50% Skim Makes This Pool a Sucker Play

In Oregon, where it rains a lot, brains are fertile. Oregon makes a study of the soccer pools in Europe and, noting their continuing success, reaches the thoughtful conclusion this is a way to glean a soft buck.

And Oregon feels it can use a buck to bankroll sports programs and scholarships at its colleges. When someone asks, for instance, the last time an Oregon team plays in the Rose Bowl, it gets a little embarrassing.

“It’s before the nickel defense is invented,” the interrogator is told, but after the forward pass. An Oregon team last appears in the Rose Bowl in 1965.

To arrange help for its schools, Oregon last fall initiates a football pool card whereby clients are invited to call upon their science and pick four to 14 games in the NFL, each linked to a point spread.

The idea hardly is new. For more than a half-century, offices, factories and halls of learning have been enriched by these cards, usually distributed by someone named Lou.

On the occasion of a player’s hitting Lou a lick, picking 10 winners, Lou is known to catch a train.

That’s the beauty of Oregon. You hit Oregon a lick and it is there the next day, chiefly because the card it runs is a can’t-lose.

Unlike Lou, Oregon doesn’t book the action. It is the middleman, handing back 50% of the take to the winners on a parimutuel arrangement and skimming the other 50%, of which 34% goes to the colleges and the rest to expenses.

This is such a sweet thing that Oregon, beginning next month, is going to expand the pool card to NBA games, much to the displeasure of the NBA, which is moving to kill the idea in court.

Last summer, the NFL threatened to go to court to kill the Oregon pool card but drew back, seeking, instead, help from friends in Congress.

One of the friends, it developed, had been busy giving help to Lincoln Savings, meaning he may have been max-ed in his effort to give help.

But the NBA commissioner, David Stern, insists he is serious about stopping the pool card in Oregon, describing it as a gambling inducement and a threat to sports.

Whether it’s a threat at all is a debatable point in a republic rampant with gambling. Nor has evidence been found over the decades of a collapse of European societies from the soccer pools.

What Oregon pool cards get down to, essentially, is whether the client can survive the sucker proposition that is presented.

In the neighborly state of Nevada, a number of gaming salons operate pool cards, working, for the most part, on a house margin of 10% to 15%.

Well, if Oregon skims 50%, you offer prayer in behalf of the client.

Now in semi-retirement, stemming not from losers he gave his followers, but from his research in anthropology, Jimmy the Greek Snyder recently enlightens us with a discourse on the pool card, which, incidentally, he claims he introduced in the ‘30s, calling it “the Pink Sheet.”

It also is a fact that anyone who would play a pool card is a candidate to purchase that well-known span linking Manhattan with Brooklyn.

The only thing he can say in behalf of pool cards is that they are better than lottery tickets.

“At least there’s an element of skill in pool cards,” Snyder says. “But lottery tickets? You’re hitting bottom. And worse yet, states that run lotteries are leveling millions of people on scratching games. We have become a nation of scratchers. Families with hardly enough to eat scratch away maybe 20 bucks a week.”

Can pool card players survive a 50% takeout?

“The Oregon pool card idea will spread for a certainty to other states,” predicts Jimmy. “I see it breaking the country.”

Which, of course, is an insult to horses. Tracing the history of legalized gambling in this land, you find that thoroughbred racing has tried to kill harness racing and quarter horse racing.

All three have joined to try to kill dog racing.

Has a movement united the four? Indeed. They link up in a cause to bury jai alai.

And all five have united in solid opposition to the lottery.

Do you want to bring the six together? Talk about casino gambling.

But whatever your thoughts on the Oregon pool cards, Jimmy the Greek is pleased in at least one respect. You can play without scratching, unless it would be behind your ear.