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A man named Mark Clark, 50, of South Rockwood, Michigan recently won $4 million from a scratch-off lottery ticket. Pretty amazing, right? That’s nothing. Clark did the exact same thing just three years ago.
That’s right. He not only was lucky enough to win $4 million from a scratch-off lottery ticket, he freaking did it twice!
“You don’t think you’ll win millions once, and you definitely never think it would happen twice,” Clark said. “It’s hard to put into words exactly what I am feeling.”
Can someone please calculate the odds of this happening for me? Never mind. There isn’t a number high enough. This literally should be impossible.
A South Rockwood man has won $4 million with an instant lottery ticket, his second big win from the Michigan Lottery in less than three years. https://t.co/A8LzdGbpDP
— Monroe News (@monroenews) June 22, 2020
“I scratched the ticket off in the store with a coin my dad gave me about 10 years ago,” said Clark. “We lost him about a year ago after some health struggles, and I can’t help but think maybe that lucky coin helped me win this.
“After the first win, I retired from my job and spent a lot of time fishing. My dad and I always used to fish together and have great memories of that, so this will help me keep fishing and enjoying time with my son and family.”
The first time around Clark took the lump sum rather than the annuity and will be taking the lump sum of again this time which comes out to $2.5 million.
Okay, I need to know how lucky this guy is. Casino.org sites a 2019 CNBC story where Harvard statistics professor Dr. Mark Glickman said about things like this, “If someone already wins the lottery, then the chance that the person wins the lottery a second time will be exactly the same as the probability they win the lottery if they had not previously won the lottery before. In other words, having previously won the lottery does not improve or make less likely the chance of winning the lottery in the future.”
According to the Michigan Lottery, the odds of getting a winning $150,000,000 Payout ticket are 1 in 3.12.
HOWEVER, of the 2,298,144 prizes that one could win with this particular scratch-off ticket, there were only three $4 million prizes.
So first you have a 1 in 3.12 chance of winning a prize, then if you do win your chances of winning $4 million are still just 0.000075%.
Lottery officials said in the announcement that Clark “may be the luckiest man in Monroe County.”
Screw that, Clark may be the luckiest man on the planet.
“I’ve had a lot of ups and a lot of downs in my life, but everything is pretty amazing right now,” Clark said.
No kidding.