A huge win on December 4, 2002 gave Edward Premetz an early Christmas present--home ownership.

Premetz, a 40-year-old subtitling and closed-caption transcriber FROM LOS ANGELES said he used a portion of his $75,000 winnings to buy the house he had been renting.

“I’ve played the lottery for years,” Premetz said, a few weeks after his win. But it was only  for the last year that he decided to play Fantasy 5 and mail the coupons in after buying five plays on one ticket.

“I don’t have a complicated formula for picking numbers,” he confessed, about his lottery playing. “I just chose the same numbers every day and sent in the ticket for the drawing. It’s something you do, and then just forget about it. When they sent me a letter saying I was drawn to go to play the Fantasy 5 Dream Machine on “The Big Spin” show, I was stunned that I actually made it. I sat there and read it a few times.”

Premetz is no stranger to game shows. In l997, he won $6,400 on the TV show Debt. He has also appeared on Wheel of Fortune, Pyramid, and Scrabble. Applying to game shows is easy for me, he said, “because I live in Los Angeles.”

Premetz found himself on television again on “The Big Spin.” He wasn’t nervous. And, he walked away with a tidy sum. “I’m still waiting to see how much I will have left after I pay my taxes, but I’ve already made the down payment on my house. I won’t quit my job. It’s not like I won a million dollars.”