Lottery Winner Reveals the Simple Math Behind 14 Jackpot Wins
lotteries
2024-10-13 00:49:30
It’s common knowledge these days that the odds of someone
winning the lottery
are pretty miniscule. An often-cited statistic is that you’re
more likely to be struck by lightning
and die than choose the lucky ticket.
When there are millions of possible combinations for a lottery ticket then, well, you’d need to buy a lot of lottery tickets if you want to be in with a good chance of taking home the jackpot.
And that’s exactly what one
Romanian
economist named Stefan Mandel did, with the help of investors and a syndicate – named the International Lotto Fund or ILF – which saw them win a total of 14 lotteries around the world.
In
an interview available on YouTube,
Mandel explained: “Theoretically, anybody can buy all the possible combinations. Any high school boy or girl can calculate those combinations.
“Nobody has ever developed a logistical system to lodge such a large amount of play slips.
“We were the only winners and that was it.”
Eventually, Mandel targeted a lottery in Virginia, where the rules around picking six numbers between one and 44 meant they only had 7,059,052 – apparently, this was a good thing.
You have
more of a chance winning the Conservatives’ lottery
, if you wanted to take part in that for some reason.
What was
also
a good thing was that Virginia allowed individuals to purchase tickets and print them at home, making it a lot less inconvenient and awkward than doing it at a cashier – they only needed 30 computers.
It was in February 1992 that his syndicate went for a jackpot of $27m, and because they had done every ticket imaginable, they scooped up $900k in additional prizes for the tickets which placed second, third, fourth and so on.
14 international agencies investigated him and the ILF – including the
CIA
and
FBI
– but both were cleared of any wrongdoing.
And where is Mandel now? Well, according to
The Hustle
, he’s apparently spending his days in a beach house on a remote island off the coast of Australia.
Meanwhile, a man whose family won the lottery when he was a teenager recently opened up about the
hardships of getting rich quickly
.
Elsewhere, a man previously hade headlines after taking back orange juice to a shop –
before leaving with $315 million
.
In another remarkable lottery story, a man who suffered a string of bad luck suddenly found himself on the other side of fortune when a heart attack ultimately led to him
winning not one, but two, lottery prizes
.
This article was first published on June 6, 2023
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