On the evening of 24 April 1980, the Pennsylvania Daily Number was drawn on live television, as it was every evening. Three transparent columns, ten numbered balls in each, air blowing up from below. The announcer read the result: six, six, six.
There is nothing wrong with 666. Every three-digit combination has the same one-in-a-thousand chance, and one of them has to come up. What was wrong was that most of the balls in those columns could no longer rise.
The Paint Shop
Weighted balls cannot rise. Click a ball to paint it and watch what the machine is still able to produce.
1,000 of 1,000 outcomes still reachable — one chance in 1,000 for any one of them.
Inside all but the 4s and the 6s was a measure of white latex paint. A painted ball is heavier than the air can lift, so it sat at the bottom while the light ones rose. Three columns, two viable digits in each: eight possible outcomes, and every one of them made entirely of fours and sixes.
The payout was around $3.5 million, a record for the game.
What undid it was not the number. It was the betting. Money had gone down heavily on precisely those eight combinations — the ones the machine could still produce — and that pattern is not something a lottery's own records can hide. Investigators did not need to prove how the balls were weighted before they could see that somebody had known which ones to back.
Convictions followed, among them the announcer, Nick Perry.
It is worth being clear about what happened here, because it is the opposite of what people usually mean by beating the lottery. Nobody studied past draws. Nobody found a pattern in the numbers. Somebody walked into the room where the balls were kept and changed the machine — and then somebody else noticed the shape of the money.