It is more likely to reach a ray to touch your lottery. Until an economist broke the game winning 14 times

The lottery is more an act of faith than anything else. I don’t say it, Mathematics say. In fact, there is more likely to be a ray to become a millionaire at night. It is possible that all that of the same, and that even knowing that we will not touch us, let’s continue playing to feel part of something. The problem is that there are legends that They talk about tricks and Formulas To win.

And then there is the story of Stefan Mandel.

A mathematical mind. In the mid-1990s, while millions of people worldwide continue Murify the rules Not written from the lottery applying, not magic or superstition, but an elementary probability system and a colossal logistics.

The “trick.” His formula was as basic as radical: identify those draws in which the accumulated prize It exceeded by far the total cost of acquiring all possible tickets. By converting a problem of chance into a mathematical operation with a positive statistical return, Mandel transformed the game into a profitability equation.

After successfully trying his system in his native Romania and then in Australia, Mandel perfected his strategy With a small team, developing algorithms that generated and printed millions of valid combinations for specific lotteries.

The jump to Washington. The high point of his odyssey came when he looked at the United States, where he detected that Virginia’s newly established lottery used only 44 numbersgenerating “barely” 7,059,052 possible combinations. With the boat reaching 15.5 million dollars, and after having prepared in advance A network of investorsprinters and points of sale, Mandel activated his machinery.

For two frantic days, his team managed to buy 6.4 million tickets. They did not reach the desired total, but among the paper mountain was the winning ticket. Although the feat unleashed an investigation by the FBI and the CIA, no legal violation was detected: its maneuver, although clearly outside the spirit of the game, it did not transgress any norm written in the regulations in force.

The boundaries of chance. The key to the mandel method was not in sophisticated numerical tricks, but to detect when the conditions of the game offered A structural advantage.

In this way, its formula only worked when the prize I tripled the cost To acquire all combinations and when lottery systems allowed printing tickets directly with chosen combinations, a possibility that was later prohibited in many countries precisely by cases such as yours.

Winning horse. In essence, its strategy converted the lottery into A safe betprovided that resources, time and discipline were available to execute a plan of such magnitude.

However, the profit margin was not immediate: Mandel had to distribute the profits between dozens of investors and assume considerable operational and legal costs. Even so, the system allowed him Win 14 lotteries over several years and knead a considerable fortune without resorting to traps or privileged contacts, only to applied mathematics with implacable determination.

Legacy and sunset. After his last significant victory, Mandel He retired to a paradise in the Vanuatu Islands, where he lives away from media foci. Its history, however, not only challenges the myth of fate in games of chance, but has become A mathematical legend which highlights the design gaps of many lottery systems before digitalization.

Today, with stricter regulations, limits in the purchase of tickets and automated systems, replicate its model It would be unfeasible. Thus, its feat remains one of the most forceful demonstrations of how human ingenuity, when it faces in intelligence and rigor, can alter the balance of the improbable.

Image | Barcex

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