Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2022 11:58 am Post subject: Old couple figured out a way to beat the lottery and win millions
Video (13 minutes long) -
Looks like this is an old story that I never heard of before (2003). They've now made this into a movie called Jerry & Marge Go Large Trailer #1 (2022)
Here's the trailer starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Benning:
Quote:
‘Jerry and Marge Go Large’: Retirees made town rich gaming the lottery
In 2003, a retired Midwestern couple in their 60s chose the former by winning millions after discovering — and exploiting — a legal loophole in a lottery game sold across the United States.
They are Jerry and Marge Selbee of Evart, Michigan. Together with their friends and neighbors, they raked in cash for years playing a game called Winfall by figuring out exactly when buying up hordes of tickets would pay off. Their wild story is now getting the cinematic treatment in “Jerry and Marge Go Large,” starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening, respectively, which debuts on Paramount+ Friday.
Jerry, now a grandfather at 83, is the one who cracked the game, using his strong background in mathematics. At one time, he’d worked a number-crunching role at Kellogg’s cereal headquarters in Battle Creek.
He would go on to own a corner store with his wife Marge, 84, one that had a lottery machine in it for years.
When it came time to enter the golden years, Jerry told The Post he started spinning the adventure partly because of boredom.
“It gave us something to do every six weeks or so that was completely different,” Jerry Selbee said. “Being retired, you can only do so much camping, picking rocks, which was a hobby of ours, and things like that.”
Jerry realized that Winfall had a pretty significant loophole. In Michigan, the game’s jackpot would “roll down” each week if no one won, expanding the prize winnings. This happened until it capped out at $5 million. At that point, if no one hit all six numbers on their ticket, the prize would be allocated to a handful of lesser winners, who matched a majority of the winning digits.
This was where Jerry saw an opening. In 2003, he was able to figure out that, by the law of averages, roll-down weeks were a guaranteed victory if you bought enough tickets. In their case, they bought thousands at a time.
“It didn’t take me three minutes to figure the game out [as portrayed in the film]. I had to do a little bit of research on the risk to reward analysis … I decided I could play the game and, as long as nobody won, other than me, it would be profitable,” Selbee said.
But at first, it took some trial and error, according to the mathematician.
“My first play, I played $2,200 … but I lost $50 on that play. So that [showed me] to compensate for the variance between the mathematical and the probability of getting more or less,” he said.
Selbee figured out that the trick was to bet more. The second time around, he put down $3,600 and won back $6,300.
“I knew I was on the track … my third play, which is in the movie, was $8,000 and I got back $15,700. So I knew that the system worked.”
Selbee’s uncanny strategy was even mind-blowing for some of the film’s cast.
This was covered pretty thoroughly in the book "How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg. There actually were three grouts who figured out the Expected Value quirk of that Massachusetts Lottery tweak and made lots of money from it.
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