Something to watch tonight: Beat the Lotto

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