Wednesday, 3 January 2024

Foolproof Way To Win The Lottery

Voltaire is often quoted as saying 'I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' although he never, it was said by someone many years later who said it sounded like something Voltaire would say but undoubtedly something he did say was KERCHING when the city of Paris set up a series of lotteries and made the prizes greater than the cost of all the tickets so Voltaire and a group of friends bought a ticket for every available number and shared the resulting 7.5 million Francs they won with the philosopher pocketing 500,000 Francs.
He later badmouthed religion and was offered the ultimatum of either being sent to prison or be exiled to England presumably because the Government figured that sending a Frenchman to live in England would be a far worse punishment than any prison sentence they could offer but a Romanian economist has
taken a lesson from the 18th Century Frenchman and his friends by winning 14 lottery jackpots by buying all the possible combinations in lotteries where the prize is larger than the cost of the tickets.
With the help of investors and a syndicate, they scoured the World for lotteries which haven't yet worked that out and after scooping a lottery in Virginia, where the rules around picking six numbers between one and 44 meant they only had odds of 7,059,052/1 so with 7 million tickets won not only the $27m top prize but also $900k in additional prizes for the tickets which placed second, third, fourth.
The odds of winning the Euro lottery, which sometimes have wins of hundreds of millions of Euros is 1 in 139 million so to buy every ticket would cost £347 million at £2.50 a time so if the Euro lottery ever goes above that amount (or £90 million in the British lottery at £2 a time at odds of 45,000,000 to one) and you have £346,999,990 handy then give me a shout as i have a tenner to chip in.