How to win the lottery

A husband and wife who found a math error in the lottery won $27 million, after playing over and over for 55 weeks

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…