I. A Dream for a Nation, a Passion for Mathematics
There was a time in Irish history, just before the Celtic Tiger started to grow quickly, when the country’s imagination was taken over by a simple idea: the possibility of a better life, not based on work or family, but on chance. In 1992, that idea was put to the test.
The National Lottery was set up in 1986 and has become a regular part of life in Ireland. It offered dreams of being rich, which few Irish people had dared to imagine before. But for mathematician Stefan Klincewicz, the lottery was about calculation, not chance. Klincewicz is originally from Poland but has been living in Cork for a long time. He had already been part of a pub syndicate that won a £2.4 million jackpot in 1990. He had published books on winning the lottery and ran a helpline where you had to pay for his advice. He wasn’t a dreamer; he was someone who understood the odds.
What Klincewicz saw was a problem. On some holidays, the lottery offered a guaranteed £100 payout for matching four numbers. This, along with a rollover jackpot, meant that covering every possible combination – almost two million of them – was almost guaranteed to win. The plan was very bold, difficult to organise, and many people did not think it was fair. But it was legal.
II. The Heist That Divided a Nation
Ross Whitaker’s documentary Beat the Lotto, which was shown for the first time at the Dublin International Film Festival in February 2025, is a film about a robbery that is very different from all the other films of this type. It is a thriller told by the people who caused the crime, a caper that unfolds not with guns and getaway cars but with pens and betting slips.
The logistics were incredible. To cover nearly two million combinations, the group had to fill out two million little boxes – that’s almost twelve million ticks of a pen! Friends and family were asked to help. The main office was set up on Mespil Road in Dublin. The plan took months to prepare.
But the lottery authorities found out about the plan. This would make people either for or against the decision. They started to close the places where the syndicate members were buying a lot of tickets. They were in a race against time. The group, led by Klincewicz and Paddy Kehoe, who had invested £130,000 of his own money, hurried to find machines that were still selling tickets. As Klincewicz later recalled, “We had a headquarters down in Mespil Road. “It was chaos down there.”
The documentary shows this tension in Whitaker’s typical style. He looks closely at 1990s Ireland, the National Lottery, and what happened when that trusted system was thrown into turmoil. The result is a film that is both a thrilling story and a time capsule of a nation about to go through huge changes.
III. A cultural artefact from before the Celtic Tiger era.
What makes Beat The Lotto more than just a good story is how it captures a special moment in Irish cultural history. Whitaker himself has said that the film is a reflection of Ireland in the 1990s, and how the events of the 1992 Lotto heist show who we were back then, before Ireland changed so much.
The early 90s were a time of disillusionment. Record unemployment. Charles Haughey resigns amid a scandal. The whole Annie Murphy-Bishop Casey situation is really shaking up the Catholic Church. For a lot of people, the state wasn’t something to be trusted, but something to be beaten. Whitaker said that back then, people probably felt more inclined to break the system or take down institutions because they didn’t feel the country was doing much for them. The syndicate’s bold plan tapped into that feeling, splitting public support down the middle.
But the film also captures the innocence of the era. Whitaker remembers how they used to play on the street and how they’d all run in at 8pm on a Saturday night to see if their family had won the lottery. It was a time when the lottery was still a bit of a novelty, a shared ritual that brought families together around the telly.
IV. A guide to the basics of documentary filmmaking
Whitaker knows a thing or two about audacity and obsession. He’s also made Barney Curley: There’s The Man Who Beat the Bookies (2021) about a boxer, Katie (2018) about boxer Katie Taylor, and Between Land and Sea (2016) about surfers on Ireland’s west coast. He’s got a knack for finding the human drama in subjects that might seem a bit out of the ordinary.
In Beat the Lotto, he uses a winning look that’s all about “carefully picked low-fi cuts from Irish TV in the late 80s and early 90s”. The old videos are more than just a pretty picture – they really bring the audience back to a time when the Euro and the Celtic Tiger were still just ideas.
The film’s been a big hit. It won Best Irish Film from the Dublin Film Critics’ Circle. After Eclipse Pictures released it in cinemas, Netflix picked it up for the UK and Ireland, making sure its story reaches a new generation.
V. The Man Who Beat the System
The documentary is all about Klincewicz himself, who’s now in his 70s. Whitaker found him on LinkedIn and, after a few lunches, managed to convince him to take part. Klincewicz is a bit of a reluctant hero, an outsider who was often bullied as a child because of his unusual name. He was clearly a maths genius.
The aftermath of the 1992 heist is still a bit of a sore point. At first, the lottery didn’t pay out to the syndicate. They said they needed the names and addresses of all the members, which some people said broke the promise to keep that information confidential. The syndicate eventually got their winnings, but they’d changed the system. The lottery was embarrassed by the near miss, so it changed its rules to stop it happening again.
You could say that the idea behind Klincewicz’s plan is still around. He’s still working on systems and scheming. When asked about the possibility of a similar coup on the EuroMillions, he replied: “To fill out all those combinations, well over 100 million. Now, it could be done…” It looks like the gambler’s optimism is still going strong.
VI. A Bridge to the Experimental
The ideas in Beat The Lotto—being obsessed with something, taking risks, wanting to beat the system—are similar to other popular Irish art and films. The Irish Artists’ Film Index (MExIndex) is a great place to find works that explore Irish history, politics, culture and society in experimental ways. Even though the Index doesn’t currently include a curated selection on gambling, the thematic parallels are clear.
Have you ever thought about the work of artists like Gareth Byrne? His project It Could Be You looks at consumer culture and the obsession with wealth. The lottery, after all, is the ultimate consumer fantasy – the promise of something for nothing. Both Byrne and Whitaker are looking at the same cultural impulse, but they’re doing it in different ways.
This mix of documentary and experimental styles is typical of modern Irish art. As the documentary expert Dióg O’Connell has said, Irish documentary has been really important in showing and shaping the nation’s dramatic social and political changes since the 1990s. Beat The Lotto is a really important part of this tradition – it’s both fun and culturally significant.
VII. A Lasting Record
‘Beat the Lotto’ is about more than just a heist. It’s a picture of a nation stuck between the austerity of the 1980s and the excesses of the Celtic Tiger that was just around the corner. It’s a story about dreams, about how far people will go to escape the daily grind, and about the things that shape and limit those dreams.
Ross Whitaker has come up with a great read – it’s a thrilling thriller and a valuable cultural artefact. It’s something we should talk about more, especially when we’re thinking about Irish identity, risk, and why people are still drawn to those lucky breaks.
