Back in the 60’s I recall my Dad coming home from work every 2 weeks proclaiming “Clint Taurus (or some other employee) won the check pool this week”. On rare occasion my pop won the check pool.
HTF does a check pool work? I’m freaking retired now and I’ve never worked any job where there was a check pool. Seeing that I’ve been in law enforcement for over 26 years and it’s obviously a form of gambling probably is why.
I’m thinking it had something to do with the numbers on the check.
I know my old man explained it to me once, but that was over 40 years ago. I forgot what he said and he’s much too dead to ask him now.
Back in the 70s when I was working, there was a check pool at a car dealership I worked at. The numbers of the check 10001, for example was a full house, like in poker. 12345 was a straight. 11111 was five of a kind, top hand. 12689 was nothing. 12289 was a pair of twos. 0s are 10s.
Playing cost a buck or whatever the in was. I never played, being underage and known to be disgustingly lucky I wasn’t allowed. I was told that my first legal gambling was going to be a draft lottery, whatever that was.
My dad used to do that, too, when we lived in Montana in the 70’s and 80’s. Not sure if he still did it once we moved to Minnesota in 1990, but I still remember him looking at a few of my paychecks once I started working to see if I would have had a good hand.
Most jobs I’ve had since then give you your paycheck and/or stub (if you get direct deposit) in the mail. That probably killed the game.
They’d probably be more popular at unionized places where each worker’s pay isn’t top secret. I’ve seen companies where telling your co-worker how much you make was a firing offense. Divide & conquer; it works.
Checks come with serial numbers. You take the last 5 and add them to a 5 digit number which is arrived at by pulling from a deck of cards. The last 5 numbers are the card hand.
The job steward goes around to everyone on payday to see if they want in on “check pool”. anyone wanting in pays $10. This is before any checks are issued (it’s a blind bet). Once all the $10’s are collected the winner from last week pulls a $10 from the pot. The last 4 digits in the serial number are the numbers that are used to add to the last 5 digits of every players check number.
For instance if Bill drew a $10 that had a last 4 of “4673”, and your check number was 59236, then you would add those 2 numbers to get “63909”… you have a pair of nines with a 10 high. 0’s are 10’s, and 1’s are aces. there are no face cards. Any straight ends at 10, and aces are only low in a straight. high poker hand takes home the pot… and brings in doughnuts for everyone the next day… a twist is that he brings in a $2 scratch off lottery ticket for all players. he also draws the number next week.
There are all sorts of office/store gambling still going on that I know of. At one place I worked, you could buy in to a pool based on weekly or monthly sales numbers. One place had an over/under on service calls. And, of course, there are football pools, fantasy football, tourney brackets, etc… that people would bet on.
In almost all that I ever knew of, buy in amounts were low. Rarely over $5-$10 or so (except for things like Super Bowl, etc…), and thus the winnings were nice enough to care about but nothing to get super stressed over. In a bigger office/store/company, even a low buy in amount could garner a nice payout, but I was never in any place larger than a department store, mostly in an under 50 person workplace.
You can play the same game with US currency which is also serialized. At work we would usually play using dollar bills but sometimes it would be fives or evem tens (big money in those days).
You couldn’t play regularly since someone would keep their eyes out for favorably numbered currency, so we would randomly do it every couple of months.
It was a good time killer when you were waiting in line to get into a movie or otherwise standing around doing nothing important. And no, I don’t remember winning very often either…
I haven’t received a paper check in the past 12 years. I think this may be one reason it isn’t as common as it once was. Also, I’ve know people to hold back certain dollars that were an almost guaranteed win, so nobody wanted to play with money too much.
That’s called liar’s poker. It was very popular at a tavern I use to hang out at. The bartender kept a big stack of ones behind the bar, the only way to play was buy one of the random bills from him. That kept the favorably numbered bills from being used.
