Some people spend their whole lives fantasizing about winning the lottery. Jerry Selbee figured out how to actually do it in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee.

In 2003, Selbee had recently retired and settled down with his wife, Marge, in the sleepy, one-stoplight town of Evart, Michigan (population 1,900) when one morning he came across a brochure in a convenience store for a state lottery game called Winfall. Reading the fine print, Selbee — a math whiz who had spent much of his career as a materials analyst at a Kellogg’s cereal factory — quickly realized that the lottery had a mathematical flaw that would mean guaranteed winnings if he bought enough tickets.


“I looked at the odds, I looked at what the payoff would be and I did a risk-reward analysis,” the plain-spoken, pragmatic Selbee, who is now in his 80s, says by phone from his Michigan home. “It took me less than two minutes to figure out that that game could be profitable.”

After Jerry tested out his theory, winning nearly $16,000, he and Marge began to spend countless hours buying and poring over thousands of tickets in the Winfall game and, later, a similarly structured lottery in Massachusetts. As their winnings started to accumulate, they set up a corporation called GS Investment Strategies LLC and invited a couple dozen family members and friends in Evart to join. By the time both lotteries had been shut down in 2012, the Selbees and their partners had grossed more than $26 million from the venture.

I want to see this one. Always liked Annette Benning.