A nationwide reporting adventure tracks improbably frequent lottery winners (what the heck!)

CJR ^ | 15sep17 | By Jon Allsop, Selin Bozkaya, Jeremy Devon House, Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, Ayanna Runcie, and Daniel S

[Tom in SFCA]

I think this article misuses statistics. The question is not how likely is it that any one particular person should be so lucky as these people named. The question is how likely is it that the luckiest person in the state should be so lucky. If you have millions of people in a state buying lottery tickets then the luckiest person among them can be expected to be exceptionally lucky.

[Mr.Unique]

Thanks for the fire hose.

I guess.

[Admin Moderator]

Anytime ;-)

[Svartalfiar]

I think this article misuses statistics. The question is not how likely is it that any one particular person should be so lucky as these people named. The question is how likely is it that the luckiest person in the state should be so lucky. If you have millions of people in a state buying lottery tickets then the luckiest person among them can be expected to be exceptionally lucky.

This isn't lookoing at the big jackpot lotteries, this is scratch-off tickets, looking at people that win big (over $600) on their scratch-offs. And the frequent winners are people that have done this more than FIFTY times. That one dude won over 7,000 times in six years!

If we assume the overall odds of winning $600 or more is 1 in 5,000 (it's probably higher), that would mean he would have had to buy 35 MILLION TICKETS to hit those odds. Sure, he might have gotten lucky, so cut the number in half. Just under 3MM tickets a year, or about 8,000 tickets PER DAY. Physically, that is not possible. To drive to enough stores, to scratch off that many tickets... 15 seconds a ticket means 33 hours a day to get through 8M tickets.

So, either there's some real funny business going on, or this guy has a nice setup similar to this:

[Tom in SFCA]

You simply did not reply to what I posted possibly because you did not understand my point.

Not everyone knows how to use statistics. Many who do not know how to use them also do not know that they don’t know how.

[Svartalfiar]

You simply did not reply to what I posted possibly because you did not understand my point.

Not everyone knows how to use statistics. Many who do not know how to use them also do not know that they don’t know how.

Well I can't argue that, it's a completely true statement.

[Svartalfiar]

Gah, hit 'post' before I meant to.

If you have millions of people in a state buying lottery tickets then the luckiest person among them can be expected to be exceptionally lucky.

This is the point I was referring to in my response above. Sure, the one guy that wins the lottery is extremely lucky, but that one guy doing that same thing ten times is near impossible. 7M times in six years is simply outside the bounds of probability. Well, not really, but close enough. "Exceptionally lucky" doesn't even come close to describing the statistical anomaly of the one luckiest guy, much less the 1700 other people with that much 'luck'.