On Friday, May 29th, 1992, agents monitoring the National Lottery spotted odd purchasing activity. People were visiting out-of-the-way newsagents and post offices around Ireland to buy Lotto tickets in bulk. Some of them were spending up to £70,000 – this is pre-euro – in a single transaction. With a rollover scheduled for Saturday, the jackpot had swelled to an impressive £1.7 million. Someone was attempting to outsmart the system.
Enter Stefan Klincewicz, a Cork-born accountant and passionate philatelist of Polish heritage and the hero of the irresistible documentary Beat the Lotto, about a plan that captured the nation’s imagination.
The idea was simple, if not inexpensive: using mathematical analysis, Klincewicz reckoned the system could be cracked if he could just gather enough people to form a syndicate to buy every single number combination.
[ The Irish syndicate that beat the Lotto: ‘It wasn’t illegal to do what they did’Opens in new window ]
Ultimately, he and 100 associates – a self-styled crowd of reprobates – bought 80 per cent of the 1,947,792 combinations then available given the number of balls at the time. The money is important; “the craic” adds further motivation.
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Ross Whitaker, the director of this documentary, is perhaps best known for his portraits Katie Taylor and The Boys in Green. He invests this pre-Celtic Tiger tale with the punch-the-air rhythms of a sports movie, replete with a last-minute intervention from the authorities. Archive footage of Ray Bates, the charming, accordion-playing public face of the National Lottery, adds further gaiety to proceedings.
Whitaker has a fascinating subject in Klincewicz and a winning aesthetic in his judiciously selected low-fi cuts from Irish TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s, skilfully assembled by editor Nathan Nugent. Against this grim-looking place, hit by emigration and the high unemployment that helped to prompt it, this is a much-needed good-news story, then and now.
In cinemas from Friday, July 4th
