Most people play the lottery hoping lightning will strike, but Stefan Mandel had no interest in chance. The Romanian-Australian economist won the lottery 14 times, not because he was lucky, but because he found a way to beat the system with math.
His strategy boiled down to something surprisingly simple. Mandel worked out a formula that calculated the total number of possible combinations for a lottery, then compared that to the jackpot on offer. If the jackpot was larger than the cost of buying every possible ticket, it meant a guaranteed profit. All he had to do was raise enough money to buy every combination.
Of course, Mandel couldn’t bankroll it alone. He built syndicates of investors who pooled their money, then used it to print or purchase millions of tickets. The payouts were shared, but the method was reliable as long as the math checked out. It wasn’t about luck at all – it was about running the numbers and being organized enough to pull it off.
One of his most famous wins happened in Virginia in 1992. The lottery there required players to pick six numbers between 1 and 44, creating about 7 million possible combinations. When the jackpot swelled to $27 million, Mandel’s group saw their chance. They printed and bought more than 6 million tickets, covering nearly every possible outcome. As expected, they didn’t just hit the jackpot—they also collected a huge number of smaller prizes, pushing the haul even higher.
Naturally, this level of gaming the system didn’t go unnoticed. The FBI and CIA investigated the operation, trying to determine if Mandel had crossed any legal lines. But technically, he hadn’t. Everything was done within the rules that existed at the time. Still, lottery commissions weren’t eager to see this repeated. Laws and procedures were quickly changed to prevent anyone from trying the same scheme again.
Mandel’s success was less about gambling and more about exploiting a loophole in how lotteries worked. It required sharp math skills, logistical planning, and a willingness to take risks on an enormous scale. Today, pulling off the same trick would be impossible. Lotteries have become more complex, and buying millions of tickets at once isn’t feasible anymore.
It’s the kind of story that feels almost like a movie script, but it really happened. Mandel’s run stands as one of the cleverest examples of using math to turn the odds of chance into near certainty.
