Who says you can't make money by playing the lottery? You just have to be smart about it. Systematic gamblers are exploiting a hole in Cash WinFall lottery in Massachusetts, raking in huge profits every 3 months. The idea is simple (fairly). There's a 2 million jackpot, which was won once in the last 7 years. If nobody wins the jackpot, the smaller prizes go up and players get higher rewards during something called rolldown weeks.

A Toronto statistician, Srivastava, calculated that a gambler who bought 200,000 Cash WinFall tickets during four rolldown weeks in a year would win enough to cover the $1.6 million investment and earn a profit of $240,000 to $1.4 million - without ever winning the jackpot. Srivistava’s calculations suggest that the top five groups and individuals playing Cash WinFall collectively win back the cost of their tickets plus $1 million to $6 million in profits each year from about 12 days of gambling. That is a lot of money, for very little work. :-)

Here's the infographic on how it works:

You can also read the full (and long) article about it in the Boston Globe.