The site www.stocklottery.com also shows daily DJI values and keeps the history of all the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the last 10 years.

Funny text message - Send to a friend!

Some sources name New York the birthplace of gambling in the USA; others say it was in Chicago where the first - back-then illegal - lotteries began. Policy was an illegal lottery first introduced in Chicago in 1885 by an operator nick-named Policy Sam. It soon spread around the country and, despite anti-policy laws, which started appearing on the books as early as 1901, it flourished everywhere in America until legal numbers games such as state lotteries supplanted it. Eventually the use of the term "policy" for this type of game came to imply an African-American clientele, for among Italian-Americans a similar illegal lottery was called "the numbers," while Cuban-Americans in New York referred to their lottery as "bolita." The name "policy" may have come from a verbal code that the numbers runners (ticket sellers) used when collecting bets on the street: "Would you like to take out an insurance policy?" they asked. One could also play at a "policy shop" or "policy office," where the bets were taken and the stakes held by "policy writers." American gamblers have their own version of lottery – numbers game, also known as “numbers racket”, “policy game”, “bolita”, “mutual numbers”, and “negro numbers”.

Rules of the Game

The objective of any lottery is for players to make a bet and guess a random number. The winning numbers can be determined in various ways, and this is what makes lottery games differ from each other.

In Chicago policy bets were placed on groups of numbers from 1 through 78 (coincidentally the number of cards in a Tarot deck). Borrowing from horseracing terminology, a two-number betting combination was called a "saddle," a three-number combination a "gig," and a four-number combination a "horse." Gigs were the most popular play, but bets could be made in combinations of up to 25 numbers. Some gigs were so well known that they had their own names, such as "the washerwoman's gig" (4, 11, 44) and "the dirty gig" (3, 6, 9). In the 19th century, a wager could be as low as one cent per number or three cents per gig; by the 1930s most operators set a three-cent or nickel lower limit on bets. The payout was usually ten-to-one, but higher payouts were made for groups of numbers.

In New York during the 1920s, policy operators tampered with their wheels so often that an "honest" version of the game was established in which gig bets were taken on the last three numbers of the daily Federal Reserve Clearing House Report. The policy company that ran this game, known as "Clearing-House," was immune to charges of corruption, and offered a further advantage that the bettor did not need to contact a runner or return to the office to learn if he or she had won - because the numbers were printed in the daily newspapers. In the South another "on-the-level" policy game, called "The Cotton Exchange," derived its winning numbers from the daily spot prices for cotton on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Lottery Cheaters

Through the history of illegal lotteries the operators developed a great variety of ways to deceive gamblers by determining the results. For example, in Cuban Bolita, which was brought to Tampa, FL in the 1880s and flourished in Latin saloons, 100 ivory balls were placed into a velvet sack, which was tightly sealed. To choose the “correct” ball out from the sack the operator simply kept it in the fridge until the drawing began.

Information from Policy Game Project was used in this article. To read more about the history of Gambling and lotteries in the USA visit www.policygame.net.

On topic:
• Lotto History. Chronicles Of The Game
• Basics of Winning the Lottery
• The fundamentals of sound money management
• Numerology. Lottery numbers prediction methods
• Bingo Strategy - Techniques
• Maryland lottery origin
• New rules for DC 4 lottery
• Super 7 lottery rules
• Hotel in Ukraine online reservation

In its latest misstep, the U.S. Justice Department has asked a Louisiana federal court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by casinocity.com that challenges the government's crackdown the past year on advertising by Internet casinos.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb about gambling and goes like this: "If you must play, decide upon three things at the start: The rules of the game, the stakes and the quitting time.”

A U.S. trade official, speaking on condition that she not be identified, confirmed that a WTO panel had issued a final report that was "largely unchanged" from its preliminary ruling against the U.S. ban one month ago.

Since they couldn't go after the offshore operations directly, prosecutors started threatening to go after companies that aid and abet those offshore bookies. That could mean anybody who accepts advertising from offshore betting parlors, including the search engines.

Last June, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John G. Malcolm sent a letter to media trade groups warning that their members could be breaking the law by accepting ads for gambling sites. Meanwhile, Raymond W. Gruender, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, has convened a grand jury in St. Louis that is issuing subpoenas to companies that do business with the online gambling industry.

Michelle Carinci, in an interview with The Canadian Press, said the website is already being used to create a database of potential on-line gamblers.

This was as a result of regulatory changes made by the Canadian Pari-Mutuel Agency last year allowing Internet wagers on horse racing.

Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, called the subpoenas and notice letters an "intimidation tactic to go after the messenger," rather than prosecute the online gaming sites that the Department of Justice alleges are violating the law.