Naw, the odds are easy when the state owes your crime buddies a payoff (nice Italian/Latino name, too)...
Posted on 12/12/2002 11:02:03 AM PST by new cruelty
SAN JOSE, Calif. _ There's winning the Lottery. But winning two big jackpots? On the same day?
Angelo Gallina beat the incredible odds, and on Wednesday the Belmont retiree claimed his payoff _ $6.6 million, after taxes, for holding the winning ticket from both the SuperLotto and the Fantasy 5 games on Nov. 20. It's the only time in the 17-year history of the California Lottery that's happened. And experts said the odds of doing it are mind-boggling.
The odds of winning SuperLotto are 1-in-41 million. For Fantasy 5, 1-in-575,000. But for both?
"This is just amazing, astronomical," said Stanford University statistics professor Tom Cover as he calculated the probability of the double-header. "Oh brother," he muttered before announcing the odds: 1 in 23.575 trillion.
Cover said the odds that an individual player will win improve if he or she buys multiple tickets, but this run of luck is "still very, very rare."
Gallina has been betting against the odds since the game started.
"I dumped a lot of money in it," explained Gallina, who spends about $600 each month on the two games. "I was hoping I'd get it back."
The retired machinist for Southern Pacific Railroad buys an average of 20 lotto tickets a day with rental income. "That's the entertainment," he said. "It saves a trip to Reno."
Gallina bought the winning tickets on Nov. 20 for that night's SuperLotto $17 million jackpot and the Fantasy 5 $126,000 jackpot. But he and wife Maria will receive considerably less for choosing the lump-sum cash prize.
Gallina, 78, said it made more sense than waiting around for the 26 annual payments.
The pair mused about buying a car and traveling to Italy, Maria's homeland. Gallina said he'll probably splurge on the children, too.
"We've got two boys _ ages 38 and 33 _ and I think I'm going to have to buy them shoes," Gallina wise-cracked.
He also won't have to worry about saving money on motor oil and cat food.
"I'm collecting rebate coupons," Gallina said, "but now I'm going to throw them all away."
This ranks as the weirdest event in human history. Haven't there been other people who have won the lottery more than once on different occasions?
The difference between good luck and being lucky: if you win the lottery, that's good luck; if you win it twice you're a lucky person. We should be hauling lucky people into laboratories to find out what it is that is different about them. What we learn might come in handy when we go to war, etc.
Woo hoo!! Come to papa!
You have to buy a ticket first!
This is less spectacular when you think it through. It is somewhat misleading given its limited scope. These are the odds of any particular person winning both lotteries. And yes, those odds are astronomical. (And this is no disrespect to the lucky winner; I'd be pretty d*mn happy if it happened to me, too.)
However, the odds of some person winning both lotteries, given the millions of suckers who buy tickets, are much higher. I won't try to calculate them as I have no idea how many people buy lottery tickets in that jurisdiction. But there was a woman in New Jersey in the early 1990s who won two major lotteries within four months. The odds of that particular woman winning was 1 in 17 trillion. The odds that it would happen at all? 1 in 30.
There's a mathematical principle called the law of truly large numbers. Basically it says that when you have large enough sample sets, improbable events become common, or indeed inevitable.
Another real-life example: My grandmothers share the same birthday. It so happens it is Valentine's Day. "Wow, that's incredible! What are the odds?" someone might ask me. Easy: 1:3652 = 1:133,225. In other words, there are thousands of pairs of mothers-in-law out there with shared birthdays on February 14. I just happen to be the grandson of one pair.
Naw, the odds are easy when the state owes your crime buddies a payoff (nice Italian/Latino name, too)...
There's a mathematical principle called the law of truly large numbers. Basically it says that when you have large enough sample sets, improbable events become common, or indeed inevitable.
Well, yes, but here, by definition, the sample set is one person, given two drawings. And the odds on that are pretty bad ;)
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