The mathematician’s theory that saw him win the lottery 14 times

Winning the lottery is often considered a once-in-a-lifetime event. Winning it twice would be extraordinary, and more than that seems nearly impossible.

However, this isn’t the case for Stefan Mandel, a Romanian mathematician who developed and perfected a method to win the lottery an astonishing fourteen times. He kept his methodology secret for a year before revealing it, according to La Información.

Mandel’s repeated successes, grounded in mathematics, forced some countries where he played to change their lottery rules. In the 1980s, he moved to Australia, where he gained citizenship. This allowed him to access the financial activities of the British Commonwealth and bet on multiple lotteries simultaneously. He then created an investment fund, governed by the relevant economic legislation, with one goal in mind: to win the lottery and distribute the profits.

How to win the lottery according to Mandel

Here’s how his strategy works: Mandel bought numerous lottery tickets in a calculated and intentional manner, considering the total number of possible combinations. For a lottery where you choose six numbers from 1 to 40, there are 3,838,380 possible combinations. He targeted lotteries where the jackpot was at least three times the number of possible combinations.

The third step was to invest the necessary money to buy all possible combinations from different betting houses. For a jackpot of $10 million, with each ticket costing $1, playing every possible combination would yield a profit of $6,161,620.

Although this required significant time and money, it brought Mandel substantial profits. Once he published his method, the United States changed the rules of several of its lotteries. Mandel once played the Virginia lottery, where each ticket cost $1.

Using this method led to investigations by the Financial Intelligence Authority (FIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). As a result, many lottery systems today have protection mechanisms to ensure that the purchase of tickets does not exceed the value of the prize at stake.

In Australia, he won the lottery up to 12 times, prompting authorities to crack down on his entire operation. They banned groups of people from buying tickets simultaneously. However, this law did not prohibit individuals from purchasing tickets, so he continued to buy and increase his wealth through a lottery company.

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Original article written by Raúl Izquierdo, translated with the assistance of AI and edited by Joe Brennan.