Michigan Lottery Whupped

This was in UK news this week. Apparently a couple spotted an exploit for the Michigan Lottery and caned it over a decade for $23M
https://www.thisisinsider.com/how-jerry-marge-selbee-won-the-lottery-2019-1

"A small-town Michigan couple recently sat down with "60 Minutes" to tell the unlikely story of how they used "basic arithmetic" to find a loophole in the lottery that helped them win $26 million over nearly a decade."

I don't know if it's already been discussed here. Sorry if it has.

I watched the story from 60 minutes. The advantage was obvious, so I’m surprised that more people didn’t figure it out. My problem is that I would never have even looked into a lottery game to get that far.

The 26M win is misleading, because the profits were more like 3-4M.

Quote: CrystalMath

I watched the story from 60 minutes. The advantage was obvious, so I’m surprised that more people didn’t figure it out. My problem is that I would never have even looked into a lottery game to get that far.

The 26M win is misleading, because the profits were more like 3-4M.

I hope they still made a big profit post tax.

I recall this being discussed some time ago. Basically, they buy as many combinations as possible to take advantage of spillover distribution when the top prize is capped. I think it came up because the lottery was asking the state to pass laws limiting sales per person or group.

Edit: Earlier post here: beating-the-lottery

Quote: OnceDear

This was in UK news this week. Apparently a couple spotted an exploit for the Michigan Lottery and caned it over a decade for $23M
https://www.thisisinsider.com/how-jerry-marge-selbee-won-the-lottery-2019-1

"A small-town Michigan couple recently sat down with "60 Minutes" to tell the unlikely story of how they used "basic arithmetic" to find a loophole in the lottery that helped them win $26 million over nearly a decade."

I don't know if it's already been discussed here. Sorry if it has.

There was another Lottery game that was exploited over a few years. Cash Win all. A few IT Students found a loophole in this game and exploited it like many people would. They found that aiming for the SECOND prize Jackpot could net a hefty win. They worked in teams of two or something like that and each team bought up staggering amounts of Cash Win all tickets. Like $200 worth for each person, so if there were 8 people all in it, that was $400 worth of tickets for a team and altogether, they spent $1600 a trip. If they did this once a week, every week for let's say 4 years, they spent roughly $333,000.They ended up winning like two million dollars split all between them. Not too shabby on a roughly $333,000 investment. To put this into perspective, a guy won $500,000 on a lucky game in a Casino and put it right back into bad playing games the same day and had nothing to show for it. These IT Students played less and got way more than the guy who list half a million after winning it. The Lottery not only pulled the game after these Students beat the game, they put a limit on how many tickets a Lottery Retailer could sell to one person.