Man who won lottery 14 times explains simple math he used to beat the system
A man who won the lottery an astonishing 14 times has revealed the surprisingly simple maths he used to turn one of the world's biggest games of chance into something much closer to a numbers game.
For most of us, winning a lottery jackpot is little more than a fantasy.
The odds of taking home the Mega Millions jackpot, for example, are roughly one in 302.5 million. In other words, you could play for decades and never come close.
Stefan Mandel, however, decided those odds weren't something he simply had to accept.
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Rather than relying on lucky numbers or hoping for a miracle, the Romanian-born mathematician developed a strategy designed to dramatically increase his chances of landing the winning combination. It took years of work, and eventually involved persuading groups of people to pool their money into a syndicate so they could buy vast numbers of tickets.
His first success earned the syndicate $19,000, leaving Mandel with just under $4,000.
But that relatively modest win proved to be the beginning of something much bigger.
After using the money to move from Romania to Australia with his family, Mandel went on to establish the International Lotto Fund (ILF), which would eventually claim lottery wins an incredible 14 times across countries including Australia, Romania and the US.
They didn't always win the jackpot, but the group still won substantial amounts of cash over the years with their system in countries like the US, Australia, and Romania.
While Mandel's schemes weren't technically illegal, they definitely caused a lot of suspicion with authorities and various international agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, who investigated him and the ILF for wrongdoing.
However, both Mandel and the ILF were ultimately cleared.
Mandel entered a years-long legal battle and, while he was acquitted of all the crimes he was accused of, the whole ordeal caused him a bunch of financial trouble.
The big winner ended up declaring bankruptcy in 1995, just three years after winning a $27 million jackpot prize, and he went on to spend the next decade running various alleged investment schemes.
His number-picking algorithm, which he called 'combinatorial condensation', rested on the premise of buying enough lottery tickets to play every possible combination, leading the US to establish laws banning it altogether.
The lottery rules were changed to ban punters from buying bulk tickets, as well as using computer-generated tickets, to ensure no one else could replicate Mandel's methods.
So, if you were planning on testing your luck, it's not going to work, unfortunately.
Callum Jones