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Sounds good. But what if we only have one team, and after their first two big jackpot wins they receive attention from the media and also from let's say a mobster or a hit man, and what happens is that the mobster/hitman kidnaps the math genius and the team has to track them down to rescue him/her.

Another one-team take. I don't know if these lottos are public or private. I'm considering ours is private, and they are mad they found out the sequence. They tried to reprogram it but the team has found the sequence again and again. So the owners of the lotto are furious. So they secretly hire hitmen to go after the team. But of course, the hitmen would be more than glad to have the secret before just killing the entire team.

This could also be some sort of Rain Man inspired version. A man takes care of his autistic savant son that is always doing math stuff on notebooks. Everybody just thinks they're just meaningless numbers, but one day the father notices the numbers are really the lotto numbers - his brother cracked the algorithm. So he buys some tickets and wow - he wins the first, second, and third place of the lotto. Everybody is suspicious and there's a lot of media attention. They find out it was his son the one who made this possible and the lotto company doesn't want to pay because they say he cheated. They even want to send the son to an institution.

Based on the public domain story of Faust. Mephistopheles appears to a man in financial trouble. Jobless, about to lose the house, the car, his marriage, and his three sons. As you can guess, there's a pact involved - Faust wins the lottery in exchange for his soul. Unfortunately he q

Based on the public domain story of Faust. Mephistopheles appears to a man in financial trouble. Jobless, about to lose the house, the car, his marriage, and his three sons/daughters. As you can guess, there's a pact involved - Faust wins the lottery in exchange for his soul. Fame and fortune follow. Unfortunately he quickly spends all the money and ends up with much more debts than he had. The devil offers more money in exchange for the soul of one of his kids. He accepts. More debt... and so on. Now this guy is a very good father, so in the end the prayers and the innocence of his sons/daughters save him. Or maybe not and he goes to spend eternity in hell. With his sons. But Hollywood wouldn't allow that, right?

I just now realized that the kid in the remake of "Charlie and The Chocolate Factory" was a scratch tracker. Maybe each "team" has a different strength, one can pick the numbers and one can figure out the locations, but then when you try to make them work together... for some reason, it doesn't work. The data from one interferes with the process of the other, or something like that. I keep thinking, Alejandro said Rain Man, I keep thinking of Cube, where Nicole DeBoer could figure out prime numbers and do math but Andrew (I forget their character names, I know they were all prisons but I can't remember who was who) could do all that in his head, and I could totally see David Hewlitt having the big idea of using these brain boxes to win the lotto, and they have to out-think him... the way out is through math! I just don't know if I'm smart enough to write that script.

Maybe our guy goes to the lotto vendor and suddenly he hears "use the force. trust your instincts" when he's about to select his numbers. Probably the team should bring different abilities together. Like in Ocean's Eleven, everyone has different abilities that complement. So maybe our math guy is so shy he can't talk to people. Enter another guy that's good talking with people. And our first two guys suck at computers (yes, the math guy does everything with pen and paper). Enter the computer girl. Another guy with "social hacking" skills. And all of them don't have a vision, there's one team leader that sees the big picture and makes them work together. Yes, I remember cube. I don't remember the names :-D Maybe one guy's ability is to "translate" the math guy to terms the other guys can understand.

Sorry, i was out for a couple hours... okay, seven hours... and my fingers are frozen. Anyway... Yeah! The team building element would be great, it's almost like a heist movie except it's probably legal. And since the next ticket could come from anywhere, you have this road trip element to the whole thing as well.

Heist/caper is a good idea. I was thinking of combining a story about Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who, in order to deflect the attention of the IRS, coerced a lottery ticket winner to "share" his winnings, and the recent Heartbleed virus that was caused by a simple programming error: A lottery office IT worker discovers a bug in the lottery system whereby a valid ticket can be purchased on a machine undergoing repair up to 15 minutes after the winning numbers for the lottery are entered into the system. However, as a lottery employee he cannot enter himself, so he gets his friends at a local 7-11 to help him. Patiently they wait, ever so often testing the system, until that huge jackpot arrives. Forced into premature action when a coworker discovers the bug, they now have only the upcoming lottery to enact their plan to steal a huge payout. Unknown to them, a local gangster has gotten wind of their scheme and tries to force them to give him the winning ticket. But the gangster is not their only problem as a lottery inspector, charged with prosecuting fraud cases, sees a pattern to their activities and decides to investigate.