Richard Lustig


Richard Lustig was an American man who came to prominence for winning relatively large prizes in seven state-sponsored lottery games from 1993 to 2010. His prizes totaled over $1 million. He wrote Learn How To Increase Your Chances of Winning the Lottery.
Although Lustig is known by his remarkable record, won the first prize 14 times, by buying every possible combination where the jackpot is three times larger than number of combinations.

Wins

Lustig's total wins amount to a value of $1,052,205.58. Two of those wins were holidays rather than cash prizes, valued at $8,560.66 total. His first win was in 1993, and the last one in 2010:
Lustig's seven lottery wins has been featured on the financial web site CNN Money.
His book Learn How to Increase Your Chances of Winning the Lottery was ranked #3 on Amazon's self-help book list in 2013.

Method

In an interview with ABC News, Lustig explained that his method is to re-invest all of his winnings back into the lottery. He also recommends using hand-picked sequential numbers and using the same numbers repeatedly.

Criticism

Personal finance author Zac Bissonnette has characterized Richard Lustig's recommendations as "dangerous", further noting the odds of winning any lotto prize are low and Lustig's advice to play sequential numbers is statistically inferior to selecting random numbers for each drawing. Financial journalist Felix Salmon wrote that given Lustig's habit of using much of his winnings to buy more lotto tickets it's unclear if he has kept more in prize money than he spent on lotto tickets: " never actually comes out and says that he’s a net winner." CNN Money took their video down after a firestorm of criticism.

Death

Richard Lustig died on July 22, 2018, at the age of 67.