The Odds of Winning Twice: Why Repeat Winners Exist

The odds of winning twice are almost impossible to picture for any one person, and yet repeat winners show up in the news every few months. When a couple in Wales matched a National Lottery win in November 2025 after a first million-pound win in June 2018, Allwyn — the operator of the UK National Lottery — put the combined odds at more than 24 trillion to one, as reported by CNN and ITV News. Numbers like that sound like proof of a glitch. They aren’t.

Here is the answer up front. For a single person buying a single ticket in each of two drawings, the odds of winning twice are the two jackpot odds multiplied together — for Powerball, whose official jackpot odds are 1 in 292,201,338, that means roughly 1 in 85 quadrillion. But that isn’t the question the world is actually running. Millions of people buy many tickets, over many years, across dozens of games.

Once you ask “will anyone, anywhere win twice,” the answer flips completely. Statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller made this famous after Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey Lottery twice in four months in 1985 and 1986. The press ran 1-in-17-trillion. Diaconis and Mosteller calculated the odds of some U.S. player doing it at closer to 1 in 30.

The odds of winning twice, in actual numbers

Start with the official published odds. Powerball’s jackpot odds are 1 in 292,201,338. Mega Millions changed its game on April 8, 2025 — tickets went from $2 to $5 — and its jackpot odds improved to 1 in 290,472,336, up from 1 in 302,575,350 under the old format, according to Mega Millions’ own announcement.

Multiply two of those together and you get the personal odds of winning twice: about 1 in 85 quadrillion for back-to-back Powerball jackpots on single tickets. That figure is real, and it is also nearly meaningless as a description of the world, because nobody plays that way.

Why repeat winners exist anyway

The concept doing the work here is what Diaconis and Mosteller called the law of truly large numbers: with a large enough number of chances, extremely unlikely outcomes become expected. It isn’t a loophole. It’s arithmetic applied to the right denominator.

Three things inflate that denominator. Regular players buy many tickets, not one. They play across many games and many years. And “a repeat winner” doesn’t mean one specific named person — it means any of tens of millions of players. Adams reportedly raised her spending from $25 to $100 a week before her two wins.

So the odds of winning twice for you stay astronomically long, while the odds of somebody doing it this year stay fairly ordinary. Both statements are true at the same time, and the gap between them is why the headlines keep coming.

The key figures at a glance

Real repeat winners, and what they actually did

Joan R. Ginther is the most-cited case. She won four Texas Lottery prizes over 17 years — $5.4 million in Lotto Texas in 1993, then $2 million in 2006, $3 million in 2008, and $10 million in 2010, totaling $20.4 million, as reported by ABC News and NBC News. She held a Stanford PhD and bought scratch-off tickets in enormous volume. No investigation ever found wrongdoing.

Recent U.S. cases are more modest and better documented. New Jersey Lottery press releases recorded a couple who won $1 million on a scratch-off in April 2025 and $3 million on another in the fall of the same year. In North Carolina, Cristien Breton followed a $2 million scratch-off prize with a $100,000 win about two years later.

Notice the pattern: nearly every U.S. repeat winner story involves scratch-offs, not jackpot drawings. That is not a coincidence, and it changes the odds of winning twice substantially.

Why the odds of winning twice look different on scratch-offs

Scratch-off games have far shorter odds on their top prizes than Powerball or Mega Millions, and each state publishes those odds game by game on its official lottery site. A player who buys hundreds of tickets a year across many games is running a very different experiment than someone buying one Powerball line.

Second-chance drawings add another layer. Many states let you enter non-winning tickets into a separate pool — a June 2025 North Carolina player turned a losing Multiply The Cash ticket into a $250,000 second-chance prize. Those entries are additional independent chances, which shortens the odds of winning twice for heavy players.

Volume also raises cost. Every extra ticket is money spent, and the expected return on lottery play is negative by design — that’s how the games fund state programs. Higher odds of winning twice come from spending more, not from any system.

Surprising context most people miss

A few verifiable facts that tend to land oddly. Powerball has produced back-to-back billion-dollar jackpots only twice in its history: in 2023 ($1.08 billion in July, $1.765 billion in October) and again through the $1.787 billion prize split by Missouri and Texas tickets on September 6, 2025, per Powerball’s own announcements.

The 2025 Mega Millions overhaul also made the overall odds of winning any prize about 1 in 23.07, and built a random 2x–10x multiplier into every $5 ticket. Meanwhile Ginther, who won four times, lived quietly and died in 2024 at 77. And the Welsh couple’s double win was calculated as roughly 2.6 billion times less likely than being struck by lightning twice.

What happens on the tax side the second time

Winning again doesn’t get treated as a special category. The IRS says in Topic No. 419 that all gambling and lottery winnings are taxable income and must be reported, whether or not a Form W-2G is issued. Payers generally withhold 24% federal tax on qualifying prizes over $5,000, and that withholding is a prepayment, not the final bill.

State rules vary widely, and a second large prize can land in a different tax year and a different bracket than the first. This article describes how the rules work; it isn’t tax advice. Anyone in that situation should check with the IRS directly or a licensed tax professional about their own facts.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the odds of winning twice on Powerball specifically?

With one ticket in each of two drawings, roughly 1 in 85 quadrillion — Powerball’s official 1 in 292,201,338 jackpot odds multiplied by itself. Buying more tickets shortens it, but never to anything close to likely.

Do past wins change your future odds?

No. Each drawing is independent. Your numbers have exactly the published odds every time, regardless of whether you won last week or have never won. The odds of winning twice reflect volume of play, not momentum.

Has anyone won a major U.S. jackpot twice?

Documented U.S. repeat winners are mostly scratch-off and mid-tier winners, like the New Jersey couple’s $1 million and $3 million prizes in 2025. Joan Ginther’s four Texas wins from 1993 to 2010 totaled $20.4 million.

Did Mega Millions really change its odds?

Yes. As of the April 8, 2025 drawing, jackpot odds improved to 1 in 290,472,336 from 1 in 302,575,350, overall odds moved to about 1 in 23.07, and the ticket price rose from $2 to $5.

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Sources & How to Verify

The facts on this page are drawn from official government and primary sources. Rules and figures change, so always confirm the current details with the official agency or the promotion’s own published rules.

• FTC Consumer Advice: consumer.ftc.gov — prize, sweepstakes, and lottery scam guidance
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• Social Security Administration: ssa.gov — what SSI recipients must report
• The promotion’s official rules: every legitimate sweepstakes publishes them — the rules page is always the final word

Content last reviewed August 2026. If you notice outdated information, please contact us.

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