In the 1990s Stefan Mandel, a Romanian-Australian economist, and his small team played and won the lottery. The interesting thing is that they had experienced this a total of 14 times.
Of course, as you can imagine, this feat wasn’t really achieved by believing in a lucky group of numbers.
Normally, your odds of winning the lottery are pretty low. For example, your chance of winning the EuroMillions jackpot with a ticket is 1 in 139,838,160. If you decide to double your chances by buying a second ticket, you still only have 2 chances at 139,838,160.
Still, assuming you can buy more of these combinations, you’ll notice that you will eventually reach a point where your chances are 139,838,160 out of 139,838,160. In other words, this means you have to buy all the tickets. At this point, your problem turns into a logistics problem rather than a math problem. You need to be able to buy 139,838,160 tickets before you can win the jackpot.
Mandel noticed that in certain lotteries, the jackpot prize could be more than three times the cost of purchasing each possible combination of the lottery, The Hustle reported. In other words, assuming you can buy any combination of numbers, you’re guaranteed a return on your investment. This was basically the method that Mandel decided on.
While this method wasn’t clearly against the rules, it didn’t exactly seem to fit the spirit of the game. Also, the non-mathematical problems were not minor at all. First, he needed to convince enough investors to join his plan within a few years. He then had to find a way to buy all possible combinations in the lottery they had entered.
Even getting these tickets was a problem, considering that they could enter millions of different combinations. So he had to create algorithms to generate and then print the tickets as some lotteries allowed at the time.
After creating a stack of tickets that were printed and ready to be picked up, they had to wait for a big enough jackpot, and when the jackpot they were waiting for showed up, the team would buy those tickets in stores. Despite all these preparations, the process did not always go smoothly, as in the case of the Virginia lottery, due to the huge number of tickets.
After winning lots of small lotteries in Australia, Mandel realized that there are lotteries in the US with jackpots that are much higher than the cost of buying each combination. Of particular interest was the new Virginia lottery, which used only numbers 1 to 44 in its draws. Using fewer numbers meant there were 7,059,052 possible combinations, far fewer than other options that normally require over 25 million tickets.
When the jackpot was high enough ($15.5 million), he ordered his field team to buy the tickets in bulk. Predictably, Mandel had pre-arranged the unusual purchase, rather than walking into a random store and asking them to sell tens of thousands of tickets. However, some members of his team withdrew, leaving the ticket combinations they were supposed to buy unpurchased.
After two days of buying, Mandel’s team had bought 6.4 million of the 7 million possible combinations needed to secure a win. Despite their nervousness, among those tickets was the winning ticket.
Despite being investigated by the FBI and CIA, no crimes were found. Winning a total of 14 different lotteries in his own way, Mandel raised over millions in prize money for himself and his investors before retiring to a beach house on the tropical islands of Vanuatu.
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