Oceans ___: Gambler takes down Texas Lottery for $60 Million

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In the spring of 2023, a London banker-turned-bookmaker reached out to a few contacts with an audacious request: Can you help me take down the Texas lottery?

Bernard Marantelli had a plan in mind. He and his partners would buy nearly every possible number in a coming drawing. There were 25.8 million potential number combinations. The tickets were $1 apiece. The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million.

Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants. They set up shop in a defunct dentist’s office, a warehouse and two other spots in Texas. The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals. Trucks hauled in dozens of them and reams of paper.

Over three days, the machines—manned by a disparate bunch of associates and some of their children—screeched away nearly around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second. Texas politicians later likened the operation to a sweatshop.

Trying to pull off the gambit required deep pockets and a knack for staying under the radar...

Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually.

The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win...

In Texas, as in many states, most people who play the lottery go to a store with a machine, choose numbers, then walk away with a ticket. Back in 2023, Texas also allowed online lottery-ticket vendors to set up shops to print tickets for their customers.

Marantelli’s team recruited one such seller, struggling startup Lottery.com, to help with the logistics of buying and printing the millions of tickets. Like all lotto retailers, it would collect a 5% sales commission. The Texas Lottery Commission allowed dozens of the terminals that print tickets to be delivered to the four workshops set up by the team.

That April 19, the commission announced that there had been no winner in that day’s drawing. The next drawing, with an even larger pot, would be three days later, on a Saturday. The group sprang into action.

The printing operation ran day and night. The team had converted each number combination into a QR code. Crew members scanned the codes into the terminals using their phones, then scrambled to organize all the tickets in boxes such that they could easily locate the winning numbers.

The game called for picking six numbers from 1 to 54. For a pro gambler, some sets of numbers—such as 1,2,3,4,5,6—aren’t worth picking because so many other players choose them, which would split the pot. Marantelli’s operation bought 99.3% of the possibilities.

Money moved to Lottery.com from Ranogajec’s accounts—held under the name John Wilson—in the Isle of Man, a tax haven off the U.K. coast, taking a circuitous route via an escrow account at a Detroit law firm, according to people familiar with the transfers and bank statements reviewed by the Journal.

The crew hit the jackpot that Saturday. One of their tickets was the sole winner.

State lotteries like the one in Texas are in a sweet spot for the pros. The jackpots are big enough to be worth shooting for, and the number of possible combinations minimizes the risk of multiple winners. Multistate games such as the Powerball often have far bigger pots, but there are so many combinations that buying them all would be unwieldy and cost too much

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