Beat the Lotto review – how a small-time accountant tried to outwit Ireland's national lottery

The Guardian

30-06-2025

Harking back to a simpler, more innocent, less gambling-saturated era, this Irish documentary tells the story of how a syndicate of entrepreneurs and semi-professional gamblers tried to game the Republic of Ireland's national lottery in 1992. Mustachioed ringleader Stefan Klincewicz, interviewed here, looks exactly like the kind of provincial accountant he originally was, neither a smooth master criminal nor a geeky Moneyball-style statistical genius. Klincewicz merely worked out that the capital needed to buy a ticket for every possible combination of the six numbers in the Lotto game would cost less than IR£1m. That strategy would significantly lower the 1 in 2m odds a punter usually faced, but only if they could manage to buy all the tickets needed.
When a rollover weekend came around, making the pot worth the gamble, Klincewicz and his micro army of chancers, including teenage daughters and friends press-ganged into the effort, went to work. But the accordion-playing head of the national lottery at the time tried to foil their scheme by limiting how many tickets individuals could buy at once. The concern was that the public would feel discouraged from playing Lotto if they thought syndicates would usually win.
The director, Ross Whitaker, works his way towards the inevitable conclusion, with its mixed success, by deploying lashings of 1990s TV footage, the low-resolution cinematography as endearing as the pre-millennium fashions worn by the interviewees of the time. There are clips from talkshows hosted not just by Irish institution Gay Byrne, but some of the many others, prompting the thought that Ireland must have more daytime talkshows than any other world economy of comparable size. But there is not much going on here in terms of wider contextualisation or deeper themes, just a very meat-and-potatoes, TV-friendly story of a scam played, as nearly everyone says, for 'the craic'. And the money, of course.
Beat the Lotto is in Irish and Northern Irish cinemas, and Bertha DocHouse, London, from 4 July.