Winning the lottery is supposed to come down to luck. But Stefan Mandel, a Romanian-born mathematician, found a way to make the numbers work in his favor – a strategy successful enough that he and his lottery syndicate won money from lottery games 14 times.
Mandel didn’t have some sort of magical formula. Instead, he focused on mathematics.
For comparison, the odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are around 1 in 302.5 million, according to UNILAD. For the average player, those numbers make a jackpot win almost impossible.
Mandel, however, realized that there was another way to approach the game.
Who is Stefan Mandel?
His strategy centered on purchasing enough tickets to cover every possible number combination. The idea was simple in theory, although putting it into practice required enormous amounts of money and a large group of people willing to participate.
Mandel began by convincing groups of investors to pool their cash together in a lottery syndicate. With enough money behind them, they could purchase huge numbers of tickets and dramatically increase their chances of winning.
His first successful attempt brought the group $19,000. Mandel personally walked away with just under $4,000.
That payout may not sound particularly impressive today, but it gave Mandel the money he needed to take his strategy further.
He eventually moved to Australia with his family. There, he founded the International Lotto Fund, or ILF, which went on to score lottery wins across several countries, including Australia, Romania and the United States.
Won the lottery 14 times
The group did not win the jackpot every time, but its approach still produced substantial amounts of money over the years.
Mandel’s success attracted plenty of attention. Authorities and international agencies, including the CIA and FBI, became suspicious of Mandel and investigated the operation.
Ultimately, however, Mandel and the ILF were cleared.
But the legal battles took a toll on Mandel financially. After years of legal trouble, he was acquitted of the crimes he had been accused of, but his financial situation deteriorated.
New restrictions were introduced
In 1995, just three years after winning a $27 million jackpot, Mandel declared bankruptcy.
He later spent the following decade involved in various alleged investment schemes.
At the heart of his lottery strategy was an algorithm Mandel called “combinatorial condensation.” The concept relied on buying enough tickets to cover every possible combination in a particular lottery.
That approach eventually prompted changes to lottery rules in the United States.
New restrictions were introduced to prevent players from purchasing tickets in bulk and from using computer-generated tickets, effectively making it impossible for someone else to use Mandel’s strategy on the same scale.
So while Mandel managed to turn one of the world’s biggest games of chance into something resembling a mathematical exercise, today’s lottery players can’t simply follow his formula and expect the same result.
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