Richard Lustig: Lottery genius or liar?

There are two Richard Lustigs.

Lustig number one is one of the most successful lottery players of all time. He was a seven-time winner who claimed to have developed a proven system for beating the lottery by improving your odds of winning. His wins made him famous, and he made frequent media appearances on national TV shows, including Good Morning America, CNN, and The Rachel Ray Show.

Lustig number two was a shameless self-promoter and hopeless gambling addict whose seven wins are attributable to spending a fortune and buying thousands of tickets. His alleged system for winning was a farce based more on superstition than any provable ability to improve the odds.

So, who is the real Richard Lustig, and was he really a big winner or a big fraud?

Getting rich

Before his rise to fame, Lustig was a rock drummer and singer who toured the country with different bands. After retiring as a performer, he relocated to Orlando, Florida, with his wife and two children. He founded Lustig Talent Enterprises, a booking agency that planned national and international tours for music acts.

Other than music, Lustig's real passion was the lottery. He was a frequent player and winner, with at least seven confirmed lottery wins to his name. However, when he first started buying tickets, Lustig claimed he was a major loser, and it wasn't until he developed his personal system that he began collecting winning tickets. He went on to write in his book:

When the lottery came to Florida, I was like everybody else: 'Wow, buy lottery tickets, win a lot of money, retire, buy a big fancy yacht, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Like everybody else, I was running out and buying haphazardly, buying quick picks, I mean, buying tickets with no plan, or no method, or whatever. Like everybody else, I was losing all the time.

He claims that he created a system that helped him win, allegedly leading to seven winning tickets. All of his wins are below.

• In January 1993, he won $10,000 from a scratch-off ticket.
• In August 1997, he won $13,696.03 from a Florida Lottery Fantasy 5 ticket.
• In June 2000, he won a trip to Los Angeles (valued at $3,594.66) after entering a second-chance drawing for the scratch-off ticket “Wheel of Fortune.”
• In October 2001, he won an Elvis Presley-themed trip to Memphis, Tennessee (valued at $4,966) after entering a second-chance drawing for another scratch-off ticket.
• In January 2002, he won $842,152.91 playing Mega Money, which was the original name for Mega Millions. This was by far his largest lottery win.
• In November 2008, he won $73,658.06 from a Fantasy 5 ticket.
• In August 2010, he won $98,992.92 from a Fantasy 5 ticket.

Lustig won $1,052,205.58 over the course of 17 years, before paying taxes on his prizes.

Rich's tips for winning

At Lottery USA, we cannot endorse any system for winning the lottery, as we recognize that these are truly games of chance, entirely dependent on random outcomes that players cannot control. However, we can share the systems that other people claim to use to win.

In Lustig's case, he wrote and published a forty-page book called “Learn How to Increase Your Chances of Winning the Lottery,” in which he outlined a strategy that he claimed would increase any player's odds of winning the lottery.

These steps include:

• Never play Quick Pick numbers. This was an issue he was particularly adamant about. In an interview with USA Today, he said, "Don't buy the Quick Picks. Quick Picks is the worst thing you can do, guys. Every time you buy a Quick Pick, you're getting a different set of numbers, so your odds are always going to be at their worst."
• Set a budget. You should never play with more money than you can afford to lose, and he strongly advised against chasing your losses. "You don't want to wake up Thursday morning and realize you're a loser and then pull your hair out trying to replace the money you spent," he told reporters.
• Track your numbers. Lustig kept a log of all the numbers he played and their outcomes, which he claimed helped him pick winning numbers in the future.
• Reinvest winnings. He believed that if you won a prize, you should use some of the money to buy more tickets to reduce your out-of-pocket expenses. "Most people buy a $1 ticket and win $10, and they put the $10 in their pocket," says Lustig. “Those people are playing the game wrong.” Instead, he says, if you win $10, then you should buy $11 worth of tickets because "if you lose, you only lost a $1."
• Always play the same numbers in the same game. Lustig was adamant that players should stick with the same numbers for every drawing. He also believed that consistency was essential and that players should never skip a drawing of their preferred game.
• Join a lottery pool. Pooling your money with others will give you access to more tickets without spending more money, but it will also reduce your total prize if you win.
• Look for the best odds. Lustig believed it's better to play smaller, in-state games, such as Fantasy 5, compared to larger multi-state games, like Powerball and Mega Millions, because they offer better odds of winning, even though the prizes are smaller.

So, will these steps help you win the lottery? Probably not. While setting a budget for buying tickets is sensible, it won't change your odds of winning. Buying more tickets can help, but when the odds are millions to one, just a few more tickets are not statistically relevant.

His best piece of advice is probably to find games with lower odds, although that should really be considered common sense.

Real or fake?

Lustig claims that his constant winning is proof of the success of his system. He said:

Luck has absolutely nothing to do with it. How can anybody in their right mind say this guy's won seven times, he's just a lucky guy? Come on. Nobody can be that lucky.

However, critics have been quick to point out that Lustig's advice is not mathematically sound. Personal finance expert Zach Bissonnette has been particularly scathing in his critique of Lustig.

Bissonette explained that, mathematically speaking, there's no real way to shift the odds of a lottery drawing. He stated:

The lottery works randomly. Unlike poker or blackjack, there's nothing you can do to gain an advantage at this. You can't make decisions to influence the outcome. It's just like roulette—there's no game of skill.

Finance journalist Felix Salmon also points out that some of Lustig's advice will actually make your odds of winning worse:

In fact, if you're going to play the lottery, the rational way to play the lottery is to do the exact opposite of Lustig's advice. Never pick your own numbers; always accept random numbers…If you want to minimize your chances of overlapping with someone else, you're much better off accepting a set of random numbers than using some kind of human-generated method.

Mathematically speaking, the only way to improve your odds of winning the lottery is to buy more tickets, and we mean a lot more. When a wealthy group of gamblers won a $93 million Lotto Texas drawing, they spent over $25 million to buy every possible combination of numbers and guarantee a win.

So, unless you're prepared to write a check with two commas in it, it's tough to buy enough tickets to alter the odds in your favor meaningfully.

Lustig claimed that he played the lottery every day, and he never mentioned how much money he spent on tickets to secure his winnings, so it's impossible to know if he actually turned a big profit or if he gambled away more than he won.

The real lesson

If there's a real lesson to be learned from Richard Lustig, it may be what to do after you've won the lottery.

Lustig never seemed to experience the kind of financial meltdown that has plagued so many other lottery winners. He never went bankrupt, succumbed to drug addiction, or was the victim of scheming criminals. Instead, he lived the dream of using his money to improve his life.

In an interview with Time magazine about his winnings, he recalled:

I've been rich and I've been poor, and I like [being] rich a whole lot better. Obviously, it's changed my life, big time. We've lived in big, fancy houses. I drive a Jaguar. We've gone on cruises. I can't complain.

In the same interview, he credited his post-lottery success to smart financial planning. He said the first thing he did after winning was to pay off his debts and hire an accountant and financial planner. He offered:

I'm smarter than that. People, they just don't think. You have to secure your future. The reason why you hear those horror stories about people who win huge amounts like that and all of a sudden they're filing bankruptcy is because it's usually from people who have never had that kind of money before in their lives.

He added, “They just go through it like crazy. They think there's no tomorrow. Well, there is a tomorrow, and eventually it will run out.”

Lustig passed away in 2010 at the age of 68.