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Originally Posted by Calzone Lord
I'm amused by some of the other explanations given as to why horse racing was so successful from 1880 through the mid 1940's.
The most popular one was that state lotteries weren't legal...so there wasn't competition.
My grandfather told me how easy it was to play lotteries. How easy it was to bet sports and horses with a bookmaker. How he'd play dice games like barbooth and craps all the time. How clubs in the city also had card games like poker and blackjack.
If you listen to some people in racing, you'd think it were impossible to bet anything but horse racing in that era. That's nonsense. And big off-track betting, in those days, was done through bookmakers at pool halls. The tracks weren't in with them.
At one point, pool halls in cities all over the country served as books and handled massive amounts of money on horse races. Pittsburgh Phil got his start betting horses, first from the pool halls in Pittsburgh and then from the pool halls of Chicago. He was a bookmaker at Monmouth Park for a little while before he became truly famous as a bettor.
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I remember my grandfather telling me virtually every newsstand in Chicago and they were on almost every corner were mobbed up and acting as a one stop shop for betting horses, sports or the 3 number lotto (that had a derogatory racist name). I also accompanied him to a pool hall on Milwaukee Ave (that was used for the movie Color of Money) anytime there was a death in the family as the funeral parlor was right down the block. I never saw him play pool in his life so I suppose while I played the 'shuffleboard' bowling game he played the ponies.
I believe the lotto payoff was 600-1 with real odds at 1000-1 and they (the mob) made a fortune. Like the superfectas of today you could also play it for a dime.
They used the last three numbers of the Treasury Balance on weekdays and the last three numbers of the handle at Maywood or Sportsman on the weekends to decide the winning number.