In an effort to resume something like normal service now we have moved from Substack, here’s tonight’s recommendation – an Irish documentary that played in the 2025 British & Irish Film Festival and then returned ever-so-briefly for a theatrical run here in Aotearoa.
Beat the Lotto is a charming film that I reviewed for RNZ Nights back in December last year. (This is a machine transcription of my rambly review but you can listen to the whole thing here.)
Ireland got Lotto at about the same time we did, 1986, 87, and for similar reasons. We were both countries of a similar size, and we were going through various economic downturns, was a lot of unemployment and it was seen that introducing a lottery might be a way to provide money for social and community causes, but at the same time give people a little bit of a sense of hope that maybe there’s a way out of this economic malaise that both countries were in.
So this is a film about a guy who’s a bit of a statistical whiz, a guy called Stefan, who came up with this idea that if you bought every combination of numbers, you would be able to break the system, basically. If you bought a ticket, at least one entry for each of the combinations of six numbers – and it doesn’t, it doesn’t sound like it would make any sense because the odds, I mean, you would, you would be guaranteed to win the top prize, but the top prize wouldn’t come near what you had invested to buy all of the tickets.
But what he realized was that at the time they were the Irish lottery was promoting and marketing and they had a guaranteed 100 Irish pound prize if you got four numbers in a row. And, of course, he was if he bought every single combination of numbers, he was going to win all of those prizes as well.
And he realized that just winning all of the combinations of four numbers was going to get him, sort of, three quarters of the way there, which meant that winning the grand prize would be all kind of gravy on top.
You know, when you play Lotto, you’ve still – it still works this way – I know lots of people play online and what have you, but you’ve still got pieces of paper with a pencil and you mark the the tickets, the numbers that you want on the, on the tickets.
And it goes through a machine and it reads it, et cetera. Well, it hasn’t really changed very much. That was how it worked. But he spent an entire summer filling out those tickets with his family so that he had boxes and boxes of those ready to go when he established the group of people, investors, the syndicate who were going to invest in this particular plan, so that they could use those tickets all on one day, basically.
I mean, it’s a wild story. It could only really happen in Ireland, I think. This kind of, the craic, you know. Lots of the people involved in this are still around. This happened in 1992. Lots of people are still around, and luckily for them, they were all, kind of, independently wealthy. They were bookmakers or car dealers or what have you, and no one was betting their farm or their home on it, and so they can look back on it with a great deal of fondness.
But the story really takes off when the National Lottery, about halfway through the day, realises what’s happening and starts to push back, because they realise that they are about to get done.
…
Yes, I love this sort of caper movie. But this is all based on real life. And these guys were driving all over Ireland with boxes of tickets and boxes of cash, because you had to pay with cash at the time, in order to try to meet the deadline of buying every single combination of numbers by the time it closed. It’s very amusing and it is also very, kind of, gripping at the end.
Where to watch Beat the Lotto
Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on DocPlay
Canada: Not currently available
Ireland: Streaming on Netflix
India: Streaming on HotStar
UK: Streaming on Netflix
USA: Not currently available
