Beating a lottery has been done, and it was done with a printing press.
Stefan Mandel, a Romanian-born mathematician, won 14 jackpots by covering as many combinations as he could buy. His masterpiece came in February 1992, when Virginia's game asked players to pick six numbers from a pool of just 44. That works out to 7,059,052 possible combinations, and the jackpot had climbed above $27 million. Most states drew from a larger pool, which pushed the combinations past 25 million and put a complete buy out of reach.
Mandel's syndicate of 2,500 investors printed millions of play slips, the forms a customer normally marks by hand before a clerk feeds them into the terminal. Laser printers in a Melbourne warehouse spent three months filling them out. The paper shipped to Virginia for about $60,000, and couriers carried it into cooperating stores with cashier's checks. The lottery's own machines printed every actual ticket.
Stores ran out of ticket stock in the final hours, leaving roughly a million combinations unbought. The syndicate won anyway, collecting the jackpot plus six second prizes, 132 third prizes, and about 135,000 smaller ones.
Notice what that is not. It is not prediction. Mandel never guessed a number in his life. He waited for a jackpot worth three times the cost of buying every line, then bought all he could reach. It was arithmetic and logistics, and it cost him millions up front. Since that exploit, lotteries have banned people from printing their own play slips.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
