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Week of September 10, 2002 |
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DODGE CITY SALOON
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VANCOUVER, Wash.-- People in the
Pacific Northwest take their bar games seriously. For that
matter, they take their bars seriously. Maybe it's the frigid wet
winters, but in mountain country, a man's neighborhood bar is his
second home.
And, of course, Washington and Oregon would have to disagree
on what constitutes a real bar game--because they don't agree on
anything, right?
In Oregon, the bibulous game of choice is video poker. Every
bar in the state has the machines, and they're not the "Jacks or
Better" kind in Vegas that can be beaten with strict mathematical
play. Not that anyone would try to do that in a bar anyway.
Trying to clock 10,000 rounds on a video poker machine while
declining brewskis tends to take the festivity out of the place.
But if you travel across the Columbia River to Portland's
neighboring town of Vancouver, video poker is illegal. Instead,
you come face to face with Washington state's bar game of choice:
pull tabs. It's hard to find a bar, in fact, that does not have
pull tabs, and since I had heard about this kind of gambling for
years but never tried it, I slipped across the border one
afternoon and pulled a few tabs at a fairly typical neighborhood
bar called the Dodge City Saloon. (Hitchin' post out front, hip-
hop on the jukebox, burgers, pizza, and lots of suds.)
Chris Ogber, the personable but no-nonsense manager of the
joint, treated me, appropriately enough, like a space alien. "You
know that the only kind of gambling we have here is pull tabs,
right?" (She must have said it at least three times.)
Yes, I sheepishly admitted, and I've never lived in a state
that had pull tabs. I don't really know what they are. Oddly
enough, they're not even legal in the state of Nevada. They tend
to be popular on "Class II" Indian reservations (the ones where
slot machines are banned) and in states where they got started as
charity games. In fact, the original name for pull tabs is "jar
raffles."
To show you how clueless I am, though, I always thought it
was some kind of cashless slot machine. I look around the Dodge
City Saloon and I'm not finding pull-tabs. There's a pinball
machine. There's a little pari-mutuel betting area the size of a
walk-in closet. (The Dodge City Saloon is also the only place in
the county where you can place off-track bets on racing at
Emerald Downs.)
So just as I'm about to make a further donkey of myself by
saying "Where are the pull-tab machines?," Chris senses my
naivete and points behind the bar to a long row of plexiglass
containers with big colored cards on the front of them and names
like "Black and Gold," "Red White and Blue" and "Casino Action."
Each card has giant dollar amounts on it--400! 400! 300! 250!--
and little cartoon characters and gambling symbols to draw your
eye to it. Anybody drinking at the bar can't avoid staring
directly into the advertising for infinite riches. (Well, maybe
not infinite--the highest payoff I found was $599--but in a bar
that sounds pretty good.)
The plexiglass containers, as Chris soon demonstrates, are
full of little cardboard rectangles. When a new game opens, she
tells me, there are 6,000 of them inside. You pay 50 cents for
the bartender to reach in and pull out one of the cardboard
rectangles, and it has--voila!--a pull tab on it. A pull tab is
similar to a scratch-off card at McDonald's, only instead of
rubbing out that silver stuff, you pull up on a perforated square
that reveals your fate.
If you get a cute little cartoon character, then . . . you
lose.
If you get a heart, club, spade or diamond, then . . . you
lose.
If you get anything that doesn't show a cash value somewhere
on the square . . . you lose.
But there's more to it than that. I quickly learn that the
colored cards on the front of the plexiglass hoppers are called
"flares," and on the flare you have a list of all the winning
tickets. For example, on the more or less typical game I played,
the payoff board showed winning denominations of 400, 400, 400,
400, 10, 10, 10, 10, 50, 50, 50, 50, quite a few 5's, and quite a
few 1's. If you add up all the winning tickets, it comes to
$2,020.
Calculating the quick odds on that, you've got a whopping
32.67 percent edge to the house. There's not a slot machine in
the world set that low, not even on Mexican cruise ships.
But there's actually a way to make those odds better. Every
time somebody draws a winning ticket of $5 or more, the rules of
the Washington State Gambling Commission state that the bar owner
has to prominently mark the flare to show that that ticket is no
longer in the bin. So most of the 24 bins at the Dodge City
Saloon had X's over some of the numbers, leading to what I
suppose is the following gambling strategy . . .
Study the bin. Calculate how many pull tabs have yet to be
drawn. (They won't tell you, so this is going to be a guess.)
Compare that number to the number of big payoffs that have yet to
be drawn. Then decide whether the odds are tilting in your favor.
For example, if all four 400's were still in the bin after a
third of the tickets had been drawn, and the rest of the payoff
tickets were being drawn at a predictable rate (one-third paid
off), then the house edge would be reduced to 13 per cent, which
is probably about as low as you're gonna get it.
But there's a wild card in the equation. Just as casinos are
allowed to reshuffle a blackjack game when they think someone is
counting cards, bar owners are allowed to shut down a pull-tab
game at any time! So in the example I've just given, chances are
the game would simply be pulled before you got your reduced house
edge.
Chris Ogber didn't want to tell me how much she pays for the
pull-tab games, but I found out later from another source. The
whole kit--flare and 6,000 pull-tabs--costs $27.50. (Maybe this
accounts for the bar's expected payout of $2,020--that extra 20
bucks covers the kit itself--keeping the odds right at 33 per
cent in favor of the house.)
So what we've got here is a small-scale lottery--or, in the
case of the Dodge City Saloon, 24 small-scale lotteries. In fact,
in some states the pull-tabs are run by the state lottery, and
you can even participate in pull-tab games at convenience stores.
In the states where they're legal, the best odds I've found are
in Minnesota, where the house edge is 25 per cent, but in every
state the pull-tab odds are better than lottery odds. It's a
sucker bet, but it's not the worst sucker bet on the market, and
it's obviously designed as a bar diversion.
There's even a casino called "Agate Pull Tabs." It must be
the loneliest casino in America, though, because all they have is
10 pull-tab dispensers. It's run by an Indian tribe in Sand
Point, Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands.
The only other variation on the game is that, in some
states, you have pull-tabs that are done with traditional slot-
machine symbols. You pull three tabs on each card to see if the
cherries line up. It's a little more work, and perhaps a little
more fun, but it doesn't change the nature of the game in any
way.
Pull-tabs, then, turn out to be the oldest legal game in
America. They're almost identical to the original national
lottery, the one set up by the Commissioners of the District of
Columbia in 1793 after consultation with President Washington,
who was a lottery player his whole life. The District needed
money to design the plan of the federal city, and so they sold
50,000 lottery tickets at $7 each--and the odds were almost
exactly the same as Washington state pull tabs: 16,737 of the
tickets offered prizes, and 33,263 were blanks.
In those days, the way the game worked is that you paid your
seven bucks and were given a numbered ticket that matched an
identical stub that remained with the lottery operator. Then, on
a certain date, the stubs were placed in a wheel and drawn out
one at a time on a pre-arranged schedule.
The problem was, there were so many competing lotteries in
the new nation that ticket sales, after starting off well,
slumped badly. So at the first drawing, lottery agent Samuel
Blodget was accused of fraud, as it was claimed that the numbers
for the larger prizes had never been put into the wheel. Blodget
ignored the criticism and started selling a second round of
tickets before he had even finished the drawings for the first
round. Washington was alarmed by this, and forced Blodget to
pledge his personal property and stocks to guarantee the payment
of the prizes.
But things got worse. The grand prize winner was supposed to
get a hotel worth $50,000--but he found out the hotel was still
under construction. He sued Blodget, and the litigation went on
for years.
The second drawing was postponed for a year and a half and
then never completed. Two and a half years after that, Blodget
resumed the drawings, but by then the Federal Lottery, as it was
called, was a source of general ridicule so it was almost
impossible to sell any more tickets. In 1799, Blodget
discontinued it entirely.
The first Federal Lottery, in other words, turned out to be
a total ripoff.
Pull-tabs are more honest. You get the lottery ticket as
soon as you pay your 50 cents. But be quick about pulling the
tab, because some latter-day Samuel Blodget can discontinue the
game at any moment.
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© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs
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