The lottery is a game where people pay money for a chance to win something. It is a form of gambling, though it is largely legal and has been around for thousands of years. In modern times, people often play lotteries for housing units in subsidized apartment buildings or kindergarten placements at reputable public schools. The financial lottery is perhaps the most familiar, offering cash prizes to those who correctly pick a group of numbers during a drawing.
The odds of winning are extremely low, but the game still attracts millions of people who buy tickets each week. Lotteries raise billions in revenue each year, but the percentage that actually gets returned to players is shockingly small. And for most people, buying lottery tickets is just another way to spend money they could be saving for retirement or college tuition.
There is an inextricable human urge to gamble, and many people have irrational gambling habits. However, there is a lot more going on with these folks who are spending $50 or $100 a week on lottery tickets. Many of them have these quote-unquote systems that don’t jibe with statistical reasoning and they have this belief that there is this meritocratic system out there where they are going to get rich someday.
But what if there was a proven strategy to increase your chances of winning? The mathematician Stefan Mandel has figured out how to do just that. His solution is to find enough investors willing to buy all the possible combinations of numbers.
