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  Baseball And Football PoolsA form of lottery which capitalized on the public’s interest in sports also began to achieve popularity during the late twenties and thirties—the baseball and football pools. Of the baseball pools the most successful was the Albany baseball pool, which will serve as a good example to explain their operation. Numbers were used to represent the teams in the three biggest baseball leagues: the American, National and International. Since at the time there were only eight teams in each league, the numbers ran from 1 to 24. Participants paid $1 and selected five numbers representing the teams they thought would score the greatest number of combined runs for the week. The ticket holder whose five teams scored the most runs received the top award, usually about $25,000. The sizes of the awards varied, depending on the number of tickets sold. The ticket holder whose five teams scored the next highest number of runs usually received about $10,000, and so on down to a small $50 consolation prize. The Albany baseball pool paid out about 40% of its gross handle in prizes, the other 60% taking care of agents’ commissions, police graft and operators’ profits. This was one of the few honest baseball lotteries then in operation, and to make sure that the customers were aware of this the operators distributed a player’s sheet listing all the five number selections sold for the week. These were available at the start of the week’s baseball play, and it was evident that the operators could not later ring in fake winners. I have a player’s sheet that contains 123,265 selections, which means that at $1 per ticket $123,265 worth of tickets were sold in that week. Most of the hundreds of other baseball pools in the late twenties were not this honest. They were run by crooks and fly-by-night lottery operators who disappeared when there was a big winner, moved to some other locale and set up shop there with the same ticket. Baseball pools as large as the Albany pool do not exist today because government agents more or less enforce the law forbidding the transportation of lottery tickets across state lines. They once used the teams in the American and National Leagues, a total in 1961 of 16 instead of the Albany pool’s 24, and they used the total winning runs of four, rather than five, teams. The player was not permitted to select his number but received a sewed-together ticket, usually priced at 500, which contained a hidden number designating the teams the buyer had for the week. The number of possible four-team combinations was only 1,820 and the top weekly prize award was therefore small, seldom more than $200. Today baseball pools still use the American and National League teams and thus have numbers 1 through 24. Most of these small pools are run by individuals who think that such an operation will net them thousands of dollars until, having found out differently, they fold up after a few weeks of the baseball season, leaving unpaid winners behind. Football pools were originally conducted in the same manner as the Albany baseball pool, the ticket holder trying to pick a group of teams that would score the most points. Today, football-pool players try to name the winners of each game. The operators offer odds to the player for picking 3 winners, 4 winners, or as many as 10 winners. In order to eliminate the possibility that a team’s past performance will be too much help to the player in picking winners, the operators, like the professional sports bookmakers, use a sports line (see page 113) and give inferior teams a spot, or handicap in points. Football-pool operators pay off winners at ridiculous odds. In an evenly matched game or one reduced to equality by a logical spot, the chance that a selected team will win is 1 in 2. A participant trying to select three winners in three games has 1 chance in 8, four winners in four games, 1 chance in 16. The operators pay 4 to 1 for picking three winners, and 9 to 1 for picking four, etc. You have 1 chance in 1024 to pick ten winners in ten games, and the payoff odds are only 200 to 1. It’s a bad deal from any angle: the more winners you try to pick, the less chance you have of winning. And if you had a couple of bucks riding and did happen to pick ten out of ten, it’s an even bet that you’d never get paid. In 1928, a concentrated drive by police throughout the country put the Albany baseball pool and many of the smaller baseball and football pools out of business, and the lottery-buying public was again victimized by crooked foreign lotteries, mostly Canadian and Mexican. 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