A punchboard is a game board, primarily consisting of a number of holes which was used once for lottery playings.

History

Punchboards were originally used in the eighteenth century for gambling purposes. A local tavern owner would constuct a game board out of wood, drill small holes in it, and fill each hole with a small piece of paper. After a patron buyes the punchboard, he would puncture one of the holes in the paper with a nail. If the game piece contained a winning number, the patron won the prize.

Decline in use

In the nineteenth century, gamblers eventually drilled into their own holes (they knew where the big money was, because they made the board). The punchboard’s use started to decline.

Popular again

In the late 1800s, a new type of punchboard was introduced. This one involved putting paper in both the front and back of the hole (to help prevent operators from cheating). These new punchboards became popular to buy at drugstores, and they were sold with a metal stylus. The punchboard soon became increasingly similar to today’s lottery tickets.

Soon, the punchboard became cheap and easy to assemble, and the industry flourished. Noted gambling author John Scarne estimates that 30 million punchboards were sold in the years between 1910 to 1915. He also estimates that 50 million punchboards were sold in 1939 alone, during the peak of their popularity.

After the war

After World War II, use of the punchboard as a gambling tool began to decline because many people started to frown at its gambling-like nature, and the punchboard was outlawed in many states. However, the use of punchboards for advertisement were starting to gain popularity. Many companies started hiding goods such as bottles of beer and cigarettes inside punchboards. Zippo lighters reportedly sold more than 300,000 lighters through punchboard advertising between 1934 and 1940.

Larceny

People have been cheating on punchboards ever since they were first invented. Many operators know where the big prize holes are; they used to create punchboards with very few holes so they could easily track the big money.

Other gamblers could make a dirty deal with the costumers: give the costumer a “map” of where the big prizes are on the punchboard. This came to prevention by the use of serial numbers: the costumer would present the slip to the operator, and if the serial numbers matched, the costumer was declared a winner.

Other references in popular culture

The movie The Flim-Flam Man starring George C. Scott involved the use of illegal gambling through punchboards.

Links

• History of the punchboard

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The Numbers Game or Policy Racket is a lottery game where the bettor attempts to pick three or four numbers from zero to nine that will be randomly drawn. Before the advent of state-operated lotteries, the gambler would place his or her bet with a bookie at a candy shop or a tavern. Today, state lotteries offer this game as the Daily Numbers Game. A runner carries the money and betting slips between the betting parlors and the headquarters.

Different policy banks would offer different payout ratios, though a payoff of 600 to 1 was typical. One of the game’s attractions to low income and working class bettors was the ability to bet small amounts of money. Usually a gambler could bet as little as ten cents with the possibility of winning sixty dollars. Also bookies, unlike state lotteries, could extend credit to the bettor.

In the northeastern United States this game was known as the “Nigger Pool”. This reflected the belief that the game originated in black neighborhoods.

One of the problems of the early game was to find a way to draw a random number that the bookie could not be accused of choosing unfairly. One method was to take the last three numbers in the published daily balance of the United States Treasury. When the Treasury began rounding off the balance many bookies began to use the “mutuel” number. This number consisted of the last dollar digit of the daily total handle of the Win, Place and Show bets at a local race track, read from top to bottom.

For example, if the daily handle was:

• Win.. $1001.23
• Place. $582.56
• Show… $27.61

then the daily number was 127.

This variant of the numbers game, where the number depends on an event beyond the bookie’s control, is sometimes called a policy game.

In 1875, a report of a select committee of the New York State Assembly stated that “the lowest, meanest, worst form, however, which gambling takes in the city of New York, is what is known as policy playing.”^[1]

Today, state lotteries use mechanical devices to draw the number. They also pay under a parimutuel betting system.

Since most bookies in the United States operate outside of the law, there is no way to gauge what effect the legalization of state-run gambling has had on the Numbers Game. Some gamblers still prefer to play with a bookie for a number of reasons. Among them are a guaranteed payoff, betting on credit, and calling in one’s bet on the telephone.

Payout

In illegal numbers games, typically certain more popular numbers, known as cut numbers, have reduced payoffs. A player’s chance of winning on one number is only one in 999; his winnings may pay off at 800 to 1.

1. ^ Holice and Debbie, Our Police Protectors: History of New York Police Chapter 13, Part 1. Accessed on 4/2/2005

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In a simple Lotto type game, the order in which the numbers are drawn from the machine does not matter, so if a ticket holder has the numbers 1,2,3,4 and 5, and if the order in which the machine selects these numbers is 5,2,4,3, and 1; then the ticket is still a winner. However in a mega game, in order to win the main prize, the player must match the first five numbers drawn in any order, but then must also match the last number drawn exactly. For the game which is currently offered in California under the name Super Lotto, the first five numbers drawn are from a set of 47 white rubber balls, which are selected by one machine, and the mega number is chosen as just one ball from a set of 27 purple balls, which is selected by a second machine. The Mega Millions game is similar, but it uses a set of 56 balls for the first five drawn, and another set of 46 for the final ball, known as the mega number.

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Where more than 1 powerball is drawn from a separate pool of balls to the main lottery (e.g. the Euromillions game), the odds of the different possible powerball matching scores should be calculated using the method shown in the “other scores” section above (in other words, treat the powerballs like a mini-lottery in their own right), and then multiplied by the odds of achieving the required main-lottery score.

If the powerball is drawn from the same pool of numbers as the main lottery, then, for a given target score, one must calculate the number of winning combinations which includes the powerball. For games based on the Canadian lottery (e.g. Lotto, the UK lottery), after the 6 main balls are drawn, an extra ball is drawn from the same pool of balls, and this becomes the powerball (or “bonus ball”), and there is an extra prize for matching 5 balls + the bonus ball. As described in the “other scores” section above, the number of ways one can obtain a score of 5 from a single ticket is c(6,5)*c(43,1), or 258. Since the number of remaining balls is 43, and your ticket has 1 unmatched number remaining, 1/43 of these 258 combinations will match the next ball drawn (the powerball) – so there are 258/43 = 6 ways of achieving it. Therefore, the odds of getting a score of 5 + powerball are c(49,6)/6 = 1 in 2,330,636.

Of the 258 combinations that match 5 of the main 6 balls, in 42/43 of them the remaining number will not match the powerball, giving odds of c(49,6)/(258*(42/43)) = 166474/3 (approx 55491.33) for obtaining a score of 5 without matching the powerball.

Using the same principle, to calculate the odds of getting a score of 2 + powerball, calculate the number of ways to get a score of 2 as c(6,2)*c(43,4) = 1,851,150 then multiply this by the probability of one of the remaining four numbers matching the bonus ball – which is 4/43. 1,851,150*(4/43) = 172,200, so the probability of obtaining the score of 2 + bonus ball is 172,200/c(49,6) = 1025/83237. This gives approximate decimal odds of 81.2.

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For a score of n (e.g. if 3 of your numbers match the 6 balls drawn, then n=3), there are c(6,n) ways of selecting the n winning numbers from the 6 drawn balls. For one’s losing numbers, there are c(43,6 – n) ways to select them from the 43 losing lottery numbers. The total number of combinations giving that result is, as stated above, the first number multiplied by the second. The expression is therefore c(49,6)/(c(6,n)*c(43,6-n)). This gives the following results (remember that odds are the reciprocal of probability):

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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The relatively small chance of winning can be demonstrated as follows:

Starting with a bag of 49 differently-numbered lottery balls, there is clearly a 1 in 49 chance of predicting the number of the 1st ball out of the bag. Accordingly, there are 49 different ways of choosing that first number. When the draw comes to the 2nd number, there are now only 48 balls left in the bag (in case of no return of already drawn balls to the bag), so there is now a 1 in 48 chance of predicting this number.

Thus, each of the 49 ways of choosing the first number has 48 different ways of choosing the second. This means that the odds of correctly predicting 2 numbers drawn from 49 is calculated as: 49 x 48. On drawing the third number there are only 47 ways of choosing the number; but of course someone picking numbers would have gotten to this point in any of 49 x 48 ways, so the chances of correctly predicting 3 numbers drawn from 49 is calculated as: 49 x 48 x 47. This continues until the sixth number has been drawn, giving the final calculation: 49 x 48 x 47 x 46 x 45 x 44 (also written as 49! / (49-6)!). This works out to a very large number (10,068,347,520), which is however much bigger than the 14 million stated above.

The last step needed to understand that the order of the 6 numbers is not significant. That is, if a ticket has the numbers 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06 – it wins as long as all the numbers 1 through 6 are drawn, no matter what order they come out. Accordingly, given any set of 6 numbers, there are 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 6 factorial = 6! = 720 ways they could be drawn. Dividing 10,068,347,520 by 720 gives 13,983,816, also written as 49! / (6!·(49-6)!), or more generally as

C(n/k) = (n!)/(k!(n-k)!).

In most popular spreadsheets, the combinations function is COMBIN(n,k). For example, COMBIN(49,6) (the calculation shown above), would return 13,983,816. For the rest of this article, we will use the notation c(n,k) for convenience.

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Equipment

• Chips
• 3+ Decks
• 2+ Players

Players

There are players and the dealer, both of which pivotal to game play. PLAYERS: participate in every game DEALER: the dealer only plays in games specified. They also play house and make up any differences. Position moves to the left each round.

Game Play

Dealer gives five cards to everyone face down.

I. Red Black Each player bets whether the majority of cards is red or black, if all are one type the bet is doubled.

II. Poker Dealers deals house hand face down. Players place bets against the house only.

III. Bingo Dealer calls bingo cards while players put one chip on every card called. The winner(s) get all chips placed on the cards

IV. Put & Take Dealer flips cards (one at a time); first puts in one, second puts in two… and then first takes one, second takes two… the dealer makes up the difference

V. Counting Dealer flips cards from deck counting out loud (ace, two, three…). If a card flipped matches the verbal card, players give the amount on the card (Jack eleven, Queen twelve, King thirteen)

End Of Game

As soon as a player runs out of chips the player is out of the game. If the game is called short the player with the most chip wins.

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Fuck the Dealer is a simple drinking game popular in the Midwest. It is best played by three to six players, although it can be played with more. It is similar to the game Hi-Lo, except that all cards are laid out face up on the table once they’ve been played.

The rules

Play starts with one person, the ‘Dealer’, shuffling the cards and placing them face down in front of him.

The person to the dealer’s left becomes the first ‘Player’. The Player tries to guess what the top card on the deck is. The dealer then looks at the top card and tells him whether or not his guess was right. If the player guesses correctly, the dealer takes five drinks. Otherwise, the dealer tells the player whether the top card is ‘Higher’ or ‘Lower’ than his guess. The player then gets one more chance to guess correctly. If he guesses correctly on the second attempt, the dealer takes three drinks. If the player guesses incorrectly, the player drinks the difference between his guess and the card. (i.e. if he guesses a ‘5′ and the card was a really ‘3′, the player must take 2 drinks.)

In either case, the dealer now places the card face up in front of him. Arrange the cards in an organized fashion, so everyone can see which cards have already been drawn(see image right). When all four of a particular card have been drawn, it is considered to be “closed out”. Cards which have been closed out are flipped over to help everyone see that no more of those cards are available.

Now, play continues and the dealer looks at the next person and asks him to pick a card. This continues until two players in a row guess incorrectly. When that happens, the player to the dealer’s left becomes the new ‘Dealer’.

It is important to note that there are two ‘circles’ going on – the dealer circle, and the player circle. The next ‘Dealer’ is always the person to the current dealer’s left. Likewise, the next ‘player’ is always the person to the left of the last player — The next player does not change just because a new person is made dealer. The next player is NOT automatically the person to the new dealer’s left… unless of course the player to the Dealer’s left is the next person in line. And of course, the player and the dealer cannot be the same person. But if that situation should ever occur, the ‘dealer’ circle takes priority over the ‘player’ circle.

Play continues until the dealer is left with three cards. At that point, the dealer is considered to be ‘Fucked’ and must do a shot. (Since there are only three cards, the player is guaranteed to guess correctly on the second attempt. Therefore, the dealer is figuratively ‘Fucked’! Hence, the title of the game)

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Faro was undoubtedly one of the most popular card games of the 18th century, especially among the lower classes. Although both faro and Basset were forbidden in France, on severe penalties, these games continued to be in great vogue in England during the 18th century; apparently because it was easy to learn, it gave the appearance of being very fair, and, lastly, it was a very quiet, quick game, and could be played discreetly. “Our life here,” writes Gilly Williams to George Selwyn in 1752, “would not displease you, for we eat and drink well, and the Earl of Coventry holds a Pharaoh-bank every night to us, which we have plundered considerably.” Charles James Fox preferred faro to any other game, as did american con man Soapy Smith. It was said that every faro table in Soapy’s Tivoli Club, in Denver, Colorado in 1889 was gaffed (made to cheat). Faro was played all over the United States, by the rich and the poor, during the 19th century.

Faro’s detractors regarded it as a dangerous scam that destroyed families and reduced men to poverty. This reputation is likely due to the use by some bankers of rigged dealing boxes that allowed the banker to manipulate the draw of the cards after observing the players’ bets.

Faro bankers were alleged to employ ‘gentlemen’ to give a very favourable report of the game to the town, so that the games would be allowed to transpire without further inquiry.

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