A convenience store in Lyndhurst sold a ticket worth nearly $28 million. A fuel station in Ringwood produced a $10 million winner. A liquor store in Vineland generated an $8 million payout. But is there a pattern to lotto wins?
Across four months of New Jersey Lottery records, a small cluster of towns and retailers repeatedly appeared alongside some of the state’s largest prizes.
Bergen County led all counties with more than $32.6 million in reported winnings, according to a Patch analysis of lottery data from January through April.
Lyndhurst alone accounted for nearly $29 million after a Cash4Life ticket sold at Krauszer’s Liquor Wine & Food Store on Feb. 19 matched the game’s top prize.
But lottery officials and statisticians said the pattern reflects volume, not luck.
Bergen County, driven by high-volume sales areas and dense retail networks, consistently leads the state in total reported winnings. Smaller towns appear intermittently, often tied to individual large payouts that temporarily shift attention.
The New Jersey Lottery sees more winning tickets in areas where more tickets are sold, a pattern tied closely to population distribution, said Dean Ialacci, public information assistant for the New Jersey Lottery.
“This can make it appear as though there are more winners in different parts of the state, but odds per ticket always remain the same," Ialacci said.
Ialacci said the lottery prints millions of tickets per game and distributes them to more than 6,000 retailers statewide. Stores that sell tickets faster receive more inventory, increasing their chances of eventually selling a winning ticket.
“As always, winning tickets are completely random,” he said. “When you see trends in winner locations, it’s likely due to sales patterns.”
Rutgers University statistics professor Rong Chen said those patterns often mislead players searching for meaning in random outcomes.
Chen said players often assume patterns exist where none do, especially when looking at geography or streaks of winners.
“In theory and in practice, all combinations have equal probability of winning,” Chen said. “And there is no ‘memory.’”
Chen said there is no mathematical strategy that increases the chance of winning the lottery, since every number combination has the same probability of being drawn.
The only practical consideration, he said, is what happens if a ticket does win: players who choose less common number combinations may be less likely to split the jackpot with others, but that affects the payout distribution rather than the odds of winning itself.
Even so, Chen said the math behind lotteries does not change based on behavior or belief.
“A perfectly ‘rational’ person will not buy a lottery ticket, because the expected gain is always less than the price of the ticket,” Chen said. “But we are not rational.”
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