I read an article about one of these characters, not sure if its either of your examples, but the gist of it was that there was some semi-obvious hacks at work here.
One lottery would ship the winning tickets roll to one zipcode. Apparntly, they printed out the winning tickets and just queued it up via whatever delivery service they use, which turned out to be deterministic. No one ever coded in randomness in regards to store delivery. Someone figured this out by noticing the same few stores produced all the winners. He then went and bought a whole bunch of tickets from those stores when a new scratch-off game appeared and won against significant odds.
Or at least that's the story he presents, which is questionable as scratch winners aren't usually publicly reported. Some think he had inside information from a friend or relative in the Lottery commission who told him about that lack of randomness in delivery.
One lottery would ship the winning tickets roll to one zipcode. Apparntly, they printed out the winning tickets and just queued it up via whatever delivery service they use, which turned out to be deterministic. No one ever coded in randomness in regards to store delivery. Someone figured this out by noticing the same few stores produced all the winners. He then went and bought a whole bunch of tickets from those stores when a new scratch-off game appeared and won against significant odds.
Or at least that's the story he presents, which is questionable as scratch winners aren't usually publicly reported. Some think he had inside information from a friend or relative in the Lottery commission who told him about that lack of randomness in delivery.