‘Jerry and Marge Go Large’ – the viral story of a real-life retired couple who hit a multi-million dollar jackpot by ‘cracking’ the lottery code.
While many agree that any sort of lottery win has more to do with the luck of the person who owns the ticket, a retired couple has defied these terms with their jackpot which they hit by cracking the lottery code and playing on multiple tickets. Moreover, the winners have also got a feature film made on their exploit.
‘Jerry and Marge Go Large’ – the David Frankel dramedy – premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year.
The film is about Jerry and Marge Selbee, a retired couple from Michigan, who managed to crack the lottery code with their years of experience, which combined with simple mathematics and a fair share of guesswork not only helped them win multiple rounds of small lotteries, but also the bumper jackpot of £23 million by playing on multiple tickets.
The lottery which itself came as a stroke of luck to the couple, began back in 2003 when Jerry returned to his sold store one day for a quick final look and there found a state lottery game with a special feature – Rolldown, a unique jackpot which keeps building until ‘someone hits all the correct six numbers’.
Moreover, in the Rolldown, if no player is able to get ‘all six’ until it reached $5 million, the prize money would get rolled down to the lower tier winners, who matched four or five numbers.
Jerry Selbee – who had his educational background in Mathematics – was able to crack the lottery code in under five minutes, and then there was no looking back for Selbees who earned thousands of dollars in a couple of years before the game was closed in 2005.
However, fortunate for them, the couple was able to find an identical play named ‘Winfall’ in Massachusetts, and then there was no stop to their exploits until the biggest win.
Of his viral fortune, Jerry stated, “Our first play was $80,000 with 40,000 tickets, and our last play was $712,000 with 366,000 tickets. We did spend 11 to 14 nights at the motel in South Deerfield and it was something we looked forward to.”
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