The coin is not lucky, nor is the man. He is just the beneficiary of a fortuitous coincidence.
Good for him.
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The way a lot of these lottery scams work is that the person who “wins” over and over is actually acting as an agent for a friend of theirs who has a lien against them (whether it be for child support, alimony, defaulted loans, etc) and any traceable income would be garnished. So this trustworthy accomplice cashes the ticket, for a reasonable percentage, and the money is given to the person who actually bought the ticket, and the parties who the ticket-owner owes money to is none-the-wiser, and/or can do very little about it.
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Two more big wins and he will equal Joan Ginther. She had four multi-million dollar payoffs from scratch off tickets. Apparently she has an advanced degree in math which may be relevant in this context 
How? She’s not talking, but one can speculate. Those types of game where I live may have a set selection of large prizes, for eg one 10 million, five 1 million, etc. and a set number of existing tickets. The lottery corporation informs the public when a prize has been won, and by the number of smaller prizes collected you can infer roughly how many tickets have been sold. You may encounter situations where 90% of the tickets have been cashed and the main prize is still outstnding…You can therefore identify situations where the value of the ticket approaches or exceeds it’s cost: buy lots of tickets, maybe win big, maybe lose big
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Am I the only one who thinks “Mark Clark” sounds like a poorly made up witness protection identity?
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Same here. The imagining was well worth the $2, in both cases 
On another note, I worked at a convenience store in Boston in the mid-'90s and once saw a couple guys blow over $150 each in about 15 minutes on scratch cards. Actually, more than that, because they won a bit - one won at least $75 - and poured it all back into tickets until they had nothing. It was the weirdest thing to see. They seemed just as happy when they left as when they’d come in…
Oooooooh, sneaky! And what an odd coincidence that this guy with a lucky coin happens to have so many friends who win the lottery. And are possibly deadbeats. 
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So… the lottery may be “a tax on people who are bad at math”…
…but some forms may also be a high-risk/high-reward investment option for people who AREN’T bad at math?
Sounds about right.
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My experience is that many people who are well aware of the odds play lotteries. For me it’s entertainment, I spend a few dollars week on it (originally a quitting smoking award, “if you’re going to piss away money at least this won’t kill you”, although I certainly don’t spend anywhere near what smoking cost ) Sometimes it’s “insurance” : if somewhere I work has a lottery pool, I’ll contribute because I don’t want to be the one person that has to stay and do all the work when everyone else retires My favourite gambling stories though involve people like Claude Shannon (yes, the information theory guy) and Edward Thorp, and later Doyne Farmer, who devised deterministic approaches to winning . Of those three, two of them ended up hedge fund managers, make of that what you will. ( and Claude Shannon was apparently pretty successful at managing his own portfolio )
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I know a Mark Clark. Not this one. You have to be brave to give a kid that name.
After becoming a millionaire with his first win, he still felt compelled to continue doing scratchers? I don’t understand that thinking whatsoever.
Gambling addiction, I guess?
It’s clearly not about the money; if you’ll note the photograph accompanying the article, he still hasn’t cashed the first four million dollar check
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That, or a Philip K Dick character.
Winning the lottery twice is something that happens every so often. It’s true that for any given person the odds of winning the lottery twice are astronomical, but then again there’s a whole lot of people playing the lottery to begin with, and if you don’t care who out of a whole lot of people is the lucky guy (or gal) it suddenly becomes much more likely to happen at all. It’s essentially a version of the birthday paradoxon.
It’s fairly safe to say that winning twice has little to do with the lucky coin; if it wasn’t the coin it might be the lucky socks he’s wearing or whatever. We’ll have to see whether if he keeps using the lucky coin he will win a third and fourth time.
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Thank goodness, this is ten years old. I was wondering if we were at a point where chance and luck were concentrated in some events, and everything else was doing to the dogs.
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True.
What bothers me is that they are often made to make you want to buy another. They often have you just missing out on a big prize, so the primitive part of your brain thinks “that was close, but I might get it next time”.
With a weekly draw, if you miss out then it’s over and you have to wait until the next draw before you can try again. It’s more limiting than with scratch cards, although it still can be a problem for gambling addicts.
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