You are right, not even the calculation is comparable to the biggest win even if someone has gambled for 5 years, the simple calculation above has even proven that he only spent +$54k for 5 years, so the above win is very rare even in the future the list of records above remains and impossible to be surpassed.
For 50 years, mate, not five, but fifty. I showed in my calculation above that even buying a $3 ticket every single day for 50 years in a row, and losing all that money, would constitute an amount much lower than a Jackpot.
What I meant was that a rhetoric such as "he has probably lost more money before he won that prize" isn't suitable for Jackpot winners, or very rarely suitable anyway.
But if we compute it in a way the prize would just be the guaranteed win($1 million), then a person doesn't limit his bet to $3 but bets $60 a day for the tickets for 50 years might have spent way more than the guaranteed win amount. , then the rhetoric you stated would be suitable for that jackpot winner
, but of course, the total money spent on the given scenario is way too little if we compared it to mega jackpots amounting to hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.