JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – If you like playing the lottery, you'll probably be interested in knowing the places where more winning tickets are sold than most others in Florida. Of the thousands of retail stores that sell Florida Lottery tickets, some sold only one ticket worth more than $600 in the past six months, but others sold hundreds.
One of the luckiest stores in the state is in Jacksonville.
It took weeks of repeated requests, but lottery officials finally released documents that revealed the best places to buy. The records show that an Orlando convenience store with the straightforward name Food and Lotto has sold the most winning lotto tickets in the state.
"We've held that title for almost a decade now," said Chris Chang, a clerk at Food and Lotto.
The store started as a regular convenience store, but the lottery has surpassed food sales as the retailer has sold the most big winners – meaning tickets that win more than $600 in the first half of this year.
The store's biggest winner? A $52 million lotto ticket.
Customers flock to Food and Lotto hoping for some good luck.
"I’ve heard them all, from rabbit's foot, to rubbing my mannequin over there," said Chang. "I’ve heard holy water. Don’t know if that kind of goes together."
While at the store, we caught up with Miridiana Soto, who had just won $100 from a scratch-off ticket. She said she went to the store because she had heard it sold the most winning lottery tickets in the state.
While the store holds the title for selling the most winners, but several stores around the state have more than their share of lotto success. Many of them are in north Florida and the Panhandle, near the border with other states.
But the store in a close second to Food and Lotto is close to home. The Shell station at the corner of Edgewood and Avenue B in Northwest Jacksonville sold 611 tickets in the first half of 2015 that paid $600 or more.
Most had no idea that this gas station has an uncanny streak of luck. Customer Michelle Smith was surprised to learn the Shell where she buys her lottery tickets had that much luck, although she has bought some winning scratch-off tickets there.
"A lot of people come here. I do," Smith said.
Want to see if there's a store near you that have higher-than-normal sales of lottery tickets in the first half of this year? We've crunched the numbers and created four lists for you:
The vast majority of winning lottery tickets sold are the scratch off games. But are there any secrets to winning those multimillion-dollar jackpots in the lotto or Powerball?
The chance of winning those big jackpots are almost astronomical.
Florida State College at Jacksonville math professor Sharon Sweet calculated the chance of any single ticket winning winning the Florida Lotto as 1 in 22,957,479. In Powerball, it's even worse: 1 in 292 million. It used to be 1 in 175 million for Powerball before lotto made a change in October.
That change has helped spike the latest Powerball prize to over $1 billion because no one has won the big jackpot since November.
While nothing you do can change the odds of winning, Sweet does have one piece of advice.
"The thing to do if you’re going to play is play the same number every time. It’s gotta come up at some point," Sweet said.
Good luck.
Editor's Note: The Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling offers help to those who may have a gambling problem. For information go to www.gamblinghelp.org. The FCCG also offers a 24-Hour Helpline that is confidential and multilingual. It's 888-ADMIT-IT (888-236-4848).