The Retired Couple Who Cracked the Lottery

Most people buy a lottery ticket and hope for luck. Jerry Selbee bought a lottery brochure and reached for a calculator.

Three Minutes and a Flaw

In 2003, Jerry Selbee - a retired convenience-store owner from Evart, Michigan with a background in mathematics - picked up a brochure for a new state lottery game called Winfall. He read the fine print. Within three minutes, he spotted something the lottery designers had overlooked: on "roll-down" weeks, when the jackpot topped $5 million without a winner, all the money redistributed to lower-prize tiers. That redistribution made bulk ticket buying mathematically profitable. A $1 ticket was worth more than $1 on a roll-down week.

900 Miles for a Roll-Down

Jerry and his wife Marge formed a corporation - GS Investment Strategies - and invited family and friends to invest at $500 a share. When Michigan eventually shut down Winfall, the Selbees discovered that Massachusetts ran an identical game called Cash WinFall. For the next six years, they made the 900-mile drive from Michigan to Massachusetts every time a roll-down was announced, checked into a Red Roof Inn, and spent 10 hours a day, 10 days straight sorting tickets by hand. Over 43 drawings in Massachusetts alone, the syndicate played $17.3 million in tickets and collected $24.2 million back.

The Numbers

Over nine years, the syndicate grossed nearly $26 million. The Selbees themselves netted approximately $7.75 million in profit before taxes. A state investigation concluded they were dealing with "nerds, not criminals" - people who had found a legal way to exploit a flawed game design. The states eventually closed both games.

From Red Roof Inn to Hollywood

The Selbees' story was reported in a landmark Boston Globe investigation and later featured on CBS News 60 Minutes. In 2022, it became the Paramount+ film Jerry and Marge Go Large, starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening. Jerry has said he never felt he was doing anything wrong - he was simply playing the game the way the math said it should be played.