The mathematician who tried to game the Irish National Lottery

In 1992, Stefan Klincewicz, a mathematician in Ireland thought he'd worked out a surefire way to win the National Lottery.

He assembled a syndicate to try to buy every single ticket combination in a scheme that captivated and divided the nation.

Irish film director Ross Whitaker was aware of the scheme as a child and an encounter with a friend 12 years’ ago set him on the path of finding the people involved in the syndicate.

“I'm always looking for ideas and he was getting into data, which at the time was a little known, I suppose, area of work.

“And I said, is there any ideas in data that I could make into a documentary? He said, no Ross, it's very boring. But you should make a story about that time when the syndicate tried to fix the lottery and buy all the tickets.”

A “light bulb” went off, he told RNZ’s Nine to Noon. The result is the documentary, Beat the Lotto.

"I thought, that is a great idea. And so, I started looking into it.”

He remembered the scheme from his childhood, he says, it caused quite a stir, with much of the public taking a dim view of Klincewicz’ plan – which was legal. 

“I found out that the syndicate were not a dark force, but a very entertaining group of people.

“And from there, we started trying to convince them to take part. And ultimately, they did, and we made a film.”

Ireland’s economy was in poor shape in the early 1990s and the National Lottery, started just a few years earlier, captured the nation’s imagination, he says.

“I remember playing on the street and we'd all run in at 8pm on a Saturday night to see if your family had won the lottery.”

Klincewicz, whose parents had settled in Ireland from Poland, was an outsider, often bullied as child because of his unusual name, Whittaker says.

"But at the same time, he had an incredible talent for maths.”

When the National Lottery came along, Klincewicz saw an opportunity, he says.

“He realised that on certain holiday weekends, the national lottery would offer particular deals that actually made it possible to be almost certain of a win. In fact, pretty much be certain of a win.

“So, he started organising with a syndicate a plan to do this.”

But the logistics in that pen and paper era were enormous, Whittaker says.

“It meant filling out two million of the little boxes and six numbers in each of the boxes by hand. And that's almost 12 million ticks of a pen.”

Friends and family were recruited to undertake the task which took a year, but there was much that could, and did, go wrong with the plan, he says.

The Irish National Lottery got wind of the plan when a syndicate member attempted to buy $70,000 worth of tickets in one go.

“When they realised what was going on, they ultimately decided that they would try and stop them.

“And so, they started to shut down machines where they were buying too many tickets and they were getting thwarted left, right and centre,” he says.

That meant spreading out across the country to find machines that were still selling tickets, they were also working against the clock between the Wednesday night draw, and the Bank holiday Saturday night draw the syndicate was targeting, he says.

Whittaker knew he had to track down Klincewicz to tell the tale, and found him through LinkedIn, he says, eventually getting a message back - he was happy to talk.

“We took him out for a couple of very nice lunches and told him that we wanted to tell a story really well and do it as a thriller, with really high production values.”

That convinced Klincewicz, now in his 70s, to come on board, Whittaker says.

“It was fantastic fun to make because it's not often as a documentary maker that you actually get to make a thriller. Very few stories lend themselves to having this much fun in a documentary.”

Beat The Lotto is showing at the the British and Irish film festival that kicks off in Auckland and Wellington at the end of the month 29 October and plays around the country until 19 November.