14-Time Lottery Winner Reveals His Secret To The World

You know what they say. When the odds of something happening are really low. It's like winning the lottery. Okay. What would you say if I told you that this man over the course of 30 years actually won the lottery 14 times in a row? It sounds unlikely, but this is the true story of mathematical genius Estefan Mendel. It all started in the 1960s, when a poor Romanian accountant was trying to make ends meet and feed his family. His salary was so low that he was getting desperate. Living on basically $88 a month was torture. Mandel could not find a job with a higher salary at that time and resorting to illegal activities was against his morals. Then a solution occurred to him that perhaps only he could think of the lottery. Now, to most people, that would be crazy. I mean. What chance do you have? One in a million. I don't think you will be surprised if I tell you that it can be even less depending on the number of tickets distributed. Winning combinations and other factors.

He called himself a weekend mathematician who was fascinated with numbers. And he was. He spent every free minute from work and family life, poring over articles on mathematics and working on his own algorithm. And finally, after several years, he was ready. Mandil called the result of his research combinatorial condensation. He did not want to reveal the method, but he claimed that in a lottery with six winning numbers in total, he could accurately predict five of them. That brought the probability of winning the lottery from one in several million to one in several thousand. A drastic drop, right? Using his algorithm and with the support of his friends and family, Mandé was able to buy huge amounts of tickets with numbers that were more likely to win and the risk was compensated. He won the first prize, which was about $19,000, then what he owed to everyone who had helped him, and still had quite a bit left over. His net profit was $4,000, enough to start a new life. And that was exactly what he did.

Mandel packed up his family's things and went to Western Europe, where he moved from place to place for four years. However, that lifestyle is exhausting when he is not alone, so he eventually settled in Australia, quite far from Europe. There he decided to continue his research on the lottery business and was successful. You see, when he got his Australian citizenship, he had access to all the Commonwealth resources available to anyone with this status, and that meant he could participate in the UK lottery system, which turned out to be much less complicated than the Romanian that he had deciphered earlier. So he sat down and took a good look at the system, and after a while, he had an idea that would make him a millionaire and a prisoner. But that's getting ahead of the story a bit. So let's first see what came to Mandel's mind. His new and advanced method was pretty cool in its simplicity. When he realized that in order to win each time he just needed to buy all the number combinations there were.

Sounds crazy, I know. But still he made it work with a very deliberate solution. His plan included six steps. First, he would calculate the total number of possible combinations in any given lottery. For example, one. You have to choose six numbers from one to 40 you will have 3,838,380 combinations if you count them yourself. If you do not believe me. Second, you would find lotteries, where the jackpot was at least three times as large as the number of combinations. This was a requirement because otherwise he would not earn anything at all or even lose money. You will see why in a few moments third, he would redeem money to buy each combination. This was the hardest part of all. I would convince people that his method worked and I persuaded them. She would go to sponsor his project by buying as many lottery tickets as they could and sending them to him, promising to share the profits between the investors and himself. So after a while, his ideas became popular enough to attract hundreds of backers willing to win a piece of the jackpot.

4th, it would print literally millions of tickets. By doing this, she ensured that every possible winning combination was somewhere in those millions. And that, in turn, made Manuel a multiple winner of every lottery out there. He not only won the jackpot, but he also won the second, third and other smaller prizes. 5th, having printed the tickets, he would deliver them to the official distributors. They had no choice but to accept the tons of. Paper that Mendel had brought them, because as crazy as it seemed, the whole operation was legal. The British Commonwealth and Australian authorities simply couldn't believe that anyone would be so audacious as to do something like that. Stephen Mandel was unique and he probably knew it himself. And finally, the 6th step was to take the prize. And this is exactly why he needed the jackpot to be three times the number of possible combinations. After winning, Mandel had to pay his investors their fair share.

That meant that the more supporters he had and the more they paid, the more money he had to hand over after winning the lottery. But that was not all, as Mandel also had other costs to pay, including printing and logistics, for which he would eventually be left with a not-so-surprising sum in his hands. If the jackpot had been smaller, he probably would have found himself with less money than he had before the whole thing. Hence the amount of the prize. The plan was incredibly simple, now that I think about it, but at the same time he needed a lot of effort. Estefan Mandel worked day and night to make it happen and over the years he managed to create what he called a lottery syndicate, a network of hundreds of investors who believed in his method and were more than willing to help. With the 1980s, with the computer age, and Mandel was more than happy to embrace new technology. He bought several computers and a dozen printers that worked on an algorithm he created, and completing the combinations became easy.

By the end of the decade, he and his syndicate had won 12 lotteries in Australia and the UK. But such a scheme could not have gone unnoticed, although it was perfectly legal. The authorities resented that a person could perform such a trick, so Australia's lottery laws were changed twice. First they banned printing tickets at home. Now you had to buy them firsthand from a store and then bulk buying was banned. That made Mandel look to the west. Despite the many successes of him. They had brought him modest amounts of money. What I sent wanted now was to make headlines around the world. So he won the Virginia lottery in the United States. It was 1992 and the jackpot was more than three times the number of combinations. 27 million against roughly 7 million walks was exactly what he needed. Given the credit for his previous achievements, he was quickly supported by more than 2,500 investors, each of whom paid around $3,000 to buy all the combinations together.

He then printed all those tickets at his home base at Citi and shipped them to the United States. That's where the big game began. Couriers for hire worked tirelessly around the world, paying for tickets at stores with cashier's checks worth $10,000 each. He had a little time, but that was not the biggest problem. What made Mandel bite his nails was that a few hours before the entry deadline, one of the stores that had bought wholesale tickets was overwhelmed and stopped operations. As a result of the 7.1 million tickets purchased by Mandel's syndicate, only 5.5 million were processed, leaving too much to chance. There was nothing he could do to ensure his victory, and he could only hope that none of those 1.6 million losing combinations won. On February 15, 1992. The moment of truth arrived, the final draw on live television. Mandel's team was frantically shuffling the combinations to see if one of them was the winner.

And at last, a triumphant cry had won. The lottery syndicate not only took home the jackpot, but also the second and third prizes, along with dozens of smaller prizes, with total winnings of around $30 million. It was the biggest win for Mandel's company to date and it made international headlines just the way he wanted it to. But as we know very well, money corrupts people. While Stefan Mandel himself had become a millionaire. His investors had received only meager compensation for what they had spent and couldn't even sue him for failing to meet their obligations because technically he had done it on a larger scale. Mandel's actions prompted the US authorities to change the lottery rules so that no one could repeat his trick. That made him the first and the last person to do so in history. But he really didn't stop pursuing his ambitions, even after he made millions. And in 2004, that led to a 20-month prison sentence in Israel, where he tried another lottery trick.