I’m Bill Murphy Jr. Welcome to Understandably (formerly “The Byliner”), my new regularly published email about the “story behind other stories.” Please consider subscribing!
The lottery is usually a lousy return--but for a husband and wife team who figured out a math error in games run by two states, it became a wildly profitable investment strategy.
Meet Marge and Jerry Selbee, owners of a "party store" in Evart, Michigan that sold cigarettes, liquor, and lottery tickets. After watching thousands of customers, Jerry figured out how to hack the odds in a certain type of lottery: called Winfall in Michigan, and later Cash WinFall in Massachusetts.
Play a dollar here and there, and you might win occasionally. But play thousands and thousands in particular weeks, when the prize accumulated in a certain way, and Jerry realized you could almost guarantee a profit to the tune of five or six figures.
So that's what the Selbees started doing, to the point that playing the lottery became a full-t…
