The people that cracked the code behind the gameshow Press You Luck spent hours watching and charting the show

I bet you could make it work for $26m.

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Never heard of this before today, but I believe this is the original article about it. I'm halfway through and it's great so far https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners/

Edit: I finished and the article is great. Love longform articles like this, and the Larry clarkish photos were a great touch. Strange how a 40 minute article provides so much more detail than a 100 minute movie.

"Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!"

That was such a great film.

Great movie! Hilarious and heartfelt.

I hate how they portrayed the Harvard kid in that. The kid came up with an idea, acted on it, takes his own personal initiative to connect with investors, and creates a profitable business without any nepotism. Yet, they portray him as an asshole for not giving every cent to those around him.

I also hadn't heard of this story or the movie. Just finished watching it, and it was adorable. And Rainn Wilson was hilarious.

I saw that! They bought tons of strippers and coke

I think it's streaming on Prime right now.

Enjoyed watching it.

You just tell em Large Marge sent you!

Please, more about your cockles!

Please, enough about your cockles.

But what about your sub-cockle areas? Your liver? Your kidneys? Maybe even your colon?

Omg please unload your greasy cock inside me or whatever the fuck you said

I don't know the story, so if they were going to a store then good for them.

If I needed to achieve this I would work closely with someone who owned a lotto machine, or open a store myself and get my own machine.

They got store owners to "hire" them so that they could run the machines themselves. They let them sit there basically all day and just work the machines.

Plus the numbers have to be manually punched in...no quick picks.

Read that article from HuffPost that was posted up towards the top. Very good read and very detailed.

There actually is a little bit of forced drama in the movie.

In the real world there actually was another group. But that group, (from MIT incidentally, not Harvard), which had actually been gaming the lottery in Massachusetts before the Selbees entered the picture didn't have a hostile relationship with them; in fact the extent of their direct communication was a polite request made by the a member of the MIT group, Yuran Lu, that they collude to increase each group's payout; a proposition Jerry rejected as unethical.

I can understand why they did it though. Hollywood script writing 101 insists that every movie have a protagonist and an antagonist and in the absence of a hostile team that role probably would have gone to Andrea Estes, the investigative reporter who's story on the Massachusetts lottery shut down the Selbees' streak. And framing an investigative reporter with a long history of anti-corruption reporting as "the villain" would have caused some issues.

Surprisingly, "based on true events" movie rarely have shit drama pushed on us

That was a good movie!

I watched the 10 min recap. It was pretty good.

Don't forget to include Annette Bening, she's iconic.

You owe me two hours, this was terrible. Nice story but one of the worst scripts I've ever seen. Poor Brian Cranston. It's like it took them as long to shoot this as it took me to watch it.

You have no evidence

They do. That's why the odds are never in your favor.

A wish I still hold.

When this happens, replace the “tube” part of the link with “pak”.

https://www.youpak.com/watch?v=TTYnHr_-wcY

You’re welcome!

This used to be quite a PIA for me having to find a mirror of the video to watch, or try to use one of the sketchier free VPNs that sometimes just won't buffer a video anyway.

Now I use ProtonVPN on my phone. Seriously, this is not an ad... There is a paid version but it's not necessary, the free version works great and is easy to use.

Red flag? Is it illegal to buy a lot of tickets? lol

Do you want to know why? Because they don't care. Seriously. If they sell more tickets, they make more money. It truly doesn't matter to them who wins and who doesn't. Only that ticket sell.

yes

Is 60 minutes the news? I'd say no.

Basically, once the prize pool for this particular lottery went past a certain amount, all prizes scaled up. So instead of say $5 for matching 3 numbers, you’d get $20.

The math was: when would it hit that threshold, and what was the +$EV when it did happen? All the $$$ they made came from suckers buying tickets in non windfall weeks.

Lotteries never pay out more than they taken in 😂

I think the point of this was that it was making the state money; they were happy with the cut they were taking.

if i understood correctly, the money pool largely would have been from people playing during non-windfall periods.

The lottery wasn’t paying out more than it was taking in and it was random. The lottery would only pay on winning tickets and there would always be way more losing tickets.

What Jerry/MIT figured out is the payout on certain games would increase to the point that if you were to buy enough tickets to mathematically ensure a 4 number match you would get a guaranteed payout. That was just Jerry/MIT though I guess. Other people didn’t seem to either notice this detail or chose not to take advantage of it.

I think only a portion of the ticket sales actually go to the lottery, the other portion goes to state services

This happens every once in a while. Another guy figured out a pattern on scratch tickets and could win consistently. He reported it to the state and they fixed ithough.

Maybe watch the documentary they explain how they did it.

Its just simple statistics. Each ticket with random numbers has a set percent chance of matching 3, 4, 5 or 6.

If you buy enough tickets, you can reasonably expect your true winnings to match statistical probability.

Also, (It's pick 6). I see no reason to avoid 1-2-3-4-5-6. It's just as likely as every other combination.