This Blog is about football pools betting
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British pools
Several different companies including Littlewoods, Vernons, Zetters and Brittens have organised similar games, the most famous of which was historically known as Treble Chance. Competitors were given a list of football matches set to take place over the coming week, and attempted to pick a line of eight of them whose results would be worth most points by the scoring scheme, traditionally by crossing specific boxes on a printed coupon. A proportion of the players' combined entry fees was distributed among the competitors whose entries were worth the highest scores.Entries
Entries were traditionally entered by post or via agents or collectors. Collectors walked a route door to door taking a percentage usually 12.5% of the money as a fee. Main collectors, who appointed them, delivered the forms and payments to a regional office, which were then dispatched to the companies central offices. Legally the football pools collectors were agents of the entrants, not the pools company. There have been a few cases whereby a rogue agent has fraudulently withheld players' stake money, even though one entrant had actually chosen a set of jackpot-winning fixtures. These days, Internet applications are also accepted.
Business for pools collectors was sustained up by periodic canvassing, where company agents knocked on doors in an area of a town or housing estate.Scoring
Scoring schemes varied over the years. The current Treble Chance games use a scoring scheme which awards three points to score draws (matches where both team scored the same, strictly positive, number of goals), two points to no-score draws (matches where neither team scored a goal) and one point to both home wins (matches where the home team scored more goals than the away team) and away wins (matches where the away team scored more goals than the home team). The most famous historical scoring scheme differentiated between home wins and away wins, awarding one and a half points for games resulting in away wins. A scoring scheme used for only one year split score draws into two categories, awarding three points only for matches ending 1-1 and two and a half points for higher-scoring score draws.
The total score of each line would be calculated, up to a maximum of 24 points. The highest scoring line achieved by any player in that particular week's competition would be declared to be worth the top dividend, with a large proportion of the prize pool awarded to the players responsible for submitting the highest-scoring lines. Large football pools would award second and subsequent dividends, splitting smaller proportions of the prize pool among players who had submitted lines scoring nearly as many points; at its peak, the Littlewoods Treble Chance game would offer up to six dividends.
During the summer, when football leagues were not in operation in the United Kingdom, competitions were based on the results of football matches taking place in Australia. Matches which were postponed would often have their results adjudicated, for the sake of the football pools results, by a board known as the Pools Panel; The Times reports that the Pools Panel was formed in 1963 when a particularly cold winter scrapped football for three weeks running. Panel members included retired footballers with international experience and retired referees.Results
Before their popularity dwindled, pools results were published in most national newspapers a day or two after the Saturday on which the matches were played. Grids marking the points totals per game were sometimes published, against which your pools coupon could be aligned to read off the scores.
The BBC television programme Grandstand used to broadcast the winning match numbers and any Pools Panel verdicts as part of its "Final Score" segment in the late afternoon. Only two people have so far announced the classified football results on the programme since its inception in 1958 - Len Martin until his death in 1995 and, since then, Tim Gudgin. Pools news was also given out on the BBC radio programme Sports Report until May 2007.
With scores being read out on radio and television it was also common to relay the message "claims by telegram" for days when around eight score-draws occurred (and thus few players expected to achieve maximum points), through "claims by registered mail only" for days when rather more winners were expected, to "no claims" when there were likely to be so many claimants that the mail would have been overwhelmed.Winning
Typically a fraction of a penny would be charged for each line entered, though players often had the option to play each line at a higher stake and so receive a higher share of the pool should their line prove a winner. Accordingly, players would usually submit many different lines in a single entry. Popular ways to do this were "full perm" entries, where 10 (or 11, or more) matches were selected and every possible combination of eight matches selected from the ten (etc.) was entered as a single line. As there are C(10,8) = 45 ways to select eight matches from ten, the cost of such an entry was 45 times the cost of entering a single line. Note that the term "perm" was used despite the relevant mathematical operation being combination rather than permutation, as the order in which the eight matches were selected was irrelevant. The pools companies, many daily newspapers, and the sporting press also issued "plans", which were subsets of full perms: these enable the punter to cover more matches for the same stake, with the proviso that even if 8 draws were in the selections, they might not all be in a single line of the plan (but well designed plans could give a guarantee something like 'if the plan hits 8 draws it must win at least a 3rd dividend').
The largest prizes would be awarded when only one line was entered scoring the maximum number of points; typically this would occur when only eight or nine matches ended in score draws, so only one player would have the line scoring the maximum. These biggest jackpot prizes could be several hundred thousand pounds, sometimes even more than a million. Prizes depended on the number of players and the cost per line, which varied between pools companies and increased over the years; one winner, Viv Nicholson, gained notoriety by declaring she was going to "spend, spend, spend" after winning £ 152,319 in 1961. The story of her subsequent divorces, remarriages, extravagance and eventual bankruptcy was eventually made into a musical named after the famous quote.
At the other extreme, payouts of less than a pound were quite common as lower dividends when many entries won. Most "punters" could expect to receive at least one low payout if they played for long enough.
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