The Man Who Won Lottery 14 Times

What is a lottery

The lottery is a gamble in which many people buy lottery tickets to get a chance to win a given prize. Lotteries are famous for their huge prize pools, but on the other hand, with an incredibly low probability of winning the highest possible winning prize.

There are two commonly used ways of organizing a lottery. Eighter, there is a lottery with a fixed winning prize, which is a risk for the organizer when not enough tickets get sold. Or the prize pool is given by the number of lottery tickets that get sold. The latter has much higher media coverage since sometimes participants can win a huge amount of money. For instance, the largest prize pool in USA history yet, the 2016 Superbowl. Prize pool of this lottery had reached 1,586 billion dollars. The problem was that the chance of winning was around 1 in 292,2 million. The winning prize was split between three winners, making them the richest lottery winners ever in USA history.

But there was a man who did not count on his luck and made himself a considerable profit with his mathematical skills and won a lottery 14 times. His name is Stefan Mandel.

Who is Stephan Mandel?

Stephan Mandel is a Romanian economist and a very smart mathematician. In the 1950s, he wanted to leave the communist country, but with the salary of roughly 8 dollars a month and family, he needed to find a way to make more money.

Since the poverty in Romania did not offer him many chances to earn much-needed money, the government lottery seemed to be the only legitimate way to make money to leave the country. He put his mathematical skills in the use and eventually came up with an algorithm that guaranteed a second-place prize by predicting five out of six winning numbers.

First Mandel’s lottery win

His first win came after four years of waiting and testing the technique when he teamed up with three of his friends to buy the needed amount of tickets. Even though they looked for the second prize, they actually won the first prize.

As Mandel states, they won 18 months of Romanian salary. Even after splitting the winning prize among four people, it made him enough money to leave the communist country.

12 wins while living in Australia

Since people from communistic Romania could not freely move out of the country, he had to bribe the foreign ministry officials to leave to Israel with his family. Not too long after he moved to Australia.

Australian citizenship allowed him to participate in lotteries and start a business in Australia and even in other commonwealth countries like the UK.

In Australia, Mandel came up with a much less complicated plan to make money off of lotteries. He basically made a business venture for winning lotteries. He did it by convincing investors betters to invest in his project so he can buy tickets of all the possible winning combinations, which would guarantee him the first prize. After winning tickets had been collected, Mandel took a large portion of the winnings for himself, and the rest spread out to the participants. In Australia, Mandel won 12 lotteries. Unfortunately for him, the government made his business impossible to continue by many laws and regulations.

His last and biggest lottery win

After the Australian government basically stopped his business, he moved to the United States, since there were no regulations to stop him from repeating his tactic. After a lot of time studying the USA lottery market, he ended up choosing the Virginia lottery.

To guarantee the jackpot of over 27 million dollars, his team had to buy 7,1 million lottery tickets to get all the possible winning combinations. After getting support from mostly Australian investors, who on average, invested around 2,500 dollars, Mandel’s team could buy all the needed combinations. They printed all the lottery tickets in Australia.

Then they sent them to the USA, where Mandel negotiated a lower price on buying tens of thousands of tickets in various lottery ticket sellers. Soon after, stores ran out of tickets, so Mandel’s team could not buy all the possible combinations and missed around 1 million combinations. Fortunately for Mandel, he still managed to win his 14th jackpot. This time worth over 27 million dollars and more than 3 million dollars in other winning combinations.

After the win of Mandel’s group, Virginia State lottery questioned the validity of Mandel’s actions. FBI and Australian Security commission were also evolved in investigating. But eventually, it was proven that Mandel’s group did not violate any rules, all the tickets were valid and finally got their jackpot paid off. These complications were part of the reason why Mandel never came back for another lottery in the USA.

His life after all the lottery winnings

Later in the 90s, Mandel began his own lottery in Gibraltar but soon after closed the business. His last try to win a lottery came in 2004 in Israel but got imprisoned for fraud. The reason was that he forgot to provide his “investors” with the actual odds of winning. Unfortunately for Mandel, that is considered to be a scam. After serving his prison time in Israel, he moved to an island in the South Pacific, where he is living to this day.

No one knows how much money Mandel made with his lottery winnings portions, but since he and his investors in total cashed around 30 million dollars, we can imagine that he is still living a good life.

Can you win a lottery this way today?

Unfortunately, Mandel’s technique would be tough to pull off in today’s lottery environment. Winning a lottery in the 90s was much easier than it is today. The reason is that there were much fewer number combinations needed to buy, and there were fewer rules to overcome. Even if you found a lottery that would require fewer tickets to purchase to secure a victory, you cannot print your lottery tickets at home as Mandel could, which makes it almost impossible to pull off these days. Buying all the lottery tickets from ticket ventures yourself is just not possible.

Even though Mandel won the lottery 14 times, it is tough to imagine how he would pull it off in today’s standards. But it does not change anything about the fact that the man is still considered a genius.

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