----- 4 stars ----- Jerry and Marge Go Large / Huffington Post This piece was everywhere a couple weeks ago -- and for good reason. It's a great story: One year, when he and Marge went to a used-book sale at a library to find gifts for their family, Jerry’s main purchase was a stack of college math textbooks. When their daughter Dawn asked why, he replied, “To keep my skills sharp.” So perhaps it was only fitting that at age 64, Jerry found himself contemplating that most alluring of puzzles: the lottery. He was recently retired by then, living with Marge in a tiny town called Evart and wondering what to do with his time. After stopping in one morning at a convenience store he knew well, he picked up a brochure for a brand-new state lottery game. Studying the flyer later at his kitchen table, Jerry saw that it listed the odds of winning certain amounts of money by picking certain combinations of numbers. That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling. [...] About a week before a roll-down drawing, they would drive the 700 miles from Michigan, cutting across Canada to save time, listening to James Patterson novels on tape. They’d book a room at a Red Roof Inn in South Deerfield, and in the mornings, they’d go to work: Jerry to Jerry’s Place; Marge to Billy’s. They started at 5:30 a.m., before the stores opened to the public, and went straight through to 6 p.m., printing as many tickets as the terminals would handle, rubber-banding them in stacks of $5,000, and throwing the stacks into duffel bags."
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----- 4 stars ----- Jerry and Marge Go Large / Huffington Post This piece was everywhere a couple weeks ago -- and for good reason. It's a great story: One year, when he and Marge went to a used-book sale at a library to find gifts for their family, Jerry’s main purchase was a stack of college math textbooks. When their daughter Dawn asked why, he replied, “To keep my skills sharp.” So perhaps it was only fitting that at age 64, Jerry found himself contemplating that most alluring of puzzles: the lottery. He was recently retired by then, living with Marge in a tiny town called Evart and wondering what to do with his time. After stopping in one morning at a convenience store he knew well, he picked up a brochure for a brand-new state lottery game. Studying the flyer later at his kitchen table, Jerry saw that it listed the odds of winning certain amounts of money by picking certain combinations of numbers. That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling. [...] About a week before a roll-down drawing, they would drive the 700 miles from Michigan, cutting across Canada to save time, listening to James Patterson novels on tape. They’d book a room at a Red Roof Inn in South Deerfield, and in the mornings, they’d go to work: Jerry to Jerry’s Place; Marge to Billy’s. They started at 5:30 a.m., before the stores opened to the public, and went straight through to 6 p.m., printing as many tickets as the terminals would handle, rubber-banding them in stacks of $5,000, and throwing the stacks into duffel bags."
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