On Wednesday night, a Californian won the $1.08B Powerball lottery, one of the largest prizes in history. But it’s not the most improbable victory. We’re republishing this story from August 2018 about an economist who perfected the lottery:

Just after 11 PM on February 15, 1992, a janky ball machine at the Virginia State Lottery HQ spit out 6 winning numbers on live television: 8… 11… 13… 15… 19… 20.

In the coming days, officials would find out that one “person” had secured not only the $27,036,142 jackpot, but 6 second prizes, 132 third prizes, and 135k minor prizes collectively worth another $900k.

What unfolded next was the strangest, most improbable lottery tale in history — one involving thousands of international investors, dozens of complex computer systems, and a mathematical savant who’d masterminded the entire operation from the other side of the world.

This is the story of the man who “gamed” the lottery by buying every possible combination.

In the late 1960s, a young Romanian economist named Stefan Mandel was struggling to get by.

At the time, Romania was under oppressive Communist rule, a period marred by poverty, job and food shortages, and “profound misery.” Mandel’s salary of 360 lei (US $10) a month was not enough to make ends meet, and, as he later told Planet Money, he needed a way to “get some serious money, quickly.”

Many Romanians in Mandel’s predicament had, out of necessity, turned to lives of crime. But Mandel, a self-described “philosopher-mathematician,” saw another way out: The lottery.

Let’s take a step back here: What kind of idiot banks on winning the lottery? You’re literally more likely to win an Olympic gold medal, have identical quintuplets, or get crushed by a vending machine.

Well, Mandel wasn’t just any guy — he was a natural with numbers who spent every spare minute analyzing theoretical probability papers written by the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci. And, after years of research, he wrote a “number-picking algorithm” based on a method he dubbed “combinatorial condensation.”

“I’m a weekend mathematician, an accountant without too much education,” he later told a Romanian magazine. “But mathematics properly applied can guarantee a fortune.”

Here’s how it worked.

If a player picked 6 numbers in a 49-ball lottery, his odds of winning were 1 in 13,983,816. If he selected 15 numbers (which required purchasing 5,005 games — one for each possible combination), his odds of winning increased to 1 in 2,794. Mandel claimed that his algorithm could reduce these 5,005 combinations to just 569.

If the 6 winning numbers fell among his 15 picks, he’d be guaranteed to win at least a 2nd prize and hundreds of smaller prizes — and he’d have a 1 in 10 chance of winning the grand prize.

Mandel banded together with 4 friends, each of whom bought 228 tickets per draw.

Miraculously (and with a lot of luck), he won the first prize of 72,783 lei (about US $2k, or $16.8k adjusted for inflation). After expenses, he walked away with  enough to bribe foreign ministry officials and flee Romania for a new life — and a bigger jackpot.

Turning lottery wins into a business

After 4 years of roaming around Europe, Mandel settled in Australia and he set out to game the lottery in a different way.

In the typical lottery, a set of numbers within a certain range (say, 1-50) are randomly selected;  if yours match in any order, you win the jackpot. The chances of winning are based on the number of possible combinations of these numbers, often in the millions.

But Mandel caught on to something: In certain lottos, the jackpot would climb to an amount more than 3x the cost of buying every combination.

For example, let’s say a lottery required 6 picks of numbers between 1 and 40. This would yield 3,838,380 possible number combinations (calculator here). Now, let’s say that same lottery had a $10m jackpot. In theory, Mandel could buy a ticket for every single combination at $1 each and be guaranteed a win — and, after taxes, a decent profit.

Mandel maintained that “any high school math student could calculate the combinations.” But this method came with some major logistical setbacks. How would he get the capital? And how could he possibly fill out hundreds of thousands of tickets, number by number?

Over a period of years, Mandel convinced hundreds of investors to pool their money together and create a “lotto syndicate.” He then developed a full-fledged automation system: A room full of printers and computers running on an algorithm that pre-populated tickets with every combination.

Computers revolutionized Mandel’s process. Before, he’d been limited to writing out millions of combinations by hand, where a single mistake could ruin 8 months’ worth of work; now, he could outsource the work to a machine.

Throughout the 1980s, Mandel’s syndicate would wait until a jackpot was 3x bigger than the cost of covering all possible combinations, then “move to buy” thousands of tickets. They managed to win 12 lotteries (and rake in 400k smaller prizes) across Australia, including a $1.1m haul in 1986.

“Everyone said to me: You can not, you will not succeed! ” Mandel told a Romanian newspaper at the time. “Now, the voices that have long [cast me as] a dreamer have been silenced.”

But Mandel’s system soon attracted negative attention.

His repeated wins prompted Australian lottery authorities to change the law, disallowing a single person from covering every possible combination.

So, he set his sights on much bigger feat — one that would make international headlines and boggle the minds of lottery officials around the world.

Virginia or bust

Mandel began by identifying lotteries where the jackpot had risen to at least 3x the cost of buying all possible combinations.

Ultimately, he printed out tickets for 6 US lotteries, including Massachusetts ($37m jackpot to 9m combinations), Arizona ($11m to 5.1m), and Virginia.

Virginia’s lottery offered several advantages. It was fairly new, and allowed buyers to purchase tickets in unlimited quantities and print them at home. But most importantly, its numbers only ranged from 1 to 44 (other states went as high as 54). This meant that with 6 picks, there were “only” 7,059,052 possible combinations, compared to the usual 25m+.

Mandel set up an agency with a major insurance company. Under the shell corporation Pacific Financial Resources, he established a trust called the International Lotto Fund (ILF) and convinced 2,560 people to buy a 10-year whole life insurance policy, with a $4k annual premium. Mandel then used this money, legal