Numbers don't always win but it sets you on a good track. This one and the guy from Press Your Luck are always 2 of my favorites.
#findtheloophole
A retired convenience store owner read a lottery brochure for 3 minutes and found a loophole worth $26 MILLION that the state's own mathematicians had missed for years.
> Jerry Selbee was 65 and retired in Evart, Michigan. A town of 1,800 people. Nothing particular to do.
> In 2003 he walked into his old store and picked up a brochure for a new state lottery game called Winfall off the counter.
> He read it standing up in the aisle. He never sat down and never took it home.
> In less than 3 minutes he found it.
> When the jackpot hit $5 MILLION and nobody won, the prize rolled down to lower tier winners multiplying their payouts several times over.
> He did the math in his head. Spend $1,100 on tickets during a rolldown week and the numbers guaranteed an $800 profit. Every single time.
> He bought $3,600 on his first attempt and made $2,700. Told nobody.
> One evening beside a campfire he finally told his wife Marge. She sat quietly for a moment. Then said she could see the numbers too.
> They formed a corporation and sold $500 shares to neighbours, friends and family.
> Among the shareholders, three state troopers, a factory plant manager and a bank vice president.
> Every six weeks they drove 900 miles to Massachusetts, checked into a motel and spent up to $720,000 on tickets in a single session. They sorted 360,000 tickets by hand in that room.
> The Boston Globe investigated in 2011 and found no wrongdoing.
> A state official called them "math nerd geniuses who found a way to legally win a state lottery."
> The state made $120 MILLION from the Selbees buying tickets. They were the lottery's best customer for nearly a decade.
> They kept 65 plastic tubs of losing tickets in their barn in case the federal government ever came asking. They never bought a sports car. Never bought a hot tub.
> Their corporation grossed $26 MILLION over 9 years. Bryan Cranston played Jerry in the 2022 Hollywood film Jerry and Marge Go Large.
The most profitable skill in the world is not coding, not investing, and not sales. It is the ability to read something everyone else ignored and see what they missed.