...The paper's reporting revealed that two groups were dominating Cash Winfall: the Selbee gang from Evart, Michigan, and their competition, a syndicate led by math majors from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ...
The guy who started it, he was doing an independent study project as an undergraduate at MIT and he figured out that he could win this game. So he got a bunch of his friends to pool in their money so they became, as time went on, professional Cash Winfall players, recruiting their friends and raising money from backers until they too were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Incredibly, the MIT group bet between $17 and $18 million on Cash Winfall over a seven-year period, earning at least $3.5 million in profits. Almost the exact same rate of return as the Selbees.