How retired couple outsmarted the lotto system to win millions

A retired couple cracked the code of the lucrative lotto system, which has paid off handsomely to the tune of $39 million.

An American couple claim they have cracked the code of how to win the lottery, and have a cool $39 million worth of winnings to prove it.

Over nine years, Jerry and Marge Selbee have celebrated jackpot after jackpot — but you wouldn’t know that from the modest porch of the couple’s humble abode.

There’s no four-storey house, luxury yacht moored across the road or wardrobe full of designer handbags — the pair claim that despite the almost $40 million in winnings, they “didn’t change” one bit.

“We didn’t change our lifestyle,” Mr Selbee said during an interview on Channel 9’s 60 Minutes.

“We didn’t take trips … we didn’t take cruises. We didn’t fly around the world. We didn’t do any of that.”

The couple claim they know how to win the lotto, and have done so time after time.

In 2003, the retired Midwestern couple in their 60s won millions after discovering — and exploiting — a legal loophole in a lottery game sold across the United States.

According to the New York Post, together with their friends and neighbours, 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 Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston and American Beauty’s Annette Bening.

Mr Selbee, who is now a grandfather at 83, is the one who cracked the game, using his strong background in mathematics.

The game he played, 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.

The couple claim winnings come down to sums, not luck.

This was where Jerry saw an opening. 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.

But despite most lotto winners splashing the cash on holidays, luxury homes and sports cars — it was never about the money for the retired couple.

“He never really thought that, or felt that [he was in it for the money],” Mrs Selbee told 60 Minutes.

“It was not about what he would buy, it’s about the … joy of winning, of playing the game, of being involved.”

The pair claim their winnings hardly come down to luck, but rather some simple equations.

“Most people are conditioned that [the] lottery is structured so that if you’re lucky, you win,” Mr Selbee explained.

“I did not have to be lucky to win, I had to be unlucky to lose.”

He says anyone could actually walk away with a win, and success is just down to simple maths. But at first, it took some trial and error to perfect the formula, 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 in a recent interview with the NewYork Post, noting the second time around, he put down $3,600 and won back $6,300.

“I knew I was on the right 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.”

Jerry said he worked out how to nail a lotto win by doing some quick sums.

The small ball strategy of winning little on many, many tickets — while mathematically rigged — was perfectly law-abiding. Just in case, Jerry said he started a corporation to give them some extra “legal protection.”

They started G S Investment Strategies, a group involving 32 people, 20 of whom were their relatives, according to a report from the Massachusetts Inspector General.

They, along with friends of the Selbees, kicked in their own funds and then divvied up the payouts, he said.

The strategy worked until 2005, when Michigan discontinued Winfall. A relative of the couple told them that Massachusetts had a nearly identical game called Cash Winfall, so Jerry started crunching the numbers right away and found it to be an even bigger winner, due to the Bay State’s lower US$2 million cap.

Mr Selbee said he found a 92.8 per cent chance nobody would hit big.

So, the retired couple hit the road and began making routine trips from Michigan to Massachusetts on roll-down weeks. They deliberately visited small towns with the intention of keeping a low profile.

“Quite often we would spend a night on the road … because I could determine ahead of time when the Winfall should occur so we would leave, like, two days,” he explained, adding he and his wife would purchase an extraordinary amount of tickets to win.

“Our first play was $80,000 [with] 40,000 tickets. And our last play was $712,000 [with] 366,000 tickets.”

That means for 12 hours a day, four days in a row, they were standing, feeding a machine, but Mrs Selbee said the ‘game’ gave her a “high feeling”.

“We did spend 11 to 14 nights at the motel in South Deerfield and it was something we looked forward to,” he said of their journey.

“It was something different and it was profitable and it was able to help our family and help our friends out with a little financial boost.”

– with the New York Post

Watch the full interview with Jerry and Marge Selbee on Sunday’s 60 Minutes and 9Now.