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Extra.ie
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
FILM REVIEW OF THE WEEK: Beat The Lotto
Beat the Lotto , the latest offering from director Ross Whitaker, is a charming and light documentary that spins the tale of a group of amateur gamblers, hustlers, and dreamers who, in 1992, decided they could outsmart the Irish National Lottery. What unfolds is part caper, part cultural time capsule, and part portrait of the particularly Irish love of cheekily bending the rules and rooting for the underdog though who the underdog in this story is less obvious than it seems. With his trademark curiosity and affection for character-driven stories, Whitaker introduces us to Stefan Klincewicz, a moustachioed accountant with a head for numbers and a twinkle in his eye, who assembled a ragtag syndicate determined to buy every possible ticket combination and win the jackpot. Their plan was bold, audacious, and grounded in cold, hard mathematics, and the documentary walks viewers through the scheme with enough clarity and humour to keep even the most math-averse of us engaged. The true joy of Beat the Lotto is in its cast of real-life characters, many of whom are interviewed on screen. These men, older but no less spirited, bring a warmth and wit that lights up the film, and their mix of nostalgia, mischief, and sheer cheekiness is deeply endearing. Theres a sense that what they were really after wasnt just money, but fun, adventure, and the thrill of beating the odds or at least of giving it a good go. (Its interesting to note that no women appear to be in the syndicate though there was rumoured to be one woman involved, and members mention not telling their wives what they were up to, so there is like many films about finance a deeply embedded boys club mentality throughout.) Whitaker makes full use of grainy 90s TV clips, old chat show appearances, and golden-hued footage from the era, which gives the film a kind of dusty, familiar texture, and viewers who remember the early years of the Lotto will find much here to delight in. The clothes, the graphics, the music, the very tone of that time in Ireland its all there, and it makes for oddly comforting viewing, even when the subject is a potential multi-million pound scheme that was legal, but felt unfair to the average punter hoping their weekly lotto ticket could change their life. A testy interview between Pat Kenny and Stefan Klincewicz is spicily entertaining, and clips of Lotto representative Ray Bates are fantastic, as he passionately argues for fairness and equality in the Lotto. News cameras following syndicate members trying to offload hundreds of tickets in local shops feel like a wildly entertaining live episode of Crimecall , and watching the syndicate deftly turn the media narrative in another direction is a fun lesson in P.R. In this David V. Goliath story, the roles constantly change – and of course, for those unfamiliar with the story, the suspense of whether the scheme will pay off and pay out is well built. That said, the film isnt without its flaws. The pacing occasionally drags, with some interviews returning to the same points a few too many time. The dramatic reenactments dont feel necessary, and there are moments when you wish the film would stretch further beyond the mechanics of the plan and explore the broader political and cultural context of the time. It hints at a wider national mood one shaped by emigration, economic precarity and a desire to believe in something better but never quite digs in. A deeper exploration of what it meant for Irish people to put their faith in a government-backed game of chance, or how that faith sat alongside growing disillusionment in other state institutions, would have made the film deeper and stronger. Still, Beat the Lotto succeeds where it counts. It tells an Irish story that is funny, weird, and true, and does so with a lightness of touch. Ultimately, this is a film about belief in luck, in numbers, in collective effort, and in a system that might, just might, be beatable. Its about risk and reward, trust and trickery, and the uniquely Irish art of taking the craic seriously. In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below:
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
Irish Daily Mirror
20-06-2025
- Irish Daily Mirror
History of the Lotto in Ireland after €250m claimed in historic EuroMillions win
From the days of the sweepstakes up to the EuroMillions and online tickets, the lottery has had a firm hold on Irish society. As a lucky player in Cork scooped a massive €250 million in the EuroMillions on Tuesday, we take a look back at the history of the Lotto in Ireland. While the saying "the luck of the Irish" rings true for thousands of winners, the lottery hasn't been all fun and games in this country. There were scandals, a gameshow, a winning accountant that forced the rules to be changed, and the hilarious movie about the Irish Lotto - Waking Ned. In the 1930s, following the Civil War, Ireland was in a great depression, and funding was badly needed for hospitals. So the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes lottery (known as 'the sweeps') was established as it promised to raise much needed money for hospitals. Despite such lotteries being illegal in most jurisdictions, tickets were taking in millions and millions of pounds. While it promised to do good, the sweeps turned into one of the country's greatest scandals. In 1973, it emerged that only 10 per cent of the money raised was given to hospitals, as the founders of the lottery became rich. People were fooled into thinking it was an honest operation as it was associated with the Government and gardaí were in charge of tickets. However, it was far from that. On top of hospitals only receiving a small portion of profits, the sweeps involved worldwide ticket-smuggling, tickets sold abroad that never made it back to Ireland, and tickets that never even made it into the drum. Over a decade after the scandal broke, The National Lottery, which we know today, began in 1987 and the first draw took place on Saturday April 16, 1988. Two years later a draw was also added on a Wednesday. When the lottery first launched, players chose six numbers from a choice of 36. However, this didn't last long as Dubliner, Polish-Irish accountant Stefan Klincewicz, figured out how to hack the game. For a draw in May 1992, the accountant - as part of a 28-person syndicate - bought enough tickets covering all the different combinations. They matched the winning numbers and ended up winning £1.16 million. The National Lottery caught on to their game and changed the format to 6/39 in August 1992. It also added the bonus ball to create more prizes. Its very first draw was broadcast on RTÉ One, and it was presented by Ronan Collins and an independent observer. But just two years later it was decided that a show with more glitz and glam was needed, so Winning Streak was born. It first aired with Mike Murphy as the presenter, and it would go on to become one of the longest-running game shows in Europe. Marty Whelan then took over in 2009 and presented the show right up until 2020. It came off air when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and hasn't come back since. However, broadcaster Marty says he would love to present the show again as it brought so much joy to households across Ireland. In 2004, the EuroMillions launched in Ireland as lotto players rejoiced that even more money could be won. A year later, Dolores McNamara became the country's first big winner when she scooped €115.4m, and has arguably remained Ireland's most well-known lotto winner. She was also the biggest EuroMillions winner at the time. The mother-of-six from Limerick discovered her historic win while in her local pub, the Track Bar. After her friend checked her ticket, a barmaid said the pub erupted in cheers and the "drink started flowing and the champagne was poured". Media attention followed her as she arrived at Lotto HQ on August 4, 2005, to collect her massive cheque. However, the millionaire became nervous with the fanfare and released a statement through her solicitor as she wanted to "return to normality as soon as possible". Since Dolores' win, there have been 18 EuroMillions wins in Ireland, however, no one other than Dolores went public with their win. One of the biggest wins was by The Naul Family Syndicate in February 2019, when they won €175.4 million. While they didn't officially go public, one of the nine winners spoke out after the €250m win on Tuesday night. Matt Rogers, who pocketed almost €20m, gave Ireland's newest millionaire some advice: "Don't let it change you". The Lotto has had such a hold on Irish society that in 1998 a fictionalised story about a man who won it was released. Waking Ned, which starred the late David Kelly, told the story of Ned Devine- a man who had a heart attack and died after the shock of winning the big bucks. The movie then follows the hilarious extremes the village goes to to try and claim his prize, as they decide it should be done in his honour.
