GAMING THE SYSTEM
Like they say: Go big or go home. In 2003, a retired Midwestern couple in their 60s chose the former by winning millions after discovering — and exploiting — a legal loophole in a lottery game sold across the United States.
They are Jerry and Marge Selbee of Evart,
Mich. Along with their friends and neighbors, they raked in cash for years playing a game called Winfall by figuring out exactly when buying up hordes of tickets would pay off. Their wild story is now getting the cinematic treatment in “Jerry & Marge Go Large,” starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening, which debuted on Paramount+ Friday.
Jerry, now a grandfather at 83, is the one who cracked the game. At one time, the mathematician worked a number-crunching role at Kellogg’s headquarters in Battle Creek.
Later, with his wife, Marge, now 84, he owned a corner store — one that had a lottery machine in it.
When it came time to enter their golden years, Jerry started spinning the adventure partly from boredom.
“It gave us something to do every six weeks or so that was completely different,” Jerry Selbee told The Post. “Being retired, you can only do so much camping [or] picking rocks.”
Selbee realized that Winfall had a pretty significant loophole. In Michigan, the game’s jackpot would “roll down” each week if no one won, expanding the prize winnings. This happened until it capped out at $5 million. At that point, if no one hit all six numbers on their ticket, the prize would be allocated to a handful of lesser winners, who matched a majority of the winning digits.
The game begins
This was where Selbee saw an opening. In 2003, he figured out that, by the law of averages, roll-down weeks guaranteed victory if you bought enough tickets. He and Marge bought thousands at a time.
“I decided I could play the game and, as long as nobody won, other than me, it would be profitable,” Selbee said.
At first, it took some trial and error. “My first play, I played $2,200 . . . but I lost $50,” he said.
The trick, he found, was to bet more. The second time around, he put down $3,600 and won back $6,300.
“My third play, which is in the movie, was $8,000, and I got back $15,700. So I knew that the system worked.”
“Once you really look at it, it really is a numbers game, where if you have enough numbers, you can make sure that you win enough that it takes care of your investment,” Larry Wilmore, who plays the Selbees’ accountant in the film, told The Post.
“The fact that [Jerry and Marge] figured that out is fascinating,” Wilmore said.
The small-ball strategy of winning little on many, many tickets — while mathematically rigged — was perfectly law-abiding. But Jerry did start a corporation, G S Investment Strategies, for extra “legal protection.”
According to a report from Massachusetts’ Office of the Inspector General, G S Investment had 32 members, 20 of whom were relatives, who kicked in their own funds and then divvied up the payouts.
“Each share of the corporation was $500,” Selbee said. Some members played 100 shares; others, like the couple’s grandchildren, played “one or two shares — maybe three.”
Michigan discontinued Winfall in 2005. But a relative of the couple told them that Massachusetts had a nearly identical game called Cash Winfall. Jerry crunched the numbers and found it to be an even bigger winner, due to the Bay State’s lower $2 million cap. He found a 92.8% chance nobody would hit big.
So, Jerry and Marge began making routine trips from Michigan to Massachusetts on roll-down weeks. They visited small towns and kept a low profile.
Their first attempt won the group a
How the lotto got played by a nice Midwestern couple
45% profit on 60,000 tickets that equated to a $120,000 bet, the report indicated. For years to come, they raked in money, investing up to $720,000 at a time. They lost money once, in 2008, when someone actually won the jackpot.
The process took days, involving “visually inspecting approximately 60,000 paper betting slips, each with five panels of six-number bets printed on them,” the report noted. The Selbees “would cull the winning tickets while still in Massachusetts and then drive the losing tickets back to Michigan where they would sort through the losing tickets again because they invariably missed some winners.”
For Selbee, though, “it didn’t seem like work,” because it was time together with Marge.
“It was something we looked forward to,” he said. “It was something different and it was profitable and it was able to help our family and help our friends out with a little financial boost.”
Due to the high earnings, G S Investment Strategies was audited on multiple occasions by the IRS and Massachusetts state agencies. Jerry kept every losing ticket stored in his home, just in case.
Stiff competition
The Selbees weren’t the only ones to discover the game’s loophole.
Dr. Ying Zhang, a Boston University medical school graduate in 2003, created his own system to win. A collegiate duo, James Harvey and Yuran Lu of MIT, got their campus friends to invest, using a system similar to the Selbees’: They formed Random Strategies Investments LLC, named after their dorm.
In 2010, a cross-country rivalry emerged between the Selbees and the MIT crew, as each party took away from the other’s winnings in Massachusetts.
Soon, the college kids found a way to re-rig the game.
“They single-handedly bought enough tickets to push the jackpot to $2 million, triggering a roll-down that no one else was expecting and that was never announced to bettors on the lottery website,” the report surmised. “As a result, the MIT group virtually monopolized the winnings from this drawing.”
This controversial move — which had been investigated by the state lottery — was the beginning of the end for the Michigan
couple’s legendary run.
In 2011, the Boston Globe put out a series of reports that explained the big-bet strategy to the public in addition to other noticed inconsistencies in the lottery game, prompting the inspector general’s explosive report.
Party, crashed
As a result, the Selbees played their last Winfall in 2012, when the game was discontinued.
“The lottery became really embarrassed, so they shut it down,” Selbee added.
“Everyone got paid off when Massachusetts terminated the game. Everyone that was in the corporation, every member, had a profit over the long run, so they were essentially happy . . . We were disappointed the game was ended, but all good things come
to an end sooner or later.”
All these years later, Jerry and Marge are still tight-lipped on how large they really went.
“I’d rather not say [my net profit],” Selbee said with a laugh. “I’ll just say it was over a million.”
The true number was closer to $7.75 million, according to the Huffington Post.
And when all was said and done, the Selbees — along with several of their investors — remained in the town. They still live there today, Jerry and officials from Evart confirmed.
“Life didn’t change at all. In fact, it slowed down, because we didn’t have anything to do for that two weeks out of six,” Selbee said. “We continued to go to breakfast every day, we continued to have coffee with friends, I continued to play poker with my buddies and life was just back to normal.”