The mathematician who created a method that won the lottery 14 times

Many dream of having a stroke of luck and that the goddess Fortuna be generous with them by awarding them a succulent lottery prize. The illusion that paying a few pesos can earn you millions is not lost even by playing for decades, but the first thing we need to consider before playing the lottery is that the odds of winning are pretty slim if not impossible.

In the Argentine lottery draw, for example, we only have one chance in 236,060,370 !.

Now there are many who are striving for this rain of millions that will make all their dreams come true. This is the case of Romanian mathematician Stefan Mandel, who not only managed to win the jackpot of a millionaire lottery draw once, but also won prizes of up to 14 times. And all thanks to a method he himself devised and perfected, using his talent with numbers.

The formula for success

Mandel devised his formula for success while working as economist in the 1950s in his native Romania. Around this time, the Romanian government offered its citizens a statewide raffle, which served as Mandel’s attempt to challenge the system and win the prize using his ingenuity and skill with numbers. .

After many calculations, he found the formula that would give him success: a combination of mathematical operations that they could predict five of the six winning numbers out of a total of 40 options.

After finding the formula, Mandel decided to put it to the test. Thus, with three friends who gladly joined the experience because they had nothing to lose, they took part in the raffle. The mathematician aspired to get a second prize, which only required five strokes, but to his surprise, all four won the first prize.

Intrigued and with money in his pocket, he decides to leave Romania to try his luck elsewhere. Fate led him to Australia in the 80s, where he quickly chooses to see if his formula would bring him the same fate as in the past.

However, being a different system, it did not attempt to predict the winning combination; With the Australian lottery, Mandel opted for another method: to get as many tickets as possible, all with different combinations.

Thus, his probabilities increased, and his method turned out to be more than successful, since managed to win 12 raffle prizes during the times it was tested. With the product, Mandel decided to start a legal investment fund employed in one job: working with his formula to win the lottery and distribute the profits.

For Mandel, it was essential to know the possible number of combinations that the draw could have. For a lottery where you have to choose six correct numbers between numbers 1 and 40, the possible outcomes are a total of 3,838,380 combinations, for which Mandel made sure to try his luck in draws that were priced three times the number of possible combinations.

He quickly got the interest of his acquaintances, which, along with the profits of his business, were invested to accumulate money for the purchase of the range of possible figures from different bookmakers. Once the prize was collected, he distributed it to all who had collaborated.

Investigation by US authorities

His success leads him to try his luck at United States, where he also won several awards which earned him some $ 30 million during your stay in North America. However, once his method was revealed, Mandel has been investigated by the FBI and CIA.

In addition, the discovery of his method led the American lottery system to change the rules relating to several of their draws, limiting the number of shares each player could acquire.

Mandel eventually emigrated to Israel in 1995, from where he attempted to replicate his commercial success, but found himself under investigation by the Securities Authority. Mandel was interrogated, posted bond, and once he was prosecuted, in 2002 he left his wife and children in the country and fled to London.

In 2004, he was sentenced to ten months in prison and fined nearly $ 30,000 because he and his partner did not disclose to their investors their true chances of winning. Mandel is raw now lives in Vanuatu, an archipelago of islands in the Pacific where he lives enjoying his enormous fortune, impossible to calculate today.

The avant-garde.

GML