Man wins $25,000 lottery two days in row!!!!!!!

[Dracos]

An airline pilot from Maplewood won a $25,000 lottery jackpot - two days in a row. Raymond Snouffer Jr. matched the winning numbers 11-14-23-26-31 to win Saturday's Northstar Cash drawing with odds of about 170,000 to 1, Minnesota Lottery officials said.

On Sunday, Snouffer stuck with 11 and switched to 3-7-19-28 - and won again.

Lottery officials said such a sequence was so farfetched that the odds against it were "virtually incalculable."

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/16709968.htm

[Lucky Luciano]

1. Don't tell the fundies! They will say this is proof that god exists!

[jobycom]

2. I can beat that.

I've lost way more lotteries than that in a row. Heck, I can go weeks without matching a single number.

[Katherine Brengle]

3. Can he claim both?

Here you can't do that I don't think... I think it's as many as you win under $600.00 and then once a year over that... Not 100% sure tho.

Talk about beating the odds.

[NoSheep]

4. My goodness. He must get up VERY early in the morning!

:freak:

[Ferret Annica]

5. is his name Biff Tannen?

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

6. Please remember:

"Lotteries are a tax on stupidity"- Voltaire.

[Lucky Luciano]

8. ahhhh damn...

...and all this time I thought that saying was attributed to my ex-girlfriend's father! I love the line though.

[kohodog]

7. I had a teacher in the 70's who won a million

In the Mass lottery when that was the highest jackpot in the nation. About six months later he won $100,000. He made it to the cover of People Magazine and said it was a great way to keep up with inflation.

He kept his tickets in a pyramid. Maybe I should do the same.

[athena]

9. Farfetched and incalculable? Give me a break!

As anyone who has studied probability theory knows, any sequence of numbers is as likely as any other. 1-2-3-4-5 is as likely to be the winning sequence as 5-9-18-22-30. Furthermore, the probability of winning two days in a row is perfectly easy to calculate. According to this web site:
http://www.mnlottery.com/numbers.html
the Northstar Cash game involves choosing 5 numbers between 1 and 31. So the probability of winning the jackpot on a given drawing is 1/169911 (i.e., about 1 in 170,000, as the article states; the details of the calculation are below). The probability of winning two days in a row is the square of that, or 1/28869747921, or roughly 1 in 29 billion. It's very small, but it's non-zero, which means it can happen. In comparison, the probability of winning a game where you choose 6 out of 49 numbers is 1/13983816, or roughly 1 in 14 million.

Choosing 5 numbers between 1 and 31, you're not allowed to repeat any numbers. You can't, for example, play 2-2-19-20-23. So there are 31 possibilities for the first number, 30 for the second, 29 for the third, 28 for the fourth, and 27 for the fifth. That's 31*30*29*28*27 = 20389320. But the order is not important, and there are 5*4*3*2*1 = 120 ways to order five numbers, so we divide by 120 and get 169911 possible combinations. The probability of winning two days in a row is the probability of winning the first day times the probability of winning the second day, so that's 1/169911*169911, or 1/28869747921. Keeping one of the numbers the same doesn't change this probability: once you've won the first day, any combination is once again as likely to win as any other.