Does anyone still do the “ pools”?

[Zincubus]

I recall a bloke calling every week ..

My dad did something like 8 homes , 4 aways but I can’t remember how many draws ..


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[George 1978]

Does the "pools" still exist these days? If it does, it has had a low profile in the past 20 years or so. They used to advertise around the horseracing pages of the tabloid newspapers, usually Littlewoods, Vernons, and Ladbrokes, I think, offering some inflated money prize probably paid by cheque if won - it was the National Lottery of its day, and I have a feeling that the Lottery itself starting up in 1994 was one of the main reasons that fewer people started to play on the pools - it became unpopular and so the interest of it went down because of the National Lottery from the second half of the 1990s onwards.

It reminds me of the "Spot the Ball" competitions in local newspapers that ran in the 1970s and 1980s, and some local newsagents had a yellow box where one could post your coupon in - alas, it ended when I was old enough to enter myself.

[marc]

Yes, it still exists, but now only on line.

[George 1978]

I suppose that is why I thought that the Pools don't exist anymore because I have always associated them with the newspapers, even if I don't read any these days anyway - also I think that the Gambling Commission rules had something to do with it when it came to playing games like the Pools. Mind you, I am not a gambling person although I used to play the Lottery many years ago.

I actually thought that the National Lottery more or less replaced it.

[80sChav]

Maay-be it's not the Pools - but if I have spare cash and there is a Coupon in for Saturday Games in Saturday's Paper I'll take it to the Bookies and on FA Cup 3rd Round Day in Jan, I am partial to going to the Bookies and asking how much it'd cost for a permuation of say 10 games either way - win, loose or draw!

80sChav

[Pussywillow]

Well well I remember doing the pools you had to get 8 score draws or something to win the jackpot. Something like 3 points for a score draw, 2 for a goalless draw, 1 for home win and 1.5 for aways? Then in bad weather you'd have the pools panel sitting who'd invent the results if games were cancelled. You had to get so many points (24) for the jackpot and the winners would be seen in the sports pages of the papers on Wednesdays (?) while we ground our teeth at the injustice of it all.

I did these for years, never won anything much. There were 3 pools companies. Vernons, Littlewoods and Zetters that I remember. Littlewoods got you the big bucks, Zetters was chickenfeed and Vernons somewhere in between. I was once sent a 10p cheque from Zetters, for homes I think.

I remember the pools collectors who used to come round to your house to collect you completed forecasts each week. Manu's the time my father/mother had to yell at me, 'the pools man is here, have you done them' ? I was always forgetting.

Then I remember the pools man would drop off next weeks fixtures and sometimes 2 weeks worth if he was on holiday. He also gave out the bloody Spot the Ball. I always wanted to win that. They used to give cars and things away on top of a cash prize. Some people even had a little pad that you could ink and then press on the photograph of the game with blanked out ball and try a put an X on where you thought the ball was. You got the answer the following week on the back of the new sheet (where then in the papers as well?) and I always used to say some thing like 'that is ridiculous the ball was never in that place' or moan about not winning with 'my X was right there, I must have been close'.

In the end pools collectors stopped coming around and then with the advent of the crooked lottery they faded away. I suppose you can do 'fixed odds' in Bookies now which are similar but not the same.

[tex]

Spot the ball, all whizz thought it was a fiddle

[Pussywillow]

Spot the ball, all whizz thought it was a fiddle

yes I always thought that too.

[Richard1978]

I remember How Do They Do That? showed how a spot the ball was made & the balled position decided by a panel of ex-players & other pundits. My local paper used to have a weeky one, with an instruction to only use biro to draw the crosses with, & rubber stamps of X's would be disqualified.

[George 1978]

Speaking of Spot the Ball competitions, does any remember that Carling Black Label advert from the mid 1980s showing someone in a pub trying to put crosses onto a Spot the Ball competition picture with a pencil, and the point on his pencil breaks off, and the STB picture comes to life or something like that?

My late mother once entered the Nottingham Evening Post's Find the Ball competition one week, and she used to mark the picture with plus signs "+" rather than crosses "x"- I hope that the newspaper would have allowed them drawn like that in the competition! I assumed that she thought a chance to win the money prize as a plus in itself!