’​Beat The Lotto’: Gambling hijinks in entertaining Irish doc

Dir. Ross Whitaker. Republic of Eire. 2025. 80mins

Playing, the horses, smoke-filled pubs and ‘the craic’ go hand-in-hand in Ross Whitaker’s extremely entertaining doc Beat The Lotto, which performs a deft hand in recalling an incident again in 1992 when a syndicate of rosy-faced gents led by a bankrupt stamp vendor took on the Irish Lottery, and… 

A ripping yarn from a director who’s good at telling them

To provide extra away could be a betrayal of how Whitaker (Katie, 2018) expertly layers his story, and one of many extra amusing issues about this movie is you’re unsure how a lot it issues in the long run. Happening in a extraordinarily analogue period, Beat The Lotto opens the doorways on the skilled playing group on the Emerald Isle, canny geezers North and South who wish to measurement up the percentages and take a punt if the going appears truthful. 

Low-fi archival footage with speaking heads for context piece collectively a home made try and put 1.9m Lotto playing cards by way of machines in newsagents throughout the nation within the house of some days. That they have been saved in Tayto packing containers and delivered by youngsters makes it all of the extra enjoyable, and components of Whitaker’s movie unexpectedly play out like some type of rural Oceans 11. As nearly everybody says at one level or one other: ‘The craic!”

It’s fairly uncommon for a movie about playing to not embody a thunderous sermon towards it, or for the gamers themselves to be so forthright, however Whitaker tackles his topic in a sporting method. Properly pitched for a dramatic remake, Beat The Lotto is a ripping yarn from a director who’s good at telling them.

The setting right here is the Republic of Eire within the Eighties and Nineties, a depressed and poor nation unwittingly about to enter the Celtic Tiger period. Into these darkish days of recession, unemployment (at a staggering 50 p.c) and mass emigration got here the Lotto, promising dreams-come-true for a £1 guess each week (this was pre-Euro). It was a complicated lottery, as lotteries go, with income being awarded to charity: briefly, win-win all spherical. Press protection was effusive.

All this caught the attention of mathematician and philatelist Stefan Klincewicz, a slight Corkman of Polish heritage. Within the wake of the wild recognition of the weekly sweepstake, he wrote a e-book known as ‘Win The Lotto’ (subtitle: ‘Methods that will help you’). He needed to admit on reside TV that his methods hadn’t helped him to win something however, behind the scenes, Klincewicz was operating the numbers. And when the Lotto began a ‘match 4 numbers, win £100’ promo, these began to look good. Mix that with a rollover, and Klincewicz thought he’d found out a option to recreation the Lotto. 

Whitaker doesn’t reveal a lot about how Klincewicz assembled his 100-member syndicate, a self-described ‘crowd of reprobates’. Figuring all of it out isn’t onerous, although, particularly when one fellow recounts how he met Klincewicz  at a race observe they usually went on to win a ‘three-bedroom duplex, a two-bedroomed house and three automobiles’ collectively. “It’s all in regards to the recreation.”

Whitaker deftly deploys archive footage to set the scene. A drained nation, A ray of hope. The healthful, media-friendly accordion-playing head of the Nationwide Lottery, Ray Bates. Then, in opposition, the gamblers and the numbers males of the syndicate who got here up with the £975k wanted to recreation the Lotto. The truth that a few of this was in financial institution drafts, scuppered after the banks closed at 3pm on a Friday, actually takes you again. Both method, their makes an attempt turned public and, in an Eire crushed down by ‘the system’, it wasn’t straightforward to determine who the great guys have been.

In a method, this follows the Irish doc nostalgia wave of final 12 months’s Housewife of the Yr, however, whereas that was of home enchantment, Beat The Lotto has wider potential. Everybody likes a flutter, in spite of everything.