The Lottery Hackers - The Huffington Post

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By Jason Fagone

Gaming the lottery seemed as good a retirement plan as any.

Photos by Lyndon French

March 01, 2018

MARCH 01, 2018

Jerry and Marge Go Large

Gaming the lotto seemed as good a retirement plan as any.

By Jason Fagone

Photos By Lyndon French

Chapter 1

Gerald Selbee broke the code of the American breakfast cereal industry because he was bored at work one day, because it was a fun mental challenge, because most things at his job were not fun and because he could—because he happened to be the kind of person who saw puzzles all around him, puzzles that other people don’t realize are puzzles: the little ciphers and patterns that float through the world and stick to the surfaces of everyday things.

This was back in 1966, when Jerry, as he is known, worked for Kellogg’s in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was a materials analyst who designed boxes to increase the shelf life of freeze-dried foods and cereals. “You ever buy a cereal that had a foil liner on the inside?” Jerry asked not long ago. “That was one of my projects.”

He worked in the same factory where the cereals were cooked, the smells wafting into his office—an aroma like animal feed at first, and then, as the grains got rolled and flaked and dried, like oatmeal. Near his desk, he kept a stash of cereal boxes made by Kellogg’s competitors: Cheerios from General Mills, Honeycomb from Post. Sales reps brought these back from around the country, and Jerry would dry, heat and weigh their contents in the factory’s lab, comparing their moisture levels to that of a Kellogg’s cereal like Froot Loops. It wasn’t the most interesting job, but both of Jerry’s parents had been factory workers, his father at a hose-fitting plant and his mother at the same Kellogg’s factory, and he wasn’t raised to complain about manual labor.

One day Jerry found himself studying a string of letters and numbers stamped near the bottom of a General Mills box. Companies like Kellogg’s and Post stamped their boxes too, usually with a cereal’s time and place of production, allowing its shelf life to be tracked. But General Mills’ figures were garbled, as if in secret code. Jerry wondered if he could make sense of them. After locating a few boxes of General Mills and Kellogg’s cereals that had sat on store shelves in the same locations, he decided to test their contents, reasoning that cereals with similar moisture must have been cooked around the same time. Scribbling on a piece of scratch paper, he set up a few ratios.

All of a sudden, he experienced the puzzle-solver’s dopamine hit of seeing a solution shine through the fog: He had worked out how to trace any General Mills box of cereal back to the exact plant, shift, date and time of its creation. “It was pretty easy,” Jerry would recall decades later, chuckling at the memory. In a more ruthless industry, cracking a competitor’s trade secrets might have generated millions in profits. This, however, was the cereal business. Discovering the adversary’s production schedule didn’t make anyone rich, and so when Jerry shared his findings with his managers, his discovery was swallowed and digested without fuss.

He didn’t mind. To him, the fun was in figuring it out—understanding how this small piece of the world worked. He’d always had a knack for seeing patterns in what struck other people as noise. As a kid, Jerry had been dyslexic, fumbling with his reading assignments, and he hadn’t realized he possessed academic gifts until a standardized test in eighth grade showed he could solve math problems at the level of a college junior. His senior year of high school, he’d married his sweetheart, a bright, green-eyed classmate named Marjorie, and after graduation he took a job as a Kellogg’s factory worker. As their family grew over the next decade—with six kids in all—Jerry worked a series of factory and corporate jobs: chemist at a sewage-treatment plant, pharmaceutical salesman, computer operator, cereal packaging designer and, eventually, shift manager.

Marge and Jerry Selbee at their kitchen table in 1974. COURTESY OF DAWN TOMLINSON

Still, he remained intellectually restless, and he enrolled in night classes at Kellogg Community College, known around town as “Cornflake U.” It wasn’t easy to squeeze in a life of the mind between the demands of a growing brood, so Jerry invited his kids into his obsessions with various hidden layers of the world: When he got interested in mushrooms, he took them hunting for morels in the forests; when he became captivated by geology, he brought them to gravel pits in search of fossilized spheres called Petoskey stones. Around the time his oldest son, Doug, was in high school, Jerry asked Doug for help counting rolls of coins he’d collected. Knowing that people rolled up their spare change and cashed it at the bank, it had occurred to Jerry to buy these rolls at face value, hoping that the bank hadn’t opened and...