The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery | The New Yorker

📅 Published: August 26, 2025

📰 Source: newsday_com

Curated by AllZimNews.com

For the jackpot to have grown so quickly, sales volume must have been ten times what Nettles thought was normal. “I knew right then,” she told me. “Somebody was buying all the combinations. ”
Nettles is seventy-four, with cropped copper hair and the bearing of a gently exasperated elementary-school teacher.

She lives in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, with her husband, a flight instructor, and she devotes her days to theLotto Report, a publication closely tracking the Texas Lottery.

In the three decades since she started theReport, Nettles has evolved from being an enthusiast of the lottery to perhaps its most biting critic.

There are nearly twenty-six million possible combinations for Lotto Texas; Powerball, in comparison, has nearly three hundred million.

A player, or a group of players, with the financial and logistical resources can effectively guarantee a win—and, if the prize pool is big enough, a hefty profit.

This idea struck Nettles as immensely unfair.

That week, she bought more tickets than she had in years. “I kept saying, ‘God, come on, let me hold the winning ticket so these people don’t come out ahead,’ ” she said.

That Saturday, the Texas Lottery Commission put out a press release celebrating the “rare and very exciting opportunity for our players”: the biggest Lotto Texas jackpot in more than a decade. “Players are turning out in droves to have the exclusive chance at winning the largest jackpot prize on the continent,” Gary Grief, the lottery’s executive director, said.

Nettles posted an update to theLotto Reportwebsite. “I fear tonight will be a very sad night for Texas Lottery players,” shewrote. “Now the Texas Lottery is probably going to be successful in screwing every player and retailer that resides in Texas. ”
Nettles came to feel that the Texas Lottery was being badly run, and was perhaps even corrupt.

TheLotto Reportbecame something of a watchdog publication, railing against rule changes and the lottery commission’s wasteful spending.

The website version launched in 1998, and its look hasn’t changed much in the intervening decades.

Its aesthetic could be summed up as “crank-adjacent”: there is an overwhelming amount of erratically capitalized and bolded text, punctuated with exclamations like “Unreal! ” and “Unbelievable! ” and “If you have high blood pressure, don’t read any further! ” In 2014, NettlestoldtheTexasTribunethat she was spending fourteen to sixteen hours a day keeping tabs on the lottery.