Luck of the Lottery: What are the odds of the same store selling a second winning ticket?
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - Can lightning strike twice?
Earlier this week, an almost $214 million lottery-winning ticket was sold in Indiana Township.
It happens often after a store sells a winning ticket - they'll see a spike in sales as players hope the luck can rub off on their tickets.
This leads to the above question - can lightning strike twice?
If you're looking for a straight answer and want to avoid the suspense...the short answer is "Nah."
Like a casino player who won't leave a lucky machine, lottery players often hope it's magic time on the machine that always spits out their ticket.
"You can't rely on machines as being like "hot" machines," said Dr. Mark Glickman of Harvard University.
Dr. Glickman works in Harvard's Department of Statistics and said to believe in a hot machine would be to give it non-existent intelligence.
"It has no basis for producing numbers that are more likely to be jackpot winners than any other," he said. "I don't believe [there's magic in the machine], or certainly there's not supposed to be."
So, if you're planning to make the trip to Indiana Township to get to AJ's Pizza, Dr. Glickman isn't quite recommending it.
"It doesn't give you any particular advantage, but it also doesn't give you any disadvantages, either," he explained
Dr. Glickman explained that the odds of any specific combination of numbers coming up are the same as your odds of winning any day.
This, of course, leaves one big question - for the people who play the same numbers every drawing, what does he think of those odds?
Well, he said the odds remain the same every time you play them: about 1-in-300,000,000, depending on if it's Mega Millions or the PowerBall. For PowerBall, it's 1-in-292,000,000 and for Mega Millions, it's 302,000,000.