How a Secretive Gambler Called 'The Joker' Beat the Texas Lottery (msn.com) 111
"Can you help me take down the Texas lottery?"
That's what a London banker-turned-bookmaker asked "acquaintances" in 2023, reports the Wall Street Journal. The plan was to buy "nearly every possible number in a coming drawing" — purchasing $1 tickets for 25.8 million possible combinations, since "The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million." Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants. They set up shop in a defunct dentist's office, a warehouse and two other spots in Texas. The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals. Trucks hauled in dozens of them and reams of paper... [Then Texas announced no winner in an earlier lottery, rolling its jackpot into another drawing three days later.] The machines — manned by a disparate bunch of associates and some of their children — screeched away nearly around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second. Texas politicians later likened the operation to a sweatshop.
Trying to pull off the gambit required deep pockets and a knack for staying under the radar — both hallmarks of the secretive Tasmanian gambler who bankrolled the operation. Born Zeljko Ranogajec, he was nicknamed "the Joker" for his ability to pull off capers at far-flung casinos and racetracks. Adding to his mystique, he changed his name to John Wilson several decades ago. Among some associates, though, he still goes by Zeljko, or Z. Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually.
The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win. That, in turn, spilled their activities into public view and sparked a Texas-size uproar about whether other lotto players — and indeed the entire state — had been hoodwinked. Early this month, the state's lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called the crew's win "the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas." In response to written questions addressed to Marantelli and Ranogajec, Glenn Gelband, a New Jersey lawyer who represents the limited partnership that claimed the Texas prize, said "all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed...."
Lottery officials and state lawmakers have taken steps to prevent a repeat.
The article also looks at a group of Princeton University graduates calling themselves Black Swan Capital that's "won millions in recent years" by targetting state lottery drawings with unusually favorable odds.
"State lottery directors say they are seeing more organized efforts to buy lottery tickets in bulk," according to the article, "but that the groups are largely operating legally and transparently..."
That's what a London banker-turned-bookmaker asked "acquaintances" in 2023, reports the Wall Street Journal. The plan was to buy "nearly every possible number in a coming drawing" — purchasing $1 tickets for 25.8 million possible combinations, since "The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million." Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants. They set up shop in a defunct dentist's office, a warehouse and two other spots in Texas. The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals. Trucks hauled in dozens of them and reams of paper... [Then Texas announced no winner in an earlier lottery, rolling its jackpot into another drawing three days later.] The machines — manned by a disparate bunch of associates and some of their children — screeched away nearly around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second. Texas politicians later likened the operation to a sweatshop.
Trying to pull off the gambit required deep pockets and a knack for staying under the radar — both hallmarks of the secretive Tasmanian gambler who bankrolled the operation. Born Zeljko Ranogajec, he was nicknamed "the Joker" for his ability to pull off capers at far-flung casinos and racetracks. Adding to his mystique, he changed his name to John Wilson several decades ago. Among some associates, though, he still goes by Zeljko, or Z. Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually.
The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win. That, in turn, spilled their activities into public view and sparked a Texas-size uproar about whether other lotto players — and indeed the entire state — had been hoodwinked. Early this month, the state's lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called the crew's win "the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas." In response to written questions addressed to Marantelli and Ranogajec, Glenn Gelband, a New Jersey lawyer who represents the limited partnership that claimed the Texas prize, said "all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed...."
Lottery officials and state lawmakers have taken steps to prevent a repeat.
The article also looks at a group of Princeton University graduates calling themselves Black Swan Capital that's "won millions in recent years" by targetting state lottery drawings with unusually favorable odds.
"State lottery directors say they are seeing more organized efforts to buy lottery tickets in bulk," according to the article, "but that the groups are largely operating legally and transparently..."
the biggest theft from the people of Texas? (Score:5, Funny)
So are the people who allowed this to happen, the Texas lottery officials that were not smart enough to see this coming and create rules to prevent it, going to be charged for the theft?
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Re:the biggest theft from the people of Texas? (Score:4)
Why should they be charged for theft? They bought lottery tickets. The fact they bought a whole bunch of them at once doesn't make it illegal or unethical.
I didn't say the people who bought the tickets, I said the Texas lottery officials as they did not create rules to prevent this. Honestly this is mostly a sarcastic post that if Dan Patrick wants someone strung up for theft, the people who bought the tickets aren't responsible, the people who did not prevent this from happening with the lottery are, if anyone actually wants to consider this to be theft.
Re: the biggest theft from the people of Texas? (Score:2)
There's only one rule/law you need to solve this and several other "problems" at once: cap the jackpot at an amount where expected value of a ticket doesn't exceed its price. Seems like that's more a legislative call than an administrative one.
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I said the Texas lottery officials as they did not create rules to prevent this.
Why would they? This is part of the nature of a lottery: if you buy a ticket with every possible combination on it then one of them will win. If you don't want someone to do that for some reason then you need to either limit the payout or increase the number of possible combinations to make it not worth their while but changing the rules to try and prevent a legitimate feature of a lottery would itself be unethical and unfair.
You have to remember that they took a risk doing this: had one or two other pe
Re: the biggest theft from the people of Texas? (Score:1)
And just because the payout wasn't big doesn't cancel the fact that the buildup of $ was from people buying tickets and NOT winning.
If the state isn't putting money into the pile and the total payout the input, it's working as intended.
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Why should they be charged for theft? They bought lottery tickets. The fact they bought a whole bunch of them at once doesn't make it illegal or unethical.
I didn't say the people who bought the tickets, I said the Texas lottery officials as they did not create rules to prevent this. Honestly this is mostly a sarcastic post that if Dan Patrick wants someone strung up for theft, the people who bought the tickets aren't responsible, the people who did not prevent this from happening with the lottery are, if anyone actually wants to consider this to be theft.
Why would they... Even after paying out the winnings (which I suspect would have been denied) they're probably still up millions from ticket sales as it wasn't just the winners who bought them.
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So are the people who allowed this to happen, the Texas lottery officials that were not smart enough to see this coming and create rules to prevent it, going to be charged for the theft?
This is not a new thing. Stefan Mandel, in 1992, with his syndicate, famously bought every combination for a lottery in Virginia (and won). States adjusted the rules in an attempt to prevent a repeat, but, apparently, people are smarter than at least some lottery officials.
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In most cases, they don't outlaw it. They just make it very difficult to buy lottery tickets in bulk with pre-selected numbers.
I can buy one ticket. I can buy ten tickets. All legally. So why can't I buy 25.8 million? Where should the line be drawn?
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The reason for not allowing massive bulk purchases is that it favours people who are already wealthy enough to afford to buy so many tickets. To encourage people to play you want the lottery to feel like everyone has an equal chance, or at least close to that. 10 tickets is still only a 10 in many millions chance of winning, barely better than 1 in many millions.
Re:the biggest theft from the people of Texas? (Score:5, Insightful)
So are the people who allowed this to happen, the Texas lottery officials that were not smart enough to see this coming and create rules to prevent it, going to be charged for the theft?
Well, they could always shut this entire lottery operation down altogether to completely preve, oh that's right. I almost forgot who the real profiteers are.
The arrogance of them labeling this "theft" when the lottery is little more than a tax on the addicted and the poor, is quite ass-tastic.
Ignorance, not Arrogance (Score:2)
The arrogance of them labeling this "theft"
That seems more like gross ignorance rather than arrogance. Some fraction of every ticket purchased goes to the lottery organizer i.e. Texas. So, by purchasing 25 million tickets these people literally gave money to Texas, the exact opposite of stealing it.
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The arrogance of them labeling this "theft"
That seems more like gross ignorance rather than arrogance. Some fraction of every ticket purchased goes to the lottery organizer i.e. Texas. So, by purchasing 25 million tickets these people literally gave money to Texas, the exact opposite of stealing it.
They’re calling it “theft” because some “greedy” group of assholes stepped in and prevented the State from grabbing even more profits by allowing the lottery to roll over without a winner. Again and again and again.
The rollovers creating bigger lottery payouts and all the related hype driving the purchasing of tickets, is the REAL revenue generator. This is the reason they added numbers to lotteries, and the reason we regularly have lotteries like the Powerball reach into the
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How? If the state stopped running the lottery, organized crime would jump right back in.
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So are the people who allowed this to happen, the Texas lottery officials that were not smart enough to see this coming and create rules to prevent it, going to be charged for the theft?
Well, they could always shut this entire lottery operation down altogether to completely preve, oh that's right. I almost forgot who the real profiteers are.
The arrogance of them labeling this "theft" when the lottery is little more than a tax on the addicted and the poor, is quite ass-tastic.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the poor tax either.
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In a city that is notoriously in the middle of a desert (and so, you'd expect, extremely vulnerable to water-supply disruption ; which any terrorist worth the name has long-since worked out), the problem with cement overshoes is ... ?
Yeah, I know - the cement is definitely bad for the skin, and not great for helping running away from mobsters or Presidential pussy-grabbers. But other than that?
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And is also really well monitored so you'd be stupid to dump bodies there?
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Sorry, if this is the reservoir I'm thinking of, didn't they find bodies in it, including at least one in a cement filled barrel, when the water level recently dropped hugely?
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Is that the reservoir they made by damming the Grand Canyon? No, that's on the Colorado plateau. And Las Vegas is not Colorado. It has prostitutes, so Nevada?
Meteor (Barringer) crater? Or did they use one of the nukes at the Trinity site to make a reservoir?
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One could always drive out deep into the desert, plop these folks down in their cement shoes, and drive away.
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At that time, Vegas was a place where millions of suckers flew in every year on their own nickel and left behind about a billion dollars. But at night, you couldn't see
the desert that surrounds Las Vegas. But it's in the desert where lots of the town's problems are solved.
Got a lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. Except you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking abo
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You'd have no problem being driven out to the middle of one of these deserts, and having your feet encased in concrete, then left there?
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I'm certainly glad the private sector has eliminated fraud and other crimes. Do you even know what you sound like?
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The mob running Vegas is not the private sector being superior at rooting out fraud. Beating the house at their own game while following all the rules isn't fraud. The mob killed because they were embarrassed. Killing someone because they embarrassed you is childish and petty, which makes perfect sense since all members of any mob are stupid, pretty children who never actually grew up.
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Maybe they're referring to negligence from the lotto designers. THAT was the theft, from carelessness.
Exactly what I'm referring to, but I'm pretty sure the lawmaker has no interest going after the lottery managers.
It's not fair... (Score:3)
...but perfectly legal.
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When it comes to making money, those who already have money have an advantage over those who do not.
It's a universal truth, even if you replace "money" with "power" or whatever.
Re: It's not fair... (Score:2)
Still, legally sound.
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How is it not "fair"? What exactly is "fair" in a lottery? The odds of winning with a single ticket are way less than being struck by lightning. Lotteries mostly pray on the poor, weak, or stupid. I wouldn't bother worrying about "fair". One could argue it isn't "fair" to even have a lottery in the first place.
What the investors did was not against the rules, was legal, hurt nobody, paid a crapload of money to Texas, and they did put a lot of work into doing it. Oh well- no like outcome, then change t
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Lotteries mostly pray on the poor, weak, or stupid.
Pray, prey... Same difference...
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LOL :)
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Lotteries mostly pray on the poor, weak, or stupid.
Pray, prey... Same difference...
Well played!
Or is that "well pleyed"?
Voltaire did it first (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, the Pennsylvania Lottery (Score:2)
had, in not-too-small and not-too-obfuscated, fine print, that the expected winnings of the lottery tickets were intended to be 50% and that the lottery funded various old-age social benefit programs.
I didn't look too closely at the time, but given that I've read about various flavors of prize roll-over schemes and other kinds of cryptographic flaws affecting the Massachusetts lottery, the Ontario lottery, and now the Texas lottery, I can only assume that the someone who ran the Pennsylvania lottery before
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Pretty sure what you read about "expected winnings" was defined as sales minus payouts over time, not per game.
Even if this group had not bought all their tickets, the Texas lottery would still have paid out (almost) the same jackpot.
They are trying to stop this because it messes with their marketing (why buy a ticket if only rich people are going to win?), not because it changed the payout percentage.
Re: Back in the day, the Pennsylvania Lottery (Score:2)
No. 40.47% of ticket sales in the entire winner-to-winner cycle provides the seed for the annuity calculation and the cash-value prize. While the Texas Lottery uses an estimation of the current drawings' ticket sales to arrive at an advertised jackpot, the actual cash payout and annuity uses actual sales. In the case where they overestimated sales and advertised a too-big jackpot, the
A grifter will scream the loudest (Score:2)
Texas is VERY Christian (Score:2)
Re: Texas is VERY Christian (Score:5, Informative)
Texas is a 50-50 place that skews a little red across the board. Electoral margins for statewide offices are usually under 10% and the Texas Democratic party isn't a rump entity the way the California or Massachusetts Republican parties are.
Places with competitive elections are usually better run no matter which party *usually* wins because the margins are thin enough that anyone knows they can get kicked out of office for excessive stupidity.
And in such places unpopular policies usually don't get enacted and popular policies usually do. See above. If Texas likes guns* it's because the majority of Texans do. If Texas doesn't like weed it's because the majority of Texans don't. This is democracy.
And this stands in contrast to places like Massachusetts where there is no opposition party and a supermajority of the legislature runs unopposed. So they don't pass stuff with broad popular support and do pass stuff that the small number of activists who have their ear demand. Sometimes the obstinance works leftward like when they passed drivers licenses for illegal immigrants and sometimes it works rightward when they donâ(TM)t give statewide plastic bag bans or single payer healthcare the time of day.
*Texas ain't no wild west utopia. Private gun free zones have the force of law and it's effectively illegal to carry in any major city since most businesses are gun free zones. This is why many of the louder voices in the gun rights movement rail against gun free zones. They hail from Texas where gun free zones are legally binding and omnipresent.
Re: Texas is VERY Christian (Score:2)
Re: Texas is VERY Christian (Score:2)
Okay sure. And here in Massachusetts it's a mercy when the legislature even posts the language of the bill they're voting on before it becomes law (since they sometimes declare it an emergency act), so you can't even call your state rep to even complain about anything specific.
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Oh yes, Massachusetts, that poorly run left wing state, with the highest income per capita in the US
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Texas is pretty weird about alcohol. They have "precincts" where alcohol is/is not allowed. One side of the street is legal, the other side is not. They also forced drinkers to be "members of a club" and as a result, they came out with a "Unicard" which made you a "member of all of the clubs".
A state where law and fundamentalist religion is a mix.
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Oddly, cannabis is basically legal in-practice in Texas due to a legal loophole in a bill that was intended to allow the growing of non-intoxicating hemp. This has allowed dispensaries of intoxicating cannabis to pop up all over the state. The legislature has a bill out to close the loophole but it may not make it through the Texas House.
It is possible the State made money on this. (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't look up any stats on the Texas lottery, but likely there are public details to analyze the following.
It is quite possible that these guys not only did not defraud Texas, but even "made" the State some money, in a relative sense.
Remember, the lottery works by lots of people buying tickets and losing. The money accumulates. Eventually, someone wins, but the money won is just a percentage of all money accumulated. As quoted : "[Then Texas announced no winner in an earlier lottery, rolling its jackpot into another drawing three days later.]"
The $95M they made was a percentage of something bigger. Instead of the total fund being funded by millions of individual citizens paying $1 (or whatever the ticket price is), it was funded by 1 entity buying 1M tickets (or whatever the exact number). Either way, 1M tickets-dollars were transacted. If done legally, it is all the same to the lottery and its bank account. Whatever they put in, it was a small percentage of what everyone else added, and that is where their winnings came from.
The money they won was already there in part, from reserves from earlier play cycles. The money they put in likewise feeds the kitty for next cycles. Even if they did not play, other people are putting money in. Regardless who is putting their money in, as they do, the coffers swell, and if one entity puts in "way more", the coffers swell by that much more. If they bought "1 million" tickets, and it was 1 million more than would have been bought by the public, then the lottery, which keeps a percentage, made more than if those guys hadn't played.
They got a lot, but the state also got more than had they not played. The only true hurt is that other players were unfairly disadvantaged. But even on that point, they did not steal the game, and it was still possible that another player or players could have won it all or split it with them.
That is probably why they have done so for a long time and stayed under the radar, because it is unsavory but not illegal, and the lotteries are still making good money - or possibly even more money.
The problem is not that they stole anything - they played square, if not so fair. And that is the heart of the issue it seems to me.
1 - The state got hoodwinked, bamboozled, egg-on-face, pants-down, call it what you will, and nobody wants that embarrassment.
2 - There is a bit of of "gee whiz, I wish I thought of that, lucky sob's."
3 - It is genuinely unfair to the playing public who expects a fair chance at winning.
The just need to change the rules to limit how many tickets one can buy, and a system to catch violations.
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Yes they made profit for the lottery commission by buying the 28.5 million tickets.
The prize fund is only ever a percentage of the ticket sales, a quick google says 65% of ticket sales goes into the prize fund, 25% to the foundation school fund, 5% to the retailer that sold the ticket (so these guys would have got 5% of their 28.5m back since they were acting as retailers), leaving 5% presumably for the organisers of the lottery.
Someone was going to win the jackpot sooner or later, and this only happened be
Re: It is possible the State made money on this. (Score:2)
Limiting tickets per second seems like an easy fix. Just add a 1 sec delay to every purchase request.
Re: It is possible the State made money on this. (Score:2)
You can see the effect quite easily in the Texas Lottery's last jackpot estimation worksheet, where instead of selling 7M tickets between drawings with a $68M jackpot the week before, they sold 28M tickets that week. What's strange is that they don't seem to report selling enough to cover TFA's 28.5M tickets attributed to the organization, let alone any tickets, presumably at least 7M, to the public.
Statistics (Score:2)
It is genuinely unfair to the playing public who expects a fair chance at winning.
No it is not. The public's chance of winning is unaffected by other people buying tickets.What it does mean is that a public winner may end up sharing the prize with the syndicate but that prize will be much larger because of the large number of tickets purchased by the syndicate. In addition, the syndicate is still taking a signficant risk: they may be guraranteed a win but if several members of the public also get the winning combindation the syndicate may not make enough money to cover their expenses.
How is this part legal? (Score:3)
The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals.
Does Texas allow anyone and everyone to buy ticket-printing terminals? Are no checks done to see who buys these machines? Wouldn't these folks have had to tie back to the Texas lottery so whatever safety precautions (if any) are printed on the ticket are registered? Does Texas not log where tickets are printed?
There are a whole bunch of questions about how Texas runs their lottery and the apparently non-existent security.
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Does Texas allow anyone and everyone to buy ticket-printing terminals? Are no checks done to see who buys these machines?
It's Texas, so 1) yes; and 2) I doubt it.
Re:How is this part legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
What are the questions? It's a machine that produces lottery tickets in exchange for money, any news agency can get one. Where was the security breach here? Every ticket was bought and paid for. The only effort here was that they went through hoops to be able to do it in bulk. No one was cheated other than people who think that other people being good at math is somehow unfair. And they were only cheated by the department of education.
Hidden Truth In Plain Sight (Score:5, Insightful)
Early this month, the state's lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called the crew's win "the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas."
Uh, no. The Texas State Lottery itself is the biggest theft in history from the people of Texas.
Same can be said for any State Lottery. People in general are very bad at understanding a statistical models and even worse at making good risk/benefit calculations. So the rubes are milked and this is legal because a few of them win and the rest dream of being one of the few. Also there is maybe a fig leaf "helping public education" message makes it seem somehow virtuous.
It amounts to extra taxation on the poor, because rich people don't play state lotteries much.
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The problem is, that people are prone to gambling.
Otherwise a small investment in a lottery ticket is not necessarily a bad thing, if you see it as something you buy (e.g. assuming the money is just gone afterward) and do not except a guaranteed win after some time. You should now that the expected value is negative and you're buying the thrill of hoping on the one profiting from the outliers. You don't buy a win, you buy a small chance of a win. Which may be more exciting than doing something boring with a
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Has it ever occurred to you that one don't need any understanding of statistical models when it dawns on people, rich or poor, that lotteries are a voluntary tax that only a damn fool would pay?
But no, you had to drag in the tired worn out poor vs rich knee-slap argument.
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Would you rather it be the state or the mob running lotteries. That's the choice, because people are going to gamble one way or another.
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Biggest theft from the people of Texas? (Score:1)
The house doesn't always win. (Score:2)
The objective of state lotteries is to legally separate chumps from their money in the manner of other gambling.
Lotteries are an ignorance tax but play is not limited to the ignorant.
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But if nobody had blanketed the possibilities and won, they'd roll the jackpot over again, and be able to draw a lot more suckers. Now that it's back to a base payout, most of those suckers are going to stay home next week.
Yes, it's completely legal. It's still an exploit, and it should surprise nobody if they decide to put a limit on the number of tickets any one person can have an ownership stake in. Otherwise you could still see the equivalent of Sudafed smurfing, only for lottery tickets. How dare anyon
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But if nobody had blanketed the possibilities and won, they'd roll the jackpot over again, and be able to draw a lot more suckers. Now that it's back to a base payout, most of those suckers are going to stay home next week.
That's a silly take. People constantly win lottery, jackpots are not necessary for a lottery to be profitable.
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You've never seen the crazy lines when Powerball gets into the hundreds of millions? Someone blanketing the possible combinations makes sure this will not happen. As soon as the value of the pot (allowing for a likely split) exceeds the cost of covering all the options, someone is going to try. They do want it to be won eventually or the grift will become too transparent, so simply increasing the number of combinations has not been successful in the past. It's a difficult balancing act, and it may be one wh
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The house always wins.
Mod the parent up, please (Score:2)
Re:The house doesn't always win. (Score:4, Informative)
You don't seem to understand how that phrase works. "The house always wins" implies that the house makes a profit, nothing more. In traditional casino gambling this is done through stacking the odds such as the 0 on the roulette wheel. In the state lottery the house wins by not paying out the full amount based on ticket sales. A $1m payout does not mean people collectively paid $1m, they paid more than that.
In this case buying every number is perfectly fine. They paid the money. They got the jackpot like any other normal person and the "house" made a profit on the sale of tickets.
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So change the rules then (Score:2)
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Just if one other person had won they would have still lost a bit of money. It would be hilarious if two groups did it at the same time, guaranteeing record profits for the state lottery, and also guaranteeing that both groups lose more money than they win.
They spent around $24.5M on tickets (assuming they were able to keep the 5% sales commission), took home $57.8M (the lump-sum payout of the $95M pool).
If one other person had won each winner would take home $28.9M, still a small net profit.
Re: So change the rules then (Score:2)
It ain't cheatin' (Score:5, Informative)
It ain't cheatin', if you're just doing math.
Fixed that for you? (Score:2)
Why would this be theft? (Score:3)
As far as I see they played by the rules. And I don't even see the problem for the "bank". They had a full jackpot, someone won it by buying a lot of tickets. The jackpot is empty now and the person made profit. Also nobody else had a winning ticket and got less money. So who was deprived of their money? The lottery nevertheless made money, because not all money from every ticket goes into the jackpot.
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I can't see where it's theft, or even any sort of illegal or grey area. They paid for the tickets fair and square, by the lottery's own admission. There's no limit on the number of tickets one person can buy. One person buying $25.6 million worth of tickets or 25.6 million people buying a single $1 ticket, the outcome's the same. And the tactic is a well-known one for gamblers: bet when the payout exceeds the odds of winning. That's all this group did: see that the payout for winning would be greater than t
Lazlo - Real Genius (Score:5, Funny)
One of the sub-plots in Real Genius is Lazlo - the eccentric grad student. He participates in the "Fritolay Sweepstakes"
Lazlo: No. These are entries into the Frito-Lay Sweepstakes. "No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want" - so I am.
Chris: That's great! How many times?
Lazlo: Well, this batch makes it one million six hundred and fifty thousand. I should win thirty-two point six percent of the prizes, including the car.
Chris: That kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn't it?
Lazlo: They set up the rules, and lately I've come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs.
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But its still a gamble (Score:3)
If someone else had picked the right numbers then they would have had to share the jackpot, so they would have lost money.
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But they did the math that the chance of them losing is as low as the chance of someone else winning, which is known to be small.
But but but... (Score:2)
This raises some big unanswered questions (Score:3)
Namely, while he is a Joker...
- Is he a Smoker?
- What about a Midnight Toker?
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'Cause I speak of the pompatus of love.
A Long Tradition (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, they did say that as a result, the phrase "enter as often as you wish" is no longer part of the industry's spiels.
I liked the ending: "The Caltech students remained unrepentant. The only regret they expressed was at having used a computer. As Steve Klein, one of the ringleaders of the stunt, explained, "We should have used offset printing. It's cheaper. It cost us about $500 for the computer.""
60 millions... (Score:2)
I'm quite sure that the One Star rated state has been robbed directly and indirectly much more by companies and their own local politicians...
He's a Tasmanian! (Score:2)
Zeljko's partner was (is?) David Walsh, who used his gambling winnings to build the Museum of Old and New Art (MoNA) in Hobart.
One strategy they ran was to bet on every horse in a race, using on-track bookies. Back then the bookies calculated their odds independently, so by picking the bookie with the highest odds for each horse, Zeljko and David could often guarantee a profit.
Texas lottery didn't lose any $$$$....... (Score:2)
Gaming the system (Score:2)
So your saying someone or some group of very rich people gamed the system and won? I am shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
Are people mad bacuse they could not do it with their limited funds? Did Texas not profit by this? It is more or less that the state lotteries do not want you to know it can be done. Almost like the day traders getting hoodwinked by the speed traders in the market. Again, money has the advantage to make more money.
The real thieves are the lottery (Score:2)
For every dollar that goes in, only a quarter comes out as funding. Ironically the funding goes into education despite this lottery essentially being a tax on stupidity.
Also, I don't know what the big deal is with somebody betting on every single combination. If the lottery doesn't like that possibility then change the rules for jackpots, e.g. if the jackpot exceeds the chances of winning, then roll the excess over to the next draw or just give a chunk away as additional funding.
Oh the irony (Score:1)
They Deserved to Win (Score:1)
Not even close to the biggest theft against Texas (Score:2)
$58 million is a lot, but it's minuscule in comparison to the $11 billion effectively stolen from the people of Texas during the 2021 Winter blackout by natural gas producers.
https://www.texasconsumer.org/... [texasconsumer.org]
"beat" the lottery? (Score:2)
He didn't beat the lottery. He spent capital to remove volatility in his expected returns without affecting the expected return.
This is like saying someone "beat" the lottery by buying a ticket only after the jackpot gets big and then they hit. The expected return rate of both strategies is the same.
Simple Problem, Simple Fix (Score:2)
The oddsmakers at the Texas lotto no-doubt assumed that lottery tickets would be bought with effectively random numbers such that in all probability it would go several cycles without a grand prize winner. If an entity is able to buy every single combination, then the assumption of a randomness goes away. If it were common knowledge that an entity like this would guaranteed win the next cycle, then ordinary folks would stop buying tickets once the jackpot hit a certain point, so they have to put a stop to i