5 People Who Managed to Beat the Lottery

5 Voltaire & Charles Marie de la Condamine

It certainly doesn’t hurt Voltaire’s legacy that one of the most popular fun facts about him was that he was able to fund his relatively relaxed lifestyle by outsmarting the French lottery to fill his coffers. There’s another mathematician of the time that deserves a cut of the credit, though: Charles Marie de la Condamine, who was the man who actually spotted the scheme. 

It all started when France was seeing declining value in its government-issued bonds, leading to little-to-no-new sales. France’s Deputy Finance Minister, a man named Michel Robert Le Pelletier-Desforts, came up with a plan: Owners of bonds could receive a lottery ticket in exchange for 1/1000th of their bond’s value, and the winning ticket would get the value of their bond plus 500,000 livres, or roughly $6 million. 

Hot tip for starting lotteries: You generally want someone to check the math. The big flaw here is that the bonds came in many denominations, but entries were fractional, meaning that a 1 livre entry from a 1,000 livre bond and a 100 livre entry from a 100,000 livre bond were up for the same jackpot. Condamine realized that if they could buy up all of the small bonds from their owners (fairly easy, since the bond’s values had already plummeted below face value), they could have overwhelming odds to be the winner, especially as large bond holders would be less likely to pay their comparatively high entry fee. 

He brought in Voltaire and his famous silver tongue to get investors to back their small bond purchases, and the plan paid out.

4 Jerry & Marge Selbee

Rather than a prominent figure in the Enlightenment, Jerry Selbee simply ran a corner store with his wife Marge. But he also held a math degree from Western Michigan University, a degree that kicked into gear when he spotted a new promotion by the Michigan Lottery called the “Rolldown.”

How it worked was that, instead of the jackpot piling up higher and higher infinitely until there was a winner, when it hit $5 million, it instead “rolled down” to people who had matched three to five numbers instead of the full six. The unfortunate (for the state) window this opened was that it would have cost a fortune itself to buy every combination of six possible numbers. Buying every possible combination of four numbers, however, required only $1,100 worth of tickets (all math credit to Jerry here). Not to mention, you’d also have an estimated 18-19 three-number winners paying out as well. 

Altogether, Jerry figured out that, on rolldown weeks, for every $1,100 he played, he would win $1,900. From there, it was just a matter of bankroll. The Selbees ended up with a profit of $8 million.

3 James Harvey

James Harvey was a student at MIT, a school known for both smarts and mischief. So you can only imagine the breadth of the grin on his face when he realized a big problem in the Massachusetts state lottery. That’s right, Michigan wasn’t the only lottery to implement a poorly-thought out “Rolldown” promotion, though in Massachusetts, it was called “Winfall.” Harvey recruited a group of fellow students, and at the same time as the Selbees, they got to their very lucrative work. 

There is one wrinkle to their story that didn’t affect the Selbees that I thoroughly enjoy, though: The state launched an investigation into these winners, just to reach the conclusion that they were the ones who had fucked up.

2 Zhao Liqun

The scheme that repeatedly won Zhao Liqun the lottery in China is a little less intellectual than the others. Something you’d probably be able to guess as soon as you hear his occupation: lottery ticket seller. Yeah, this one wasn’t as much about the magic of math as it was about realizing there was a problem with the rules. Namely, that the system would allow ticket sales up to five minutes after the winning numbers had been pulled. 

Liqun went to work, and he won $3.76 million off his observation. But his story doesn’t end with a good-natured shrug by the authorities: He was instead put in jail for life, and had all his property confiscated. That’ll harsh your vibe.

1 Stefan Mandel

This last entry involves a plan that pretty much anyone could come up with, but would completely dismiss out-of-hand because it would seem impossible that it hadn’t been attempted before.

A Romanian economist named Stefan Mandel crunched the numbers regardless, and he was incredibly glad he did. All he did was determine how many possible combinations there were, how much it would cost to buy every possible combination and then compare that with the jackpot. Something that you’d think would be the first thing punched into a lottery commission’s calculators to double-check for.

Now, most lotteries come out on top when it involves those two totals, but certain lotteries had made a real butterfly-wing-flap level mistake in choosing smaller ranges of numbers. Most lotteries use the same six random number formula, but the difference between each of those six numbers being between 1-40 and 1-55, for example, was enough to swing them squarely into auto-win territory. Mandel then just needed to find investors to make the purchase possible, and the math made everyone rich, gaming lotteries across the world, from Australia to Virginia, operating on inadvisable methodology.