Sometimes it pays to be predictable, literally: After a Massachusetts man learned from state lottery officials that he held the winning numbers, he remembered that he happened to have another ticket with the exact same set of lucky digits.

The man got a call from the Massachusetts State Lottery this week to tell him he’d won $25,000 a year for life, reports the Boston Globe, as part of the Lucky for Life season ticket he had.

After he hung up, his brain clicked and he realized that he had a duplicate ticket that his family had bought for him, which used the same numbers based on several family birthdays. Bingo. Or rather, Lottery-o.

In case you’er wondering, a state lottery rep says it’s unusual to have someone win twice this way.

“For a game like this, where there’s so many possible winning combinations … people rarely buy the same ticket with the same numbers,” she said. “They have to be really confident that those numbers will come in.”

He picked the cash reward option, and is taking home two checks written out for $390,000 each, she added.

He’s planning on taking his family on vacation — as he should, they’re half the reason he’s so rich now — and pay for his son’s college tuition and his daughter’s car payments.

The man was “excited as most people are when they win a prize of this magnitude,” the rep said, which I will take to mean that he shouted as loud as he could at the top of his lungs and went running through the streets, screaming, “TAKE THAT, UNIVERSE! I AM A WINNERRRRRRRRRRR!” which is what I would definitely do in the same situation.

Norwood man hits it big — twice — in state lottery game [Boston Globe]

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