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IN 1987 IRELAND, the arrival of the National Lottery became a bright spot in the middle of a recession. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to win huge sums in an Ireland that was struggling financially – even if it meant gambling your own money?
The fact that some National Lottery funds go to good causes made the deal even sweeter. But for some people, it wasn’t enough to let the Lotto do its thing. They wanted to see if they could beat it.
One of those people was Stefan Klincewicz, a Corkonian accountant with serious maths skills who reckoned he could find a way to win big. He ended up gathering a syndicate who over the period of a year filled out two million Lotto tickets according to his method.
Their work culminated on a weekend in May 1992 when the lottery was having a huge £1.7 million rollover. But with such large sums being spent on Lotto tickets, their behaviour began to draw attention to itself.
What happened next, and was Klincewicz correct about the potential result? That’s what Beat the Lotto, a new documentary directed by Ross Whitaker (Katie, The Boys in Green, Rachael Blackmore: A Grand Year) explores. It arrives in cinemas this Thursday.
‘The feeling of a heist thriller’
Whitaker was at a wedding when another guest suggested he make a documentary about the syndicate.
“Immediately a light bulb went off in my head, because it was at the time exactly the kind of story I was looking for – to do something retrospective that you can have a lot of fun with, and try and build something that almost had the feeling of a heist thriller,” says Whitaker.
There was one potential issue: in his memory, the syndicate was fairly clandestine. “So I imagined that they might not necessarily be that open to the documentary,” says Whitaker.
He met with Klincewicz and assured him “that it certainly wasn’t going to be a hatchet job – that we really just wanted to tell the story as it happened.” Soon Klincewicz was on board, and put Whitaker in touch with other syndicate members. In the end, the documentary took 10 years to come to fruition.
Beating the system
At the heart of Beat the Lotto is Klincewicz, a man who was lightly derided for having the maverick idea that he could ‘beat’ the National Lottery.
An early clip in the documentary shows Pat Kenny grilling Klincewicz on the Late Late Show about a book he wrote on beating the Lotto – despite the fact he hadn’t actually won it. Yet there’s a sense that he is able to handle the questions, because he believes in what he’s discovered.
“Stefan’s a really interesting character – someone that had this natural ability for maths,” says Whitaker.
Additionally, he was of Polish origin which would have made him stand out while growing up. “He probably felt, with his Polish name in Ireland of the time, that he was maybe a little bit different, and was made to feel a little bit different to those around him,” says the director.
“So maybe in some way that fuelled his interest in taking on the system. Maybe he didn’t feel like he was entirely part of the system.”
Klincewicz’s idea for beating the Lotto was based around a system that took advantage of the weekends where the Lottery offered special offers.
This means that the documentary has to explain what to some of us is a complicated mathematical idea. “When you’re explaining something to people, it’s often not that entertaining,” says Whitaker. “So when I was interviewing the subjects, I would get each of them to explain it in as simple a language as they could, and then combine those accounts together, as well as putting text on screen to set it up.”
Regardless of how much of the maths you understand, the quest that Klincewicz and his syndicate were on is clear in the documentary, and that they had a lot of fun with their high-stakes plan.
The syndicate
Klincewicz was able to gather a significant group of syndicate members around him. “The group of people that were involved, they were people that probably naturally were attracted to these kinds of things,” says Whitaker.
“Stefan went about it in an extremely professional way. He created a presentation, he delivered it to people in a way that was tangible. It took a year to convince people. So he started filling out those forms, it took about a year to get them all ready.
In a way, apart from the maths element of it and so on, it’s the actual diligence and the organisational skills [that is impressive]. To create a system to actually fill out the boxes in an orderly way is probably where the real genius of it was, the logistics of making that happen.
Ray Bates
One of the other key characters in the documentary is Ray Bates, the head of the National Lottery at the time, who was gregarious and media-savvy.
“He’d had a pretty stellar civil service career up until then. And not only was he a really, really smart guy and a natural marketer of the organisation that he was leading, he was just brilliant on television,” says Whitaker.
“We’d hoped that Ray might participate in the documentary, but in the end unfortunately he decided not to. But we got to meet him a couple of times along the way and he’s as intelligent and charismatic in real life as he was back in the old footage.”
“The National Lottery, of course, would have preferred if people weren’t attempting to do something like this,” adds Whitaker. “So you can understand his perspective.”
‘Sprinkling golddust’
The documentary gives an insight into what the National Lottery meant to Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s.
“People that were growing up at that time might remember that suddenly there was a basketball court or a tennis court, or some facility in their community, and there’d be a little placard outside saying it was paid for by the National Lottery,” says Whitaker.
“Now, of course, the National Lottery got their funds from citizens that were buying tickets, but at the same time, it felt like there was this organisation that was suddenly sprinkling gold dust at a time when people were quite downtrodden.”
“It became this incredibly positive institution in a country where people didn’t feel very positively about their institutions.”
Klincewicz was willing to take on this institution in a way others weren’t. But did his audacious plan work? That’s for the documentary to reveal.
Beat the Lotto is in cinemas from tomorrow, July 4. Check beatthelottofilm.com for screenings.
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