The Idaho Man Who's Won the Lottery 18 Times — And What the Probability Actually Says

On May 7, Robert Bevan walked into the Idaho Lottery Winners Lobby in Boise and collected a $50,000 check from the $1,000,000 King Scratch Game. Nothing unusual there — somebody claims a check almost every week. What made the staff start digging through old files was the name. They'd seen it before. A lot.

When the Idaho Lottery posted the story to Instagram on May 11, it came with a question nobody had a clean answer to: "Does lightning strike 18 times?" Because that's how many times Bevan has hit a meaningful Idaho Lottery prize since 1997.

The list is genuinely absurd: a Chevy Blazer in a 1997 promotional giveaway, a $200,000 check in 2014, multiple $20,000 wins, $5,000 wins, $1,000 wins, and now this $50K scratch. Twenty-nine years. Eighteen trips to the same lobby. One guy.

Most outlets ran it as a feel-good marriage story (Bevan credits his 40-year marriage, not luck). That's lovely, but it's not the interesting question. The interesting question is: what does the math actually say about a streak like this?

Stop Calling It a Miracle

When we hear "won 18 times," our brain immediately compares it to "won the Powerball jackpot 18 times" — which would be roughly a 1-in-(292 million)^18 event. That number is so big the universe ends before you can write it down.

But that's not what Bevan did. He played scratch-off games, and scratch-offs are a completely different probability animal than draw games like Powerball or Mega Millions.

Here's the breakdown most coverage skips:

• Powerball jackpot odds: 1 in 292,201,338
• Mega Millions jackpot odds: 1 in 290,472,336
• Scratch-off "any prize" odds (typical $10–$50 game): roughly 1 in 3 to 1 in 4
• Scratch-off "$1,000+ prize" odds (typical premium game): roughly 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 50,000, depending on price point and remaining prizes

The Idaho Lottery's own published odds put "any prize" hit rates on its larger scratch tickets in the 1-in-3 range. The really interesting tier is the $1,000-and-up wins — the kind that actually require a trip to the Winners Lobby in Boise rather than getting cashed at the corner store.

For a $10–$30 premium scratch ticket, hitting $1,000 or more typically lands somewhere around 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 10,000 tickets, depending on the specific game.

Doing The Math On 29 Years

Now let's estimate Bevan's actual lifetime ticket volume. He's said he and his wife buy tickets casually — gas station stops, grocery runs, no system, no strategy. Call that conservatively 5 tickets a week, every week, for 29 years.

That works out to roughly 7,500 scratch tickets purchased across his lifetime. If he's a heavier player (10/week, which is still casual for a long-term scratch enthusiast), it's closer to 15,000 tickets.

If we assume an average odds-of-claimable-prize (over $600, the IRS reporting threshold most state lotteries flag) of around 1 in 1,500 across the mix of games he's played, his expected number of "big" wins over 29 years is somewhere in the range of 5 to 10.

He hit 18.

That's still well above expectation — maybe 2x to 3x what a model would predict — but it's emphatically not the impossible cosmic anomaly the headlines suggest. It's the high end of a plausible distribution. And once you remember he's also been playing for nearly three decades, the "lightning strikes 18 times" framing starts to feel a lot more like "guy plays the lottery a lot, lottery occasionally pays out."

What it really demonstrates is something we say a lot at LuckMaker: volume matters, but it matters in a really specific way. More tickets = more variance = more chances to be on the upside or the downside of the curve. Bevan happens to be on the upside. Plenty of his neighbors have bought just as many tickets over 29 years and have nothing to show for it.

What's Actually Worth Taking From This Story

Bevan's own "strategy" advice was charmingly anti-strategy: "randomness… being in the right place at the right time." He's right that there's no system to beat scratch-offs. But there are three things players can actually control, and they're worth pulling out:

1. Pick games with healthier prize structures. Not all scratch-offs are equal. The same $20 ticket from two different states (or even two different games in the same state) can have wildly different odds-of-any-prize and top-prize remaining. The LuckMaker Score at luckmaker3000.com/games rates 98 games across 25 US states and 9 international markets on a 0–100 scale that bakes in odds, payout ratio, and remaining top prizes — exactly the variables Bevan happened to ride on the upside of.

2. Spread, don't concentrate. Bevan didn't buy 7,500 tickets to the same drawing. He bought tickets over 29 years across dozens of different games. That's a much healthier playing pattern than blowing a paycheck on a single jackpot night.

3. Track every ticket. Eighteen wins over 29 years means there were almost certainly tickets Bevan didn't realize were winners until he checked. The Ticket Vault makes that automatic — scan once, get notified when your numbers come up. The flip side of repeat-winning is repeat-checking, and most people are bad at it.

If you want to play your own numbers instead of quick-picks (Bevan's wins were almost all scratch-offs, but for draw games this still applies), the Lucky Number Generator is built to actually distribute across the full ball range rather than clustering on birthdays. And if Bevan's $200,000 win in 2014 had been yours, the Lottery Tax Calculator would have told you Idaho's 5.695% state withholding plus 24% federal would have left you with roughly $140K net — useful to know before you decide between lump and annuity on the bigger ones.

The Quiet Lesson

Bevan didn't beat the lottery. The lottery's still working exactly as designed — it has to, or the state wouldn't run it. What he did was play long enough, casually enough, and across enough different games that the upside tail of the distribution eventually reached him.

He's right about one thing, though. The real luck wasn't the $50K check or the Chevy Blazer. It was buying gas-station scratch tickets with the same person for forty years and still wanting to. That part actually is the rare event.

Most of the rest is just math, patience, and a lot of unused tickets in a drawer somewhere.