Why the strategy one man used to win the lottery 14 times won't work for you today (2024)

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In 1992, Stefan Mandel pulled off every lottery player's dream: He took the luck out of the game and guaranteed himself a winning ticket for Virginia's $27 million jackpot by buying every single combination of numbers possible.

"I knew that I would win one first prize, six second prizes, 132 third prizes, and thousands of minor prizes," he told NPR's Planet Money producer Alex Goldmark on a recent podcast.

While it was by far the biggest jackpot he'd ever won, it was not his first lottery win — it was his 14th.

What started as a ticket out of his native country, Romania, in the 1950s — "The lottery was the only way I could get some serious money quickly," he told Goldmark — turned into a lucrative business.

Like all successful businesses, it required a plan, diligent research, and patience before taking off. "He doesn't just go out and buy random tickets," Goldmark reported. "He's a pretty natural math whiz. He goes to the library and he starts reading math paper after math paper after math paper, and he comes up with a formula for buying blocks of tickets that he thinks should guarantee him a prize."

His first try with the lottery won him more than enough money to move his family to Australia, where he found more investors and perfected his system.

After winning 12 times, enough sufficient laws were passed to put him out of business in Australia. He was forced to look elsewhere, which is where the 1992 Virginia lottery comes into play.

At the time, there were 7.1 million combinations of lottery tickets in Virginia. Mandel figured he had to wait until the jackpot reached $25 million or more before purchasing each combination to ensure he would turn a profit.

The operation took about three months: "They printed out all 7.1 million tickets in Australia, paid $60,000 to ship them to the US, and negotiated bulk buys with grocery stores all around Virginia about how they could send cashier's checks to buy tens of thousands of lottery tickets," Goldmark explained.

The night of the drawing, Mandel wasn't anxious at all. He knew he had it in the bag, and sure enough, he took home first prize, along with several second and third prizes, and "thousands of minor prizes."

It would be his last lottery. Today, he's living on a tropical island in the South Pacific.

For hopeful entrepreneurs looking to replicate Mandel's business model, you're out of luck.

"It cannot be done anymore," Goldmark says. "The number of combinations have grown too much, you wouldn't be able to print the tickets, you wouldn't be able to buy them in time and you probably couldn't even do the math right to figure it out without making a mistake."

And as Business Insider's Andy Kiersz found when determining whether or not it would be worth it to buy over 292 million lottery tickets to guarantee winning the recent$1.6 billion Powerball jackpot, there are three major flaws with the strategy today: the logistics of actually buying all of the tickets, the risk of having to split the jackpot, and the possibility of other people trying the same thing.

It looks like Mandel will remain one of a kind.

Listen to the full podcast at NPR »