If it happened once, that would not be very interesting. But if it happened twice, then you would start to sit up and take notice.

I'm talking about lotto winners and their remarkable success in winning lottery prizes twice in a row. How do they do it? Are there ways to win lottery games regularly so that you run off with a price more than once?

Here's what I found after some research on how some players were winning the lotto twice:

- A woman who won $1 million playing a Pennsylvania Lottery... won another million on the same game in June that year.

- Pennsylvania lottery officials said other winners have experienced lucky multiple winning streaks. A Carbon County man won four times - collecting over $2.5 million in the late 1980s and '90s.

- A husband and wife separately won replica Pocono pace cars in the Pocono Race for the Riches game in 2000.

- In Australia a 70-year-old Taree grandfather who had already won $1 million in Lotto was one of three winners sharing in the game's First Division prize of $500,000.

- In Ireland, for the second time in eight years, a group of 33 colleagues from the Clonmel Nationalist newspaper traveled to Dublin to collect their Lotto winnings. In October 1993, the syndicate won ¢G400,000, but in 2001 they more than doubled their winnings to ¢G1m. Each member won ¢G30,303.

- In New Zealand, a Rotorua couple celebrated the end of an extraordinary year, having won two major lottery prizes in 2005.

The more I looked, the more common it was to win more than one prize. You can see similar results by Googling "lotto win twice." The chances of winning lottery games more than once seems to be quite common.

So is there a secret factor among these double winners? Instead of having one lottery win for life, how do they manage to double the chances several times?

As I researched further, gradually the puzzle came together... and it turned out to be this:

The regular winners play regularly!

Or, to put it another way, repeat winners play repeatedly. Many of the articles I read reported that the winners were regular players, both before and after their double wins.

It confirms what I have saying for years... you MUST play often. Winning the lotto challenge is partly a game of chance, but the greater part involving your luck can be manipulated by playing more often.

One lottery win for life? Not according to these players.