On Wednesday, April 19, 2023, the Lotto Texas jackpot was seventy-three million dollars. There was no winner that night—there hadn’t been a winner for the past ninety-one drawings—and so the pool of money rolled over. By the next drawing, that Saturday, it had reached ninety-five million. Dawn Nettles started getting worried. For the jackpot to have grown so quickly, sales volume must have been ten times what Nettles thought was normal. “I knew right then,” she told me. “Somebody was buying all the combinations.”

Nettles is seventy-four, with cropped copper hair and the bearing of a gently exasperated elementary-school teacher. She lives in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, with her husband, a flight instructor, and she devotes her days to the Lotto Report, a publication closely tracking the Texas Lottery. In the three decades since she started the Report, Nettles has evolved from being an enthusiast of the lottery to perhaps its most biting critic.

There are nearly twenty-six million possible combinations for Lotto Texas; Powerball, in comparison, has nearly three hundred million. A player, or a group of players, with the financial and logistical resources can effectively guarantee a win—and, if the prize pool is big enough, a hefty profit. This idea struck Nettles as immensely unfair. That week, she bought more tickets than she had in years. “I kept saying, ‘God, come on, let me hold the winning ticket so these people don’t come out ahead,’ ” she said.

That Saturday, the Texas Lottery Commission put out a press release celebrating the “rare and very exciting opportunity for our players”: the biggest Lotto Texas jackpot in more than a decade. “Players are turning out in droves to have the exclusive chance at winning the largest jackpot prize on the continent,” Gary Grief, the lottery’s executive director, said. Nettles posted an update to the Lotto Report website. “I fear tonight will be a very sad night for Texas Lottery players,” she wrote. “Now the Texas Lottery is probably going to be successful in screwing every player and retailer that resides in Texas.”

There are plenty of Texans who oppose the lottery for moral reasons. Nettles is not one of them. Some of her earliest memories involve accompanying her grandmother to a bingo hall in Wichita Falls; at one point, she told me, she considered Las Vegas her “home away from home.” She became interested in small-scale publishing, and went on to run a real-estate magazine called Unexaggerated Homes of Dallas, in which, she said, “builders could not use adjectives—what you see is what you get.” Shortly after Texas launched its lottery, in 1992, Nettles began producing the Lotto Report, a print newsletter that she likened to the racing forms sold at racetracks. Gamblers are mystics at heart, and lottery players see all sorts of patterns in the supposedly random sequences of winning numbers. The Lotto Report provided fodder for their scrying. “It was basically telling a story about all the numbers, what’s been drawn with what, what’s overdue, what the good pairs are,” she said. “Just a complete, thorough deal on the numbers.”

Nettles came to feel that the Texas Lottery was being badly run, and was perhaps even corrupt. The Lotto Report became something of a watchdog publication, railing against rule changes and the lottery commission’s wasteful spending. The website version launched in 1998, and its look hasn’t changed much in the intervening decades. Its aesthetic could be summed up as “crank-adjacent”: there is an overwhelming amount of erratically capitalized and bolded text, punctuated with exclamations like “Unreal!” and “Unbelievable!” and “If you have high blood pressure, don’t read any further!” In 2014, Nettles told the Texas Tribune that she was spending fourteen to sixteen hours a day keeping tabs on the lottery. She showed up at commission meetings, made public-records requests, and scrutinized the director’s spending. She lobbied against a rule revision that allowed winners to remain anonymous and accused the commission of not paying winners their full share. (After an internal investigation, the lottery commission concluded that it had followed policy.) At one point, she says, the lottery removed her from its media list, so she no longer got official results via fax. “I thought, Fine, I’ll show you. So I got me a satellite feed so I could watch the drawings in real time,” she said. Rob Kohler, a former employee of the Texas Lottery, told me that, early in his career, he’d planned a conference for the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. He got word that a group of protesters had shown up. “I was, like, Good Lord, who could be protesting this conference?” he said. “And there was Dawn Nettles.”

As Nettles had predicted, on April 22nd, someone won the ninety-five-million-dollar jackpot. Grief, the Texas Lottery director, soon acknowledged that “purchasing groups” had been involved. The bulk buy was recognized as unfair but legal; the lottery paid out the prize money, which, after taxes, amounted to nearly fifty-eight million dollars. (The Houston Chronicle eventually reported that a London-based gambling syndicate had bankrolled the operation.) Two years later, it has become a full-blown scandal. The Texas Rangers have been called in to investigate what Dan Patrick, Texas’s lieutenant governor, has called “the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas.” (No criminal charges have been filed; the lawyer that represents Rook TX, the Delaware L.L.C. that claimed the jackpot, has said that “all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed.”)

At least some of the credit for the recent scrutiny of the Texas Lottery is due to Nettles’s persistence. As she saw it, if she had figured out before the drawing that a bulk buy was in the works, how could the Texas Lottery not have known? And, if the commissioners had known, why had they let it happen? She kept calling Kohler, who, after leaving the Texas Lottery, became the state’s top anti-gambling lobbyist, working for the Baptist-affiliated Christian Life Commission. “Bless her heart, she was just busting my chops,” Kohler told me. “If folks would have taken the time to listen to her, instead of taking her suggestions as an affront, well, I tell you, we’d never be where we’re at right now.”

The most consequential political battles in Texas happen not between Democrats and Republicans—there’s not much suspense in a state so thoroughly dominated by one party—but within Republican factions. Gambling is one of the subjects that reveals ideological fault lines: pro-business Republicans frame it as a “freedom and liberty issue,” as one lawmaker has put it, and moralizers see it as state-subsidized sin.

Nearly forty states have legalized some form of sports gambling, most of them having done so after 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had restricted sports betting to Nevada. The interest has spilled over into other forms of gambling. Casino attendance is up, and the average age of visitors has dropped from fifty to forty-two. So far, though, Texas has resisted many forms of gambling. It has long prohibited non-tribal casinos and sports betting, despite lobbying from powerful figures, including Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and Miriam Adelson, a casino magnate who also owns the Dallas Mavericks. For the past few legislative sessions, armies of lobbyists have descended on the state capitol, in Austin, trying to push for various forms of gambling.

Until recently, the lottery had been something of an afterthought. “There’s a concern in the lottery space about the aging customer base, especially as you have all these new gambling options in a lot of states,” Matt Carey, a reporter who covers the gambling industry for VIXIO, told me. In recent years, a new kind of company has been targeting a younger demographic, countering this concern. Lottery couriers, as they are known, pitch themselves as Uber or DoorDash for lottery players, providing an easy-to-use interface that allows users to buy tickets on their phones. “The couriers are trying to attract a player that isn’t, you know, my dad—somebody in their twenties or thirties who’s used to doing everything on their phone and hasn’t traditionally been a lottery player,” Carey said.