The Cleveland Plain Dealer last week scrutinized the phenomenon of luck’s outliers, the frequent lottery winners whose jackpots are improbably high, but where no one has been able to prove that it is anything other than luck.
It looked at Rickey Meng, the most winning lottery winner in Ohio, who has won 342 tickets and nearly $1 million over seven years.
Meng described his luck this way: “I would see a number on a license plate or an address, and it would just jump out at me.”
For Ronald Wasserstein, a professional statistician, this figure is “inconceivable.” But perhaps, as with the character in the film The Princess Bride, who kept repeating that word, inconceivable doesn’t mean what he thinks it does. Others use “astounding.”
Although he is at the top of the heap in Ohio, Meng is not alone. The Buckeye state has one of the highest numbers of frequent winners in the United States. That’s according to a report on frequent winners published by PennLive, based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
PennLive, which partnered with Columbia University, noted that all of Meng’s winning tickets were for prizes of at least $600. In the period of 2010-2016, the state had 112 players who had 50 or more wins of at least $600.
States that beat that statistic included Massachusetts with 384 winners, New York with 319, Illinois with 245 and Georgia with 167.
There are ten lotteries that don’t subject frequent winners to systematic scrutiny. The state DOES monitor retailers that have frequent winners, but not individuals. However, the Ohio Lottery is contemplating broadening its net.
Asked to comment on Meng, Marie Kilbane Seckers, a spokesman for the Ohio Lottery, to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “He’s definitely an outlier. It’s astounding. I agree.”
The lottery does ask winners of cash prizes to say whether they are a lottery retailer, employee or relative of a retailer when they claim their cash. Improbably high winners who answer yes are looked at with a figurative magnifying glass.
The second highest winner in Ohio is Samuel Sliman, who won 268 prizes of $600 or more between 2001-2016 for a total of $775,430. Sliman has been investigated by the Lottery, but the results of the investigation are unknown.
According to a former investigator for the California Lottery, the state doesn’t just investigate retailers who win frequently, but the winners themselves. California calls them “frequent fliers,” and is skeptical of their almost universal explanation, that they are “lucky.”
Meng does not live the high life, in fact he lives on disability payments. He claims to spend $100 a week on lottery tickets, and spent the great majority of his winnings buying more tickets.
As he told the Plain Dealer, “I made a lot of money but I spent a lot, too. People don’t realize that. I didn’t win every time I walked into a store.” Due to issues with the Internal Revenue Service, which garnished his early retirement checks from Social Security, he no longer plays the Lottery.
According to the American Statistical Association, the average player who buys a $10 lottery ticket has one chance in 5,000 of winning $500. To win 342 times would require buying $11.7 million in tickets. In other words, the chances to achieve this result are, as the association says, “very, very small.”
