“How to win the lottery” is probably on the list of the 1,000 most asked questions on Google. Some people would say that getting hit by lightning is more likely to happen than beating the unfathomable odds of the lottery. However, if you are born under a lucky star, you might have the chance to hit the jackpot. Some believe that the lottery winners dream the winning numbers days, months or years before they are the winning ones. There are thousands of tips how to increase your chances of winning a lottery, but most of the people know that their chances to win the lottery are small.
As aforementioned, winning the lottery takes an incredible amount of luck. Some people use family birthdays, others use lucky numbers, while others are frantically calculating lottery probability. There are almost as many ways of choosing lottery numbers as there are chances of winning it.
However, some conspiracy breakers think that the random winning numbers on lottery tickets are not completely random. In other words, they believe that there is a secret code behind every lottery game, which is the shortest way to the jackpot. The team from Casino Reports decided to make a deep dive into the stories of people, who managed to stack the odds in their favor.
Retiree Gerry Selbee Hacks Michigan Lottery
In 2003, Gerry Selbee from Michigan noticed a flaw in the state’s new WinFall’s “roll-down” lottery game. The man could easily spot the weakness of the game, which actually gave favorable odds to the players. Excited by the revelation, he bought thousands of tickets, hoping to hit the jackpot.
Similar to all other lotto games, if no player got the six numbers to win the jackpot, the windfall would roll-over to the next week. If the roll-over exceeded more than $5 million and there was still no player who guessed all six numbers, then the jackpot would be distributed among players, who managed to guess two, three, four or five numbers.
Selbee realized that if no one guessed the six numbers on roll-down weeks, then a $1 ticket was actually worth more than its price. The man admitted that he lost $50 on his first try. But then the things changed and he managed to win $6,300 from $3,600 worth of tickets and $15,700 from $8,000. Shortly after the man made sure that his calculations are accurate, he shared his experience with his family and close friends. They established a betting group called GS Investment Strategies LLC in the small town of Evart, Michigan.
In case of a roll-down week, the group bought hundreds of thousands of tickets and earned between $7.5 million and $8 million. Gerry and GS Investment Strategies LLC needed to start playing Massachusetts’ WinFall game as Michigan stopped the WinFall game. After six years, the Massachusetts lottery official noticed that Gerry’s firm along with two other betting groups systematically won the lottery. As a result, the lottery launched a crackdown on the betting groups.
Canadian Statistician Outsmarts the Lottery
In fact, Mr. Selbee is not the only person in the world, who managed to crack the code behind the lottery. In 2011, a man from Toronto managed to crack the code for finding a winning scratch lottery ticket. Mohan Srivastava, who is a geological statistician by profession, found a way to beat a scratch lottery game. The man managed to predict which are the winning tickets for a Canadian Tic-Tac-Toe scratch lottery game 9 out of 10 times. Srivastava explained that the number of the winning lotteries is controlled by the Ontario Lottery Gaming Corporation (OLG), which means that the game simply cannot be truly random. The conclusion helped the man to determine which are the winning ticket with 90% accuracy.
According to his words, the numbers themselves were not important. What was important was whether or not they were repeated. He elaborated that the winning tickets usually featured numbers or singletons that never repeated as that increased the probability for the numbers to repeat under the coating that must be scratched off.
Srivastava’s intention was not to “rip off” the lottery, but to prove his theory. To do so, he bought 20 tickets and split them into “winning” and “not winning” bundles, without scratching them. Then he sent the package to the OLG. Within days, the game disappeared from the OLG’s product line.
Cracking Lottery Code Might be a Dangerous Obsession
The name of Wang Changzhou also makes rounds in the blogosphere after media agencies found out that the 49-old-year man from China is living under a road bridge in Chongqing. In fact, the man has chosen this way of life by himself, hoping to find a mathematical formula behind the lottery’s winning digits. Earlier this year, local media agency reported that the man spends about 2,000 yuan (RM1,223) on lottery tickets each month. His intention is to write four books on topics of mental arithmetic and lottery codes based on his research.
The man lives in solitude for 10 years, cutting all ties with his family and friends. He even refused to go back home to celebrate the Chinese New Year with his family as he believes that he is really close to cracking the lottery code. According to media reports, the man suffered a work injury and he was paid 50,000 yuan in compensation, most of which he invested in buying lottery tickets.
