Math, not magic

The man who tried to buy every ticket

Stefan Mandel didn't look for a flaw in the rules. He looked for jackpots so big that buying every possible combination would pay. Then he went and did it.

A plan born in Romania

Stefan Mandel was a mathematically minded man in communist Romania who wanted money to get his family out of the country. He studied the state lottery and worked out a way to group tickets so that a set number of plays guaranteed at least a second-tier prize. He pooled money with friends, bought the tickets, and won, by later accounts, enough to cover years of his salary. He used it to emigrate, eventually settling in Australia.

The rule: only play when the math works

Mandel's idea was simple to state. Every lottery has a fixed number of possible combinations. If you buy all of them, you are certain to hold the jackpot ticket. That only makes sense when the jackpot is worth much more than the cost of every combination, so he waited for jackpots several times larger than that cost, reportedly about three times.

The margin mattered because covering everything guarantees you a winning ticket, not the whole prize. If someone else also picks the winning numbers, the jackpot is split. Taxes take another share. A big cushion was what made the plan survive those risks.

Australia, then Virginia

In Australia, Mandel raised money from investors and used computers and printers to fill out tickets in bulk. His syndicates reportedly won a dozen lotteries there during the 1980s, until Australia changed its rules to stop one buyer from covering every combination.

In February 1992 he found a target in Virginia. Its game had players choose 6 numbers from 44, which works out to 7,059,052 combinations at $1 each. The jackpot grew to about $27 million, close to four times the cost of buying everything. Mandel's group printed tickets in Australia, shipped them to Virginia, and paid teams of buyers to turn them in at stores.

They didn't finish. With hours to go, a store stopped processing their orders, and accounts say the group got through roughly 5 to 6 million of the 7 million combinations. Luck decided the rest: the winning numbers were among the tickets they had bought, and no one else matched them. The group also collected close to $1 million in smaller prizes.

Afterward

The win drew investigations from agencies in the U.S. and Australia, and the Virginia Lottery briefly balked at paying. No wrongdoing was found, and the prize was paid. Over the following years, lotteries changed their rules and games, making a repeat much harder. Investors reportedly earned a modest return after costs and taxes. Mandel later declared bankruptcy, and was caught up in legal trouble over investment schemes; accounts differ on how that ended. By the 2010s he was reported to be living quietly in Vanuatu, in the South Pacific.

What this means for Powerball and Mega Millions

Run Mandel's math on today's games and it falls apart before the jackpot even matters:

Covering Powerball means printing and buying more than 290 million tickets before a single draw, which no retailer network could process. And the money rarely lines up anyway: after federal tax, and with the real chance that a big jackpot gets shared, the cash prize almost never comes close to what every ticket would cost. Mandel's three-times rule would ask for a cash prize of about $1.75 billion on Powerball, far beyond any jackpot so far.

The calculator runs the same comparison for a single ticket against the current jackpot.