European gamblers buy every ticket and win Texas Lotto lottery

Last month, my (adult) son, who is clever, asked if someone could buy every possible combination of lottery ticket to ensure a win. Yeah, it's an old idea, but he hadn't heard of it before, so it was original to him. Anyway, I said yes, in theory, but I quickly ran through several logistical challenges in securing and filing 26 million (Texas Lotto) physical pieces of paper, not to mention needing the $26 million to purchase them in the first place, as well as the fact that your win would be reduced by 37% because of taxes.

Well, a group of European gamblers did indeed buy every possible combination of Texas lotto numbers (26 million at $1 each), and won the $95 million jackpot, which paid out around $58M when taken as a lump sum, so they profited by $37M. There were presumably no taxes, as most countries don't tax gambling winnings. (The U.S. is an exception.)

Most reporting was short on details on how they handled the logistics. I figured that it if took 5 seconds to enter each combination, print the ticket, and file it (and swap toner cartridges as needed), I figure that would take 4 years for one person working non-stop. They would have had to have like 500 terminals to get the job done in 72 hours. (There are 72 hours between drawings.)

And if they had 500 terminals, but did they have 500 people working the machines? At $20/hr., that’s about $1M worth of labor, well worth it, but how do you keep the workers from stealing the tickets?

Well, I found another article that said that they did get a retail outlet to order extra terminals, and they wrote an iPad program to generate QR codes so they wouldn't have to physically punch in each combination. My reading of the law is that that's not legal, only "approved" apps can be used wirelessly at a terminal, and the gamblers' app was very much DIY, but Texas officials investigated and said no laws were broken. However, they will no longer allow low-volume retailers to order extra terminals.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/surefire-lotto-texas-win-malta-exec-london-19727984.php

The Version I Heard was, they had "almost" every combination.
Also, it ran the risk of losing millions of dollars if anyone else got the six numbers as well.

Apologies if this was covered in the article, but it was behind a paywall...anyway, the game they played was Lotto Texas, which is a straightforward 6/54 lotto, which has 25,827,165 possible draws.

With only one split they still would have come out ahead. The prize was $95M as an annuity and $58M as a lump sum, so with a shared prize, each winner would get $29M.

Quote: MichaelBluejay

With only one split they still would have come out ahead. The prize was $95M as an annuity and $58M as a lump sum, so with a shared prize, each winner would get $29M.
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Aren’t there also a few million $$ in ‘second prizes’ that the syndicate would also win?

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they may be very smart, and profited by a lot but imo they are ruining the lottery which is intended to be a fun thing for people - not a target for professional gambling organizations

without knowing I would guess that Texas is not happy about this - although they collected lots of $ from the scheme

I don't play the lottery and I won't cry myself to sleep for lottery players - just sayin

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Bad publicity yes, and might dissuade the general public from buying tickets in the future ("What's the use?" "It's rigged!"), but for that particular lottery the state collected all the money they would usually expect PLUS whatever the syndicate put in.

And if they had not all but just "almost" every combination, as mentioned above, they could have lost outright, or if more than one other person hit the big one (three or more total winners), ended in the red.

This is one time where it worked out; mostly you read about times that it did not.

The plot thickens. Reportedly, child labor was involved in the effort.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/video-raises-questions-95-million-texas-lotto-20173069.php

Anything that discourages poor, uneducated folks from using the lottery as their retirement plan is a good thing. I hope that word it is rigged is spread far and wide.

I’m surprised that any one group would actually do this let alone pull it off. Is it +ev? Yes of course. But one mistake could cost you the whole thing. If you’re wrong I’m guessing you end up losing about 50% of your $26M in tickets. But beyond that the logistics of pulling this off are a nightmare. You have to be seriously confident that you can execute it. Start with money. Getting that level of cash would be very difficult. Then the merchant has to walk into the bank to deposit it all. Perhaps they arranged to wire the merchant’s account directly and bought tickets off the terminals against their credit. Or possibly they used debit cards directly at the machine. Which is point #2. You would have to get the lottery’s blessing. They have alerts if a mom and pop shop who sells $10k a week all of a sudden sells $100k in a day, let alone $11M. The lottery prints tickets and bills the balance against the merchants account every week. They are worried that a rogue owner or employee will suddenly run up an unpaid balance and keep the tickets. Perhaps the lottery could have been satisfied if they were using debit cards as those would go directly to the lottery. Third I don’t think it was realistic at all that these machines are printing 3 tickets a second. More like a ticket every 3 seconds. I don’t know. I could be wrong. Then there’s the logistics of the merchant actually having that many rolls from the lottery available. They would need thousands of them. I’m sure the average merchant only keeps a dozen or so in stock. Also presumably the terminals would get very hot and worked from hours of printing. Then inevitably they would break and need maintenance. Finally after you actually bought 26M tickets, you would have to go through I’m guessing about a million of them to find the magic one. I’m assuming they kept the tickets organized by terminal number and then once the winning ticket was sold they could backtrack to see which terminal sold it and look through that batch of tickets. Then after that you would need to go through all the other 26M tickets and scan every one. I’m assuming that tickets that get 3 out of 6 or 4 out of 6 pay something. These would all need to be scanned and cashed and lottery tickets are only good for 6 months or a year. But I guess they pulled it off. So kudos to them.