Latest news with #RossWhitaker
RTÉ News
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Beat the Lotto - a wry look at the joy of six in 1990s Ireland
"Once you heard it, once you saw it, you were in..." One of the best stories from 1990s Ireland (or, indeed, anytime-you-like Ireland) gets a big-screen outing in this charmer of a documentary from director Ross Whitaker (Katie, Between Land and Sea, Unbreakable: The Mark Pollock Story). Back in 1992, a syndicate led by Cork-born accountant Stefan Klincewicz decided "to play every single lottery line" by purchasing "all the combinations of numbers". Even in the good old days of six numbers from 36, that was some logistical and financial ask - and the syndicate needed a rollover Lotto jackpot to clean up on the night. Months of planning came down to desperate hours as the draw neared. Could they do it? Well, even if you know how this caper ultimately played out, director Whitaker makes sure you're still watching his film with a newcomer's sense of anticipation. Beat the Lotto is funny, pacy, and blessed with a better pitch than most Hollywood movies can manage. How has it taken 30-plus years to get this escapade into Irish cinemas? Here, you have a portal to a different Ireland, one where the greeting "Good evening, Ronan" was the clarion call to get Saturday night well and truly under way. So much has changed, but one thing that's still the same is the yearning for "a bit of craic", mischievously hardwired into the Irish DNA and exemplified by the syndicate members who share their memories of taking on the establishment - definitely older, debatably wiser, and still game for a laugh after all these years. The footage of someone rocking up to a newsagent's with a crisps box full of £50s to buy heaps of Lotto tickets is so Guaranteed Irish that you may well feel a lump in your throat. Whitaker hurries the ending, and it's frustrating that there isn't more of an epilogue, because all the interviewees are such good company that you'd love to hear a bit more. That aside, this film, well, makes a balls of it in a lovely way.
Irish Times
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Beat the Lotto review: An irresistible documentary about an audacious plan that captured Ireland's imagination
Beat the Lotto Director : Ross Whitaker Cert : G Genre : Documentary Starring : Stefan Klincewicz Running Time : 1 hr 22 mins On Friday, May 29th, 1992, agents monitoring the National Lottery spotted odd purchasing activity. People were visiting out-of-the-way newsagents and post offices around Ireland to buy Lotto tickets in bulk. Some of them were spending up to £70,000 – this is pre-euro – in a single transaction. With a rollover scheduled for Saturday, the jackpot had swelled to an impressive £1.7 million. Someone was attempting to outsmart the system. Enter Stefan Klincewicz , a Cork-born accountant and passionate philatelist of Polish heritage and the hero of the irresistible documentary Beat the Lotto, about a plan that captured the nation's imagination. The idea was simple, if not inexpensive: using mathematical analysis, Klincewicz reckoned the system could be cracked if he could just gather enough people to form a syndicate to buy every single number combination. [ The Irish syndicate that beat the Lotto: 'It wasn't illegal to do what they did' Opens in new window ] Ultimately, he and 100 associates – a self-styled crowd of reprobates – bought 80 per cent of the 1,947,792 combinations then available given the number of balls at the time. The money is important; 'the craic' adds further motivation. READ MORE Ross Whitaker , the director of this documentary, is perhaps best known for his portraits Katie Taylor and The Boys in Green . He invests this pre-Celtic Tiger tale with the punch-the-air rhythms of a sports movie, replete with a last-minute intervention from the authorities. Archive footage of Ray Bates, the charming, accordion-playing public face of the National Lottery, adds further gaiety to proceedings. [ The Boys in Green: 'It felt as if we had been in recession my entire life when Italia '90 happened' Opens in new window ] Whitaker has a fascinating subject in Klincewicz and a winning aesthetic in his judiciously selected low-fi cuts from Irish TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s, skilfully assembled by editor Nathan Nugent. Against this grim-looking place, hit by emigration and the high unemployment that helped to prompt it, this is a much-needed good-news story, then and now. In cinemas from Friday, July 4th
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Beat the Lotto review – how a small-time accountant tried to outwit Ireland's national lottery
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.
Irish Times
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Irish syndicate that beat the Lotto: ‘It wasn't complicated to organise'
'I was sitting beside a guy at the wedding of a friend, and I was asking about what he did,' Ross Whitaker tells me. 'I'm always thinking, Is there a documentary here? Ha ha!' It transpired that the other guest worked in 'big data'. He didn't think there was much for Whitaker there. 'No, it's not very interesting, Ross,' the chap deflected. 'But do you remember the story of the time the syndicate tried to buy all the numbers in the lottery? You should do a documentary about that.' Whitaker, director of such fine films as Katie and Between Land and Sea , describes a 'media light bulb going off'. Like most of us who remember 1992, he had a vague grasp of the facts. But reports at the time were sketchy. Did they get away with it? READ MORE All is now answered in Whitaker's Beat the Lotto. It is a fascinating yarn – packed full of oddballs and geniuses – that works up to the most gripping denouement of the season. At its heart is a charming, articulate Cork man named Stefan Klincewicz. It was he who devised the plan to buy up every number for a bank-holiday draw that would, despite the enormous outlay, still (almost) guarantee significant profit. Without Klincewicz, Whitaker would not have a film. Yet one could easily understand if he didn't want to revisit the controversy. 'Controversy? I never really thought about it. Because, for me at the time, it was no big deal,' Klincewicz says. 'About a year before the project went ahead I approached the National Lottery . I won't give you the name of the person, but he said to me, 'I'll get back to you on it.' And he did. Within 10 minutes.' All very civilised. All very upfront. 'I offered to bring in the full payment for buying all the combinations, give them the money and they just give us one ticket. But the response was, very simply, 'No, we cannot accept that proposal. But if you mark all the cards, that'll be okay.' So I said to myself, 'Right. That's just what I am going to do.'' My assumption is that the organisers were banking on nobody managing the logistical complications of getting nearly two million Lotto cards through machines up and down the State. It was simple enough to calculate when, on a big rollover weekend, the mathematics would deliver a profit to someone who bought all the combinations (unless there was an unprecedented number of winners). But surely nobody could manage to pull off such an enormous operation. 'It wasn't complicated to organise,' Klincewicz says with a chuckle. 'For me it was a case of turning over the page. 'Right, what's next?' Get it done. I never really thought about that. It is just something I set out to do. And I did it.' Rarely has such a remarkable man seemed so convinced of his unremarkable nature. There are the makings of a book in his family story. His mother, a nurse from northwest Cork specialising in psychiatry, was attached to Gen Montgomery's 21st Army Corps in the months after the second World War. She found herself liaising with Klincewicz's dad, a Polish paediatrician, and, after getting together romantically, they pondered where in world such a couple would find home. Most of the elder Klincewicz's family made their way to the United States. 'Mum said to Dad, 'Look, come to Ireland. We'll go there. Try it for a year. And if you don't like it we'll go to Chicago.' So, obviously, the rest is history. Dad loved Ireland, loved the people, and that's how they came to be in Cork.' Might we find clues to his interest in the mathematics of gambling from a legend about his grandparents, exiled to Siberia by the Bolsheviks? 'I could never get missing pieces of the jigsaw, but apparently they escaped as a result of the outcome of a game of chance,' he says. 'I'm not sure if it was poker. I don't know what card game it was, but they escaped with assistance based on the outcome of this card game.' Klincewicz, who was in the rare-stamp business at the time of the Lotto project, makes no claims for academic standing. 'I have no PhDs, nothing whatsoever like that,' he says. 'I would prefer to say I had no qualifications. Any papers that I do have are only diplomas or things like that – which are not major, not relevant.' The lottery had already delivered Klincewicz a degree of fame. The documentary shows him promoting his bestselling book, Win the Lotto, on RTÉ television. One cannot overstate the impact of the National Lottery in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was a time of great hardship, and the lure of instant wealth proved an irresistible intoxicant. Then there were the community projects that the profits financed. 'It was seen as a really positive thing in a time that was, I suppose, quite dark,' Whitaker says. 'We don't want to go on and on about that, but that's very much how people felt at the time. All you ever heard at school was the unemployment numbers going up.' This explains the divided feelings about the syndicate at the time. A television audience shown in the film seems to be wishing for them to fail. Here were these cynics playing poker with the people's dream machine. Yet, 33 years later, it is hard to watch Beat the Lotto without rooting for Klincewicz and his band of investors. They were breaking no laws. The flaw was in the system. And the plan involved a lot of hard work. 'I have heard of people coming out of screenings of the film arguing over which side they would be on,' Whitaker says. 'And, in fact, some of the programmers in different cinemas have been relaying that back to us.' Yet Beat the Lotto is structured like a heist movie, and everyone wants the plotters to succeed in such an entertainment. Right? All the more so if it's strictly legal. Don't the Irish pride themselves on enjoying the establishment being taken down a peg? 'You do lean a little bit into the tropes of the genre you're in,' Whitaker says. 'And, when it comes down to it, it wasn't illegal to do what they did. It was an incredible undertaking. They spent over a year filling out those tickets by hand, which just feels like an insane thing for someone to do.' So where did Klincewicz find the other members of the syndicate? For all the simplicity of the idea, you still need to gather a large number of people who are prepared to risk some unexpected glitch frustrating the mathematics. 'It would have been due to the formation of smaller syndicates prior to doing this and building up contacts through those circles,' he says, slightly cryptically. 'So many diverse aspects of life. One of the people – and I don't want to make the name public – was a major car dealer, a big name, the managing director of that company. I got to know him because I got my first car in Dublin from him. And stayed with them. So he was part of the syndicate.' He reveals that the biggest single investment would have been £220,000. 'When the news got out, one person whom I knew very well arrived into my offices on the Thursday morning and said, 'I want to invest in this.' There was very little left at the time. I think there was probably around £10,000 needed to complete it – which would have been filled anyway. He handed £50 over for his share. Ha ha!' The task of buying the tickets was shared out among members in impressively logical fashion. 'It wasn't pro rata,' he says. 'It was a case of [allocating] somebody who had the knowledge how to get, for example, £100,000 worth of tickets on. They had the ability to do it. They had the contacts to do it. They had the assistance to do it.' It would be as well going into Beat the Lotto without knowing how the plan worked out. We certainly shan't spoil that here, but inevitably a host of complications mount as we veer towards the fateful draw. Klincewicz seems genuinely puzzled when I ask if he would like to have done anything differently. 'Well, not really. No, no.' No regrets? He still feels the plan itself was sound? 'It was, yeah, yeah, yeah … apart from the complications.' Life is ever thus. Beat the Lotto is in cinemas from Friday, July 4th
RTÉ News
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Beat the Lotto coming to cinemas next month
Beat the Lotto, the award-winning documentary from director Ross Whitaker (Between Land and Sea, Katie), will be released in cinemas on Friday 4 July. The film "charts the true story that captivated Ireland in 1992; the syndicate helmed by mathematician Stefan Klincewicz and their attempt to cover close to two million combinations and guarantee a rollover Lotto jackpot win". Describing his film as "a reflection of Ireland in the 1990s", director Whitaker said: "We wanted to make a film that encouraged people to reflect on what side they take - are they in favour of the syndicate who are trying to beat the system, or the trusted national institution that was a very positive force in 1990s Ireland? "It was enjoyable to build the film to an exciting climax and for the audience to wonder who would win out in the end." Beat the Lotto received its world premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival in February 2025, winning the Best Irish Film award from the Dublin Film Critics' Circle.
