticket odds is covered in our guide to lottery odds.

Who has won the lottery more than once?

The table lists documented cases with the source for each. It is not a complete list; lotteries announce smaller repeat wins all the time.

Evelyn Adams, New Jersey, 1985 and 1986

Adams is the case statisticians still teach. Time reported in February 1986 that she had won $3.9 million in New Jersey's Pick-6 the previous October and then "hit again last week, this time for nearly $1.5 million, becoming the first two-time winner of a million-dollar-plus state lottery." Both tickets came from the same 7-Eleven in Point Pleasant, and officials said she had beaten odds of 17.3 trillion to 1. As Diaconis and Mosteller pointed out three years later, that figure assumed one ticket per drawing, and she bought many. Her later financial troubles are a common subject in "lottery curse" stories, a theme our piece on what happens to winners years later looks at with data rather than anecdotes.

Joan Ginther, Texas, four wins

The Associated Press reported in July 2010 that Ginther had collected her fourth Texas Lottery prize, $10 million on a $50 scratch-off. The earlier wins were a share of an $11 million jackpot in 1993, $2 million in 2006 and $3 million in 2008: three scratch-offs and one draw game. Mathematicians quoted by the AP put the chance of that sequence at 1 in 18 septillion. The same caution applies here as with Adams: the figure describes a single ticket per game, not years of play. A Texas Lottery spokesman told the AP that the agency had never investigated her wins for fraud and called its verification process thorough.

Recent repeat winners

Repeat wins on scratch-offs are now routine enough that lotteries publish them as a matter of course. Wayne Murray of Brooklyn won $10 million on the New York Lottery's Black Titanium scratch-off in 2022 and another $10 million on its 200X game in 2023. UPI reported that both tickets came from the same convenience store on Avenue H and that he took the second prize as a lump sum of $6,122,400 after withholding. In September 2026 the North Carolina Education Lottery announced that LuAnn Chico of Lexington had won $100,000 on Ruby Red 7's for the second time, about a year after her first $100,000 win on the same game. She took home $72,016 after state and federal withholding.

Scratch-off top prizes are where most repeat winners come from, and the table above shows why. Million-dollar scratch-off prizes have odds in the low millions per ticket, hundreds of times better than a Powerball jackpot, and players often buy expensive tickets in quantity. If you're curious how those games are built, see how scratch-off tickets work.

How did Stefan Mandel win the lottery 14 times?

Stefan Mandel, a Romanian-born accountant who moved to Australia, did not rely on luck. He bought enough tickets to guarantee a win. NPR's Planet Money, in a 2018 story reposted by WFAE, recounted his first win in Romania and quoted him as saying he won 12 times in Australia. His best-known win, in Virginia, is often counted as the 14th.

The idea is simple. If a game has a fixed number of possible combinations and the jackpot grows big enough, buying every combination costs less than the prize. Virginia's Lotto in 1992 had about 7.1 million combinations, and the jackpot for the February 15 drawing had reached $27 million. Contemporary reporting in the Roanoke Times describes the operation:

• A Melbourne-based syndicate, the International Lotto Fund, had about 2,500 investors and was believed to have raised $7.6 million for the attempt, according to an Australian law official quoted on February 25, 1992.
• Play slips were filled in by laser printer in Australia and shipped to agents in the United States, who bought tickets in bulk through retailers, the paper reported on March 12.
• The winning ticket was sold at a Farm Fresh grocery store in Chesapeake. Officials looked hard at whether it had been paid for properly, then decided to award the jackpot to the fund's trustee after concluding the ticket "was not bought in violation of lottery rules" (March 10).

Virginia then changed its rules. An Associated Press report from March 30, 1992 described regulations that give large-block buyers low priority and bar retailers from selling ticket blocks worth more than five times the store's bond, $10,000 for most stores, without written permission from the Lottery Board. Today's big games are also far too large to cover. Buying every Powerball combination would mean buying 292 million $2 plays, more than half a billion dollars, with no guarantee that someone else won't share the jackpot.

How did a retired couple keep winning Cash WinFall?

Jerry and Marge Selbee are a retired couple from Evart, Michigan. In 2003, Jerry read a brochure for Michigan's Winfall game and noticed something odd. When the jackpot reached $5 million and nobody matched all six numbers, the jackpot money "rolled down" to the smaller prize tiers. On those drawings, the lower prizes paid so well that buying enough tickets could return more than they cost.

CBS's 60 Minutes reported that after Michigan ended its game, the Selbees moved to Massachusetts's Cash WinFall, which rolled down the same way. Jerry described spending "over $600,000 per play. Seven plays a year." Over about nine years the couple grossed more than $26 million and made nearly $8 million in profit before taxes. They kept $18 million worth of losing tickets in plastic totes in case the IRS ever asked.

Other syndicates found the same edge, and after a 2011 newspaper series Massachusetts asked its Inspector General to review the game. The State Treasurer's response to that report summarizes the key findings: the game "worked as intended" and rolled down once the pool reached $2 million; investigators "found no evidence of any illicit activities or collusion among bettors, Lottery officials, or Lottery agents"; and "everyone received the same odds and was eligible for the same payouts." The game was profitable for the state, which replaced it with Lucky for Life.

Why do some people win small prizes again and again?

The most frequent "winners" in lottery records usually aren't lucky. Often they're cashing other people's tickets.

The scheme works like this. A winner with, say, a $5,000 ticket doesn't want the prize reported, usually to avoid the tax on it. A store owner or middleman pays cash for the ticket, usually about 10% less than its face value, and someone else claims it. That claimant reports the winnings but offsets them with claimed gambling losses. Federal prosecutors described exactly this in a 2019 Massachusetts case: two store owners bought winning tickets "at a discount to the value of the tickets, thereby allowing the ticket holders to avoid reporting the winnings", and passed them to an 80-year-old Lynn man who claimed them as his own and called himself a professional gambler. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit tax fraud and filing false tax returns. How gambling losses really offset winnings, and the new 90% limit, is covered in our guide to deducting lottery losses.

Newspaper investigations brought the pattern to light. In March 2014 the Palm Beach Post analysed Florida Lottery claims and, as the Columbia Journalism Review summarized, found about 200 people who had cashed tens or hundreds of winning tickets of $600 or more over roughly a decade, against astronomical odds. Six of the top 10 were store clerks or owners. Officials pulled lottery machines from three stores and announced new safeguards.

Massachusetts now has a written rule. Under 961 CMR 2.43, the Lottery reviews anyone who submits at least 20 claims of $1,000 or more within 365 days, to judge whether the claims are "factually or statistically improbable". A high-frequency winner can be barred from claiming prizes of $600 or more for up to 90 days, then 180 days for a second violation and 365 days for a third.

None of this applies to someone who wins two big prizes years apart. A second $1 million claim draws a closer look at the claim office, but it's checked the same way as the first. The extra scrutiny is aimed at patterns of dozens or hundreds of mid-sized claims.

Does winning once make you more likely to win again?

No. Drawings are independent: the balls don't know who won last time, and a scratch-off doesn't know who bought the previous ticket from the roll. Your odds on the next ticket are exactly the same as everyone else's.

Repeat winners look like proof of a system because of who keeps playing. Someone who has won a large prize can often afford more tickets, and more expensive ones, so they buy more chances. More tickets do raise your odds in a strict sense, but only in proportion to what you spend, and the expected return on each ticket stays negative. We work through that in whether a lottery ticket is ever worth buying. Books and courses that promise a winning method usually point to the author's own wins as evidence, which runs into the same multiple-tickets problem Diaconis and Mosteller described. There is a longer look at what can and cannot change your odds in our guide to how to win the lottery.

If playing more is starting to feel like chasing a second win, the National Council on Problem Gambling's helpline, 1-800-MY-RESET, is free and confidential.

What happens when someone claims a second big prize?

A second claim is handled like any other: the ticket is validated, the lottery checks state debt and child-support records where the law requires it, and prizes over $5,000 have 24% federal tax withheld. Two wins in the same year are taxed together on that year's return, which can push more of the money into the top bracket. If you're claiming as part of a pool, the rules on how a group signs and splits a ticket are in our lottery pool guide.

Because lotteries publicize repeat winners eagerly, a second win also tends to mean a second press release. Whether your name has to appear in it depends on your state; the anonymity guide lists where winners can stay private.

Winning the lottery twice FAQ

Has anyone won the Powerball jackpot twice?

None of the best-known repeat winners did it on Powerball. Their second wins came from scratch-offs, state draw games or, in Mandel's case, a state Lotto his syndicate bought up. The Powerball jackpot odds are 1 in 292,201,338 per play, hundreds of times longer than a typical million-dollar scratch-off prize.

What are the odds of winning the lottery twice?

For one Powerball ticket in each of two chosen drawings, about 1 in 85 quadrillion. For someone who buys one ticket in every Powerball drawing for 50 years, about 1 in 2.8 billion. For someone, somewhere in the country, winning twice, statisticians have called it practically a sure thing over a span of several years.

Who won the lottery the most times?

Among systematic players, Stefan Mandel is usually credited with 14 wins, 12 of them in Australia, before his syndicate won Virginia's $27 million Lotto jackpot in 1992 by buying several million tickets. Among individual players, Joan Ginther's four Texas prizes, worth nearly $21 million combined, are the best-documented case.

Do lotteries investigate people who win a lot?

Yes. Massachusetts reviews anyone with 20 or more claims of $1,000 or more in a year and can suspend high-frequency winners for up to a year, and Florida announced new safeguards after a 2014 newspaper investigation. The target is ten-percenting, where people claim prizes on tickets bought from the real winners.

Does winning once improve your chances of winning again?

No. Each drawing and each scratch-off ticket is independent, so a past win changes nothing about the next ticket's odds. Repeat winners usually keep buying many tickets, which is why some of them win again.