Earlier this month, someone in Florida became very wealthy overnight -- and without doing a lot of work to get there. Across most of the United States, anyone can go into almost any gas station or convenience store and buy themselves a Mega Millions lottery ticket. And on or around August 8, 2023, someone walked into Publix -- a grocery store -- in Neptune Beach, Florida, handed over $2, and walked away with a lottery ticket worth $1.58 billion (less if you take the lump sum prize, which you should, and even less when you account for taxes). 

And while that's a crazy amount of money, there's a reasonable chance that the victor will, eventually, go broke. While the vast majority of lottery winners manage to hold on to most of their wealth, the odds of declaring bankruptcy in the future go up if you're a big winner. As CNBC reported in 2017, "Lottery winners are more likely to declare bankruptcy within three to five years than the average American." The reasons are numerous -- some see the wealth as bottomless when it isn't, others fall victim to scammers and crime, and of course, it's hard to say no to friends and family who come asking for financial support. 

But that's now how Stafan Mandel lost it all. He lost it all, because the lottery boards sued him for cheating. Even though he hadn't.

Here's a little bit of math, but don't worry, it's easy. Let's say that the odds of winning the lottery were one in 7,059,052 -- which, not so coincidentally, is the odds of winning if you had to match six out of six numbers selected from a pool of 44. If each lottery ticket cost you $2, you could buy every single combination for about $14 million, and you'd be guaranteed to win a share of the grand prize and, for that matter, every other prize. Assuming there are no other winners -- and yes, that's a bad assumption -- if the total prize pool is more than $14 million, you'd walk away a winner, guaranteed.

There are two huge problems with that gambit, though, putting aside the multiple winners problem. First, you need $14 million, which few of us have available to us. And second, filling out seven million lottery bubble-in sheets, like the one seen above (via NPR), would take forever. But there are ways around this --- or were. All you need is a lot of automation and even more friends, or perhaps, investors.

In the 1960s, Mandel won the lottery in his home country of Romania the regular way -- with a little bit of luck. Well, that and some math. The Hustle explains: 

If a player picked 6 numbers in a 49-ball lottery, his odds of winning were 1 in 13,983,816. If he selected 15 numbers (which required purchasing 5,005 games — one for each possible combination), his odds of winning increased to 1 in 2,794. Mandel claimed that his algorithm could reduce these 5,005 combinations to just 569.

If the 6 winning numbers fell among his 15 picks, he’d be guaranteed to win at least a 2nd prize and hundreds of smaller prizes — and he’d have a 1 in 10 chance of winning the grand prize.