Stefan Mandel has broken his silence on the simple mathematical formula that powered his 14 lottery wins across three countries.
The Romanian-born mathematician, now in his nineties, developed what he called “combinatorial condensation” while living on a salary of just $88 a month in communist Romania during the 1960s. Mandel, who could not pursue an academic career due to financial hardship, spent years studying probability theory and the work of Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci before turning his attention to state-run lotteries.
“I’m a weekend mathematician, an accountant without too much education,” Mandel later told a Romanian magazine. “But mathematics properly applied can guarantee a fortune.”
His breakthrough came from a deceptively simple observation: in certain lotteries, the jackpot prize rose to more than three times the cost of buying every single possible combination of numbers. If enough tickets covering all combinations could be purchased, a profit became mathematically guaranteed. The challenge was not the mathematics but the logistics of acquiring millions of tickets.
In March 1965, Mandel persuaded a friend to pool money with him, splitting any winnings 20-80 because he lacked funds to execute the plan alone. Their first attempt succeeded. The pair won roughly $20,000 in jackpot and secondary prizes, with Mandel receiving approximately $4,000 — equivalent to four years of income for an average Romanian family at the time.
Mandel used the winnings to emigrate with his family, first to Israel, then to Australia. There he refined his operation dramatically. He recruited hundreds of investors to form lottery syndicates and built an automated system using computers and printers to generate massive numbers of tickets, eliminating handwritten errors and scaling the operation.
“Everyone said to me: You can not, you will not succeed!” Mandel told a Romanian newspaper during his Australian run. “Now, the voices that have long [cast me as] a dreamer have been silenced.”
Throughout the 1980s, his syndicates targeted Australian lotteries where jackpots exceeded the cost of purchasing every possible combination. The strategy delivered 12 jackpots along with roughly 400,000 smaller prizes, including a $1.1 million jackpot in 1986. By 1989, regulatory changes had limited opportunities in Australia, prompting Mandel to look elsewhere.
His attention turned to the Virginia Lottery in the United States, where favorable rules allowed unlimited ticket purchases and home printing. The game used numbers from 1 to 44, creating approximately 7.1 million possible combinations — far fewer than many other American lotteries. Mandel calculated the strategy would become profitable once the jackpot exceeded $25 million.
“I knew that I would win one first prize, six second prizes, 132 third prizes, and thousands of minor prizes,” he said’s Planet Money producer Alex Goldmark in a 2016 podcast interview.
By February 1992, Virginia’s jackpot had risen above $27 million, triggering the operation. His team spent three months preparing, printing all 7.1 million possible ticket combinations in Australia and shipping them to the United States. They arranged bulk purchases through lottery retailers across Virginia. When the winning numbers were drawn, Mandel’s syndicate secured the jackpot and more than $6 million in secondary prizes, with total winnings reaching about $33 million.
The win generated nearly $24 million in profit after ticket costs, but also intense scrutiny. Mandel was investigated by the FBI, CIA, U.S. Secret Service and Interpol. Authorities found no evidence of wrongdoing, and the Virginia Lottery paid out the jackpot. The case nevertheless prompted major regulatory changes across the United States, with authorities introducing limits on ticket purchases, requiring in-person sales, and restricting large investment syndicates.
In the viral moment that cemented his legend, Mandel’s operation exposed a fundamental vulnerability in lottery design. His methods were never technically illegal, but they operated in a gray zone that regulators moved quickly to close. Lottery commissions banned bulk ticket buying, prohibited computer-generated tickets, and restructured games to create so many combinations that covering them all would be financially ruinous even with massive jackpots.
“It cannot be done anymore,” Goldmark said. “The number of combinations have grown too much, you wouldn’t be able to print the tickets, you wouldn’t be able to buy them in time and you probably couldn’t even do the math right to figure it out without making a mistake.”
Mandel’s post-lottery life proved turbulent. He declared bankruptcy in 1995, just three years after the Virginia jackpot, and spent the following decade running various alleged investment schemes. He attempted similar strategies in the United Kingdom and other countries but never matched his earlier success. “What we calculated to be the reality has changed,” he wrote in a 1994 letter to investors. “It may not seem such a hot investment now.”
He later disbanded his lottery syndicate entirely. His former associate, Anithalee Alex, reflected on the story’s extraordinary nature, saying: “You could not have written a script as good as this. This is one time real life was better than fiction.”
Despite decades of speculation, Mandel has never disclosed the full details of his algorithm. As he told an Associated Press reporter in 1992, “That would be like Coca-Cola revealing their recipe.” He retired to a beach house in Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation known for its volcanoes and waterfalls, where he continues to live quietly.