So picture this: November 22, 1989, and the Mirage has been open for business for exactly nine hours. Steve Wynn’s fire-breathing volcano out front is still a novelty nobody’s tired of yet, the dolphin habitat is still brand new, and somewhere on that packed casino floor is a 76-year-old retired serviceman named Elmer Sherwin, working his way through a Megabucks machine with the same $80 he’d budgeted for the week. He loses it. He borrows another $20 from his ex-wife Florence — the two had divorced thirteen years earlier after twenty-five years of marriage but stayed close enough that she was standing right next to him at the machine — and puts that in too.
Ninety minutes into the session, the machine lights up. $4,652,177. At the time, it’s the largest jackpot ever paid out on a Las Vegas slot machine, hit by a man who’d walked into the newest, most talked-about casino in the world on its very first day and turned a borrowed twenty into a fortune before midnight.
The press conference the next day is almost as good as the win itself. A reporter asks Sherwin, half-joking, whether he and Florence might get back together now that he’s a millionaire. “She won’t have me,” he says. “He said that, not me,” she shoots back, and adds that the two of them are “still buddies” regardless. It’s the kind of exchange that makes a wire story sing — the Associated Press ran it, and it’s still floating around newspaper archives decades later, two ex-spouses trading lines at a podium over a jackpot that was really, in a roundabout way, half hers.
“I Just Kept After It”
Most people, at 76, with $4.6 million suddenly in the bank, would call that the whole story. Sherwin took a different lesson from it. He used a chunk of the winnings to travel — genuinely see the world, by most accounts, rather than just talk about it — but he kept coming back to Las Vegas, and he kept playing Megabucks, once or twice a week, for years. Not out of financial need. By his own account, later, money was never really the point of any of it. What he wanted was something no one else had ever done: hit the same jackpot twice.
It took him sixteen years. On September 15, 2005, at the Cannery Casino in North Las Vegas — an off-Strip, locals-oriented casino a world away from the Mirage’s marble and volcanoes — 92-year-old Elmer Sherwin sat down at a Megabucks machine and hit it again. This time the number on the screen read $21.1 million. It made him, by every account anyone has been able to verify, the first and still the only person to ever win the Megabucks jackpot twice — a feat one industry writer later described as being “like getting struck by lightning while sitting on your living room couch without a cloud in the sky.” A Cannery spokeswoman said Sherwin had told her, back after that very first win in 1989, that hitting it a second time had become his “life’s dream.” Sixteen years and untold thousands of quarters and dollars later, it stopped being a dream. “I’m glad I finally hit,” he said. “I’ve been trying to do it again.” He told reporters he planned to go home and surprise his family with the news in person — “I want to see the looks on their faces when they hear” — and, only half-joking by most accounts, that he intended to try for a third.
He never got the third. Elmer Sherwin died in 2007, a year and a half after his second jackpot, at age 93. What he did with that second fortune says as much about him as either win. Rather than sit on it, he gave a substantial portion away — donations went toward Hurricane Katrina relief efforts among other causes, at a moment when the disaster was still dominating the national news, and the rest went largely to his family. “I was after the prestige of hitting it twice,” he said, reflecting on the whole run not long before he died. “’Cause I knew no one has done it… I just kept after it both times.”
“Hand Pay” — and What Actually Happens When the Machine Locks Up
Both times, the machine itself would have gone silent and locked the moment those three symbols lined up — no coins spilling out, no payout screen. Wins above roughly $1,200 on a slot machine trigger what casino floors call a “hand pay”: the machine freezes, a light on top starts flashing, and nobody gets paid until a slot attendant physically walks over, verifies the jackpot, and — for something the size of Megabucks — calls in a supervisor and a representative from IGT, the manufacturer, to confirm the win on their end before anyone touches a dollar. It’s not a courtesy. Under IRS rules, any slot or bingo win of $1,200 or more has to be reported on the spot, so the attendant’s first job isn’t handing over cash — it’s collecting your ID and filling out an IRS Form W-2G right there at the machine, with a copy going to you and a copy going straight to the federal government. Only after that paperwork’s done does the actual payment get arranged.
For a jackpot the size of Sherwin’s, “payment” isn’t a wad of hundred-dollar bills stuffed into a bucket. Megabucks jackpots of this scale have long been structured as an annuity — historically payable over 25 years — with the winner given the option to instead take a reduced lump-sum cash payment up front, similar to how a lottery jackpot works. No public source specifies which option Sherwin chose either time, so this story doesn’t guess; what’s certain is that whichever he picked, the IRS took its cut immediately. Federal law requires casinos to withhold tax on the spot for any gambling win over $5,000 — 28% at the time of both of Sherwin’s wins, a rate that’s since dropped to 24% following a 2018 change in tax law. Nevada, notably, has no state income tax, so unlike a winner in most other states, nothing extra came off the top for Nevada itself — one of the quieter reasons Megabucks jackpots have always tended to get hit disproportionately often on Nevada machines specifically.
The Odds, Twice
The odds of hitting Megabucks on any single qualifying spin have been independently estimated, based on the machine’s reel construction, at roughly 1 in 49.8 million — worse odds than winning most state lottery jackpots, worse than being struck by lightning in a given year, and, as one gaming writer later put it, in the same neighborhood as the odds of becoming President of the United States. IGT has never published the exact figure officially, but the 49.8 million number, derived from reverse-engineering the machine’s reel stops, has held up as the standard industry estimate for decades.
Winning it once, then, is already a genuine outlier event — the kind of thing that happens to a small handful of people across the entire state in any given year, out of the untold millions of spins fed into Megabucks machines statewide. Winning it twice, as one industry retrospective on the “Megabucks curse” put it, pushes the math into “the order of trillions to one” — because the second win isn’t just another roll of the same dice, it’s the same roughly-1-in-50-million shot happening again, independently, to the exact same person, sixteen years and untold thousands of dollars in additional spins later. Nobody has done it since. Depending on how you want to think about it, that number is either the reason Sherwin’s story is worth telling at all, or the reason it barely makes sense as a true story in the first place.
Why It’s the Story People Still Tell
Vegas produces jackpot winners constantly — Megabucks alone has paid out well over a dozen eight-figure prizes since it launched in 1986, including a $39.7 million win at the Excalibur in 2003 that still holds the record for the largest slot machine payout in history. Almost none of those winners have a story anyone remembers a year later, let alone twenty. Sherwin’s stuck because it isn’t really a story about money at all. It’s a story about a man who got the impossible thing once, by pure accident, on a borrowed twenty from his ex-wife on a casino’s opening night — and then spent sixteen years of his life deliberately, patiently chasing the same impossible thing a second time, for no reason he could point to except that he wanted to be the only person who’d ever done it. He got there. Nobody’s done it since.