Lottery winner scores $1million prize using decades-old strategy 20 years after his wife won big

Winning a lottery jackpot just once in a lifetime requires enormous luck - but one family astonishingly managed to win it twice.

Thomas Ensko from the town of Blackstone in Massachusetts bagged the $1 million Mega Millions prize on Tuesday from a $2 ticket. He claimed his prize with his wife happily by his side, a woman who also managed to win $1 million on an instant ticket two decades ago.

The husband said that he had been playing Mega Millions regularly for the past 20 years and revealed the consistent method he has been using to pick his numbers. “I’ve been playing the same numbers for the last twenty years," he said before adding that the ones he always uses correlate to his birthday, which have finally paid off.

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Thomas said he plans to help his family with the winnings, in particular his children and grandchildren, reported WWLP . He bought the Mega Millions ticket at Anderson’s Variety in Blackstone, around 30 miles southwest of Boston on the Rhode Island border, which will reportedly receive $10,000 for selling the winning ticket.

The Enskos aren't the only recent double lottery winners, though. Earlier this month Sherri Fowler won a $250,000 top prize from a scratch-off game. However, her big win came only months after another lottery win of $50,000 for the Washington D.C. woman.

Sherri's first prize came from the DC Lottery's Win it All, which she won in February. She decided to take a chance and buy a Nothing But Cash card. Her initial winning scratch-off card was bought from a liquor store, while the second was sold at a gas station just a block away. Columbia Heights is a neighborhood in the capital located less than two miles from downtown.

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"I was at the store and started screaming," Sherri told the DC Lottery, describing how she scratched off the card while still in the store. "I couldn't believe it," she added, saying that she asked her kids to verify that she had won. With the new money, she said she's going to purchase a car. As with any winning ticket purchases, the stores that sold the cards got bonuses after Fowler won, but it wasn't immediately clear how much the stores received.