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Sports & Games
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The Statistician Who Beat the Lottery—And Then Gave the Secret Away
A geological statistician, Mohan Srivastava, discovered a flaw in a Canadian Tic-Tac-Toe scratch-off game, allowing him to identify winning tickets with 90% accuracy. Instead of exploiting it, he reported the flaw, finding his day job more profitable and fulfilling.
We've all dreamed of it: finding a secret, a loophole, a guaranteed way to win the lottery. For most, it's a fantasy. But for Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician based in Toronto, it became a reality. In 2003, armed with his unique skill set for finding patterns in chaotic data, he cracked a popular scratch-off game. Yet, the story that unfolds is not one of newfound riches, but of intellectual curiosity and a surprising cost-benefit analysis.
A Curious Fluke
It started innocently enough. Srivastava was given a couple of Tic-Tac-Toe scratch-off tickets as a gag gift. He won on one, lost on the other. But something piqued his interest. As a statistician trained to identify non-random patterns in mineral deposit data, he wondered if the lottery tickets, which are mass-produced, might contain a flaw. He thought, 'Are these tickets truly random?' The answer, he soon discovered, was no.
Cracking the Code
Srivastava realized the key wasn't in the numbers you scratch off, but in the visible, unscratched numbers printed on the card's surface. These numbers, which players use to play the tic-tac-toe game, were supposed to appear random. However, he noticed a subtle pattern. Certain numbers appeared only once on the entire visible grid—he called them 'singletons.' By tracking these singletons and their positions, he developed an algorithm.
I assumed that the numbers on the outside of the ticket were just for decoration... But they're not. They're the key. The ticket isn't a game of chance at all. It's a puzzle. It's a game of looking for a needle in a haystack.
His method was astonishingly effective. He could look at an unscratched Tic-Tac-Toe ticket and determine if it was a winner with about 90% accuracy. He tested his theory by purchasing 20 tickets, correctly identifying 19 of them as winners or losers before scratching a single one.
The Unprofitable Grind
This is the part of the story where you'd expect Srivastava to rent a van, drive across Ontario, and quietly become a millionaire. But reality was far less glamorous. He did the math. The flaw only identified likely winners, most of which were small prizes—$3 here, $10 there. To make a significant profit, he would have to travel from store to store, meticulously scan tickets in the display case, buy only the promising ones, and hope the store clerk didn't catch on. He calculated his potential earnings: about $600 a day. While that sounds great, it was a full-time, tedious job that would earn him less than his highly-paid consulting work as a statistician. The 'job' of being a lottery hacker was simply less profitable, and far less enjoyable, than his actual career.
An Ethical Choice
Faced with a boring, low-paying 'job' and an ethical dilemma, Srivastava made a choice that surprises many. He picked up the phone and called the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG). At first, they were skeptical, dismissing his claim. It was only when he mailed them a bundle of sorted winning and losing tickets—still unscratched—that they took him seriously. Within days, the OLG confirmed the flaw and pulled the Tic-Tac-Toe game from shelves, becoming one of the first lotteries to be successfully cracked by a customer. For Srivastava, the real prize wasn't the money he could have made, but the satisfaction of solving a complex puzzle that millions of others had missed.