Guaranteed Lottery Wins From History
To our knowledge there is only one known occurrence of somebody guaranteeing a lottery win by purchasing all possible lottery number combinations - and this happened on a May 1992 bank holiday Irish National Lottery. A Polish-Irish businessman and a syndicate team of 28 Dublin based players decided they would purchase every single possible combination on the lottery, and thus guarantee a win on the lottery.
On the Irish National Lottery at that time there were just 36 numbers in the draw and you had to match 6 of these, leaving odds of winning the lottery at 1 in 1,947,792. These lottery tickets each cost just £0.50, meaning that every possible lottery ticket combination could be purchased for £973,896. The jackpot prize on the May 1992 bank holiday lottery draw stood at £1.7 million. This meant that they could guarantee a profit of over £700,000 by purchasing every lottery number combination. This is of course providing that nobody else wins on the lottery draw too.
Despite a last ditch attempt by the lottery organisers to prevent the organised Dublin based syndicate to purchase the tickets, the group went ahead to win the lottery - but they weren't the only ones. Somebody else also won on the draw, and so the jackpot was split. The syndicate still ended up with a slight overall profit though, due to the other prizes for matching 5, 4 and 3 balls on the lottery. However it is certain that due to the time spent organising the whole operation, the overall profits were actually very small and not worth the time spent arranging the scheme.
