The hard luck business
A few days ago the whole of Poland was stunned to learn that during a weekend lottery draw a single person had won the mind-boggling jackpot of zł. 10,700,000 - the equivalent of 22,695,200 more or less.
That is a sum which is more than hard to imagine stacked into a single pile, when you bear in mind the highest banknote in this country is zł. 200 It was won in a numbers lottery in which you choose six out of 49 numbers to win the jackpot.
If no one selects the correct numbers, the money at stake, calculated as a specific percentage of the value of the bets placed, is transferred to the next lottery draw during the weekend. In this specific case nobody claimed the top win over two draws so at the third time of asking the accumulated amount was enormous.
The identity of the winner is held in absolute secrecy, though it will leak out sooner or later, when a sudden change in lifestyle is observed by his neighbours, when he suddenly purchases an expensive home or goes away for a protracted, expensive holiday. Or when he just cannot keep the news to himself and shoots his mouth off. The way in which the money is delivered to him is of his choice and what he later does with it is his headache, though with financial advice if requested.
The organiser of the lottery is a company which enjoys a state monopoly for such games, something like Camelot in Britain. The games it offers are individual versions of the same idea of guessing certain number patterns drawn by lottery. Apart from that six out of 49, there is also a 20 out of 80 version and four other alternatives, but the game with the longest tradition and which attracts the greatest number of players is the one in which that huge amount of money was won.
Bets are placed throughout the week at 7,200 outlets either in the company's own, self-contained units or in various newsagents and similar shops throughout the country which have purchased the franchise and installed an automatic bet-registering machine.
These are terminals connected online to a central computer where, in the final account, claims are checked. But even if you don't guess all the six numbers correctly, bets in which three, four and five numbers are properly marked also win money, though sometimes symbolic.
The number of bets made in any week is a fact which the company concerned refuses to reveal, but I was given to understand that one in every three adult Poles makes a fling. The mentioned amount of money up for grabs seems to prove that contention.
So are the Poles addicted to betting? Has it become a national pastime? What part does it play in daily behaviour?
It is a fact that over the past two centuries the well-heeled nobility, industrialists and financiers lost a lot of their family assets in the casinos of Europe. There were spectacular suicides outside the Monaco casino and in Sopot on the Baltic Coast, then a suburb of the Free City of Danzig. Millions were lost at poker and roulette in private gambling sessions regularly held among the aristocracy. The less prosperous frequented betting shops which boasted the slogan "Looking for luck? Then drop in for a moment," where again various numbers games were offered. There was also horse racing, but that, obviously, was for the well-dressed elite, though the amount of money won and lost there was also sometimes astonishing.
The situation in Poland today must cause some raising of eyebrows.
Though post-war Poland has never been a place where there was lots of superfluous cash moving around, the urge to have a fling in lottery gambling was always present. The amounts were often small. Teams were formed of family members and friends which placed group bets covering various combinations of numbers. And there was also quite a lot of shady, underground, wholly illegal betting, with poker, roulette and craps predominating. I personally participated in such betting sessions at two locations in Warsaw city centre where the stakes were high, the organisation was excellent and a lot of card sharpers were present.
The presence of several well known political figures made such ventures relatively safe. There were, indeed still are, several professions addicted to gambling at any time. That is true of the film industry where every lunch break is used to play a hand of poker or two or to roll dice. The same is true of the theatre. In Silesia, when miners return from a shift by train, small tables are extracted from carrier bags, and a pack of 31 very peculiar cards comprising figures of aprons, etc., is dealt in a game called scat, in which the stakes are not very large but tempers often rise very high.
Today there is much more to chose from. I mentioned those numbers games which are run by a state monopoly which also holds the right to accept bets in football pools, in other sports such as car and motorbike racing, also in such one-off events as the results of intermittent elections, though such betting is definitely not of the scale and scope of the numbers lottery.
There is also a second state-owned company which enjoys the monopoly on stages gambling, or games of hazard as they are called. In the past this was a company with a large following, especially among the lower middle class. The major event it staged was selling a kind of coupon or ticket with a specific number. They came in several classes and even quarter and half-tickets could be purchased. But the numbers lottery has pushed them almost into oblivion. The only assets the company possesses is its monopoly rights in specific forms of gambling, and that proved a major attraction for an American company which agreed to finance future operations based on installing 35,000 video-lottery terminals in all bars, railway stations, small restaurants and similar places throughout the country.
In such a system, bets are placed in a kind of roulette game by entering money into a special device and marking the combination required on a screen. At a certain moment the system prevents further betting and winnings, if any, are paid. The present Gambling Act does not permit such games as video-lotteries, so a bill to amend the act and allow the games to be managed by the state monopoly was presented to Parliament some time ago where it encountered heavy, negative lobbying by persons and groups affiliated to businesses distributing and managing what are popularly called "one-arm bandits". So the American group threw in the towel, declared its Polish company bankrupt and withdrew what was left of the money it had invested. That, of course, is not the end of the story and the parliamentary bill will ultimately be approved in one form or another. But the fact remains that the planned profits will not be delivered to the national budget.
All of which brings me around to a gambling business which has proved a roaring success, though without trace of any kind of state monopoly. Gambling casinos have very definitely come to stay in Poland. They have become places where you meet all the most prosperous nouveau riches, unusually attractive ladies clad in bespoke dresses, the quiet hum of roulette wheels and the discreet slap of playing cards, the voices of croupiers, and also where huge sums are regularly won and lost.
These casinos, almost entirely situated in five-star hotels in all major Polish cities, are owned by one major and three minor registered companies which enjoy privileges unmet with elsewhere. But when you look around at the banks of gambling machines - those one-arm bandits - you get an inkling about just who stands behind the venture.
These casinos bring huge profits. The bets are placed and winnings are delivered with limited paperwork concerning just how much was gambled. They have been on the scene for not very long but are already making what is not always a good impression. Gambling addicts have emerged, requiring psychiatric treatment, embezzling to cover debts, bringing ruin and despair to families, and causing marriages and businesses to collapse.
But even so, the media and officialdom prefer to turn a blind eye to all these goings on for reasons one can only conjecture.
Luckily there are other places and forms of betting which do not have such horrendous results. There is bingo which is being organised. But if you like open spaces then there is always horse racing. At the Warsaw racecourse you can not only see some fine examples of horse blood stock but also place bets for the results of races mainly staged every weekend during the season. There are official betting booths as well as the not quite official bookmakers who take bets mainly from people they know.
So are the Poles a betting nation? You could risk saying they are, especially when you look back at their history and see how much bad luck they have experienced. Perhaps something better will come along by placing a bet on a series of numbers, the draw of a card or a fine horse with a good jockey.
That is a sum which is more than hard to imagine stacked into a single pile, when you bear in mind the highest banknote in this country is zł. 200 It was won in a numbers lottery in which you choose six out of 49 numbers to win the jackpot.
If no one selects the correct numbers, the money at stake, calculated as a specific percentage of the value of the bets placed, is transferred to the next lottery draw during the weekend. In this specific case nobody claimed the top win over two draws so at the third time of asking the accumulated amount was enormous.
The identity of the winner is held in absolute secrecy, though it will leak out sooner or later, when a sudden change in lifestyle is observed by his neighbours, when he suddenly purchases an expensive home or goes away for a protracted, expensive holiday. Or when he just cannot keep the news to himself and shoots his mouth off. The way in which the money is delivered to him is of his choice and what he later does with it is his headache, though with financial advice if requested.
The organiser of the lottery is a company which enjoys a state monopoly for such games, something like Camelot in Britain. The games it offers are individual versions of the same idea of guessing certain number patterns drawn by lottery. Apart from that six out of 49, there is also a 20 out of 80 version and four other alternatives, but the game with the longest tradition and which attracts the greatest number of players is the one in which that huge amount of money was won.
Bets are placed throughout the week at 7,200 outlets either in the company's own, self-contained units or in various newsagents and similar shops throughout the country which have purchased the franchise and installed an automatic bet-registering machine.
These are terminals connected online to a central computer where, in the final account, claims are checked. But even if you don't guess all the six numbers correctly, bets in which three, four and five numbers are properly marked also win money, though sometimes symbolic.
The number of bets made in any week is a fact which the company concerned refuses to reveal, but I was given to understand that one in every three adult Poles makes a fling. The mentioned amount of money up for grabs seems to prove that contention.
So are the Poles addicted to betting? Has it become a national pastime? What part does it play in daily behaviour?
It is a fact that over the past two centuries the well-heeled nobility, industrialists and financiers lost a lot of their family assets in the casinos of Europe. There were spectacular suicides outside the Monaco casino and in Sopot on the Baltic Coast, then a suburb of the Free City of Danzig. Millions were lost at poker and roulette in private gambling sessions regularly held among the aristocracy. The less prosperous frequented betting shops which boasted the slogan "Looking for luck? Then drop in for a moment," where again various numbers games were offered. There was also horse racing, but that, obviously, was for the well-dressed elite, though the amount of money won and lost there was also sometimes astonishing.
The situation in Poland today must cause some raising of eyebrows.
Though post-war Poland has never been a place where there was lots of superfluous cash moving around, the urge to have a fling in lottery gambling was always present. The amounts were often small. Teams were formed of family members and friends which placed group bets covering various combinations of numbers. And there was also quite a lot of shady, underground, wholly illegal betting, with poker, roulette and craps predominating. I personally participated in such betting sessions at two locations in Warsaw city centre where the stakes were high, the organisation was excellent and a lot of card sharpers were present.
The presence of several well known political figures made such ventures relatively safe. There were, indeed still are, several professions addicted to gambling at any time. That is true of the film industry where every lunch break is used to play a hand of poker or two or to roll dice. The same is true of the theatre. In Silesia, when miners return from a shift by train, small tables are extracted from carrier bags, and a pack of 31 very peculiar cards comprising figures of aprons, etc., is dealt in a game called scat, in which the stakes are not very large but tempers often rise very high.
Today there is much more to chose from. I mentioned those numbers games which are run by a state monopoly which also holds the right to accept bets in football pools, in other sports such as car and motorbike racing, also in such one-off events as the results of intermittent elections, though such betting is definitely not of the scale and scope of the numbers lottery.
There is also a second state-owned company which enjoys the monopoly on stages gambling, or games of hazard as they are called. In the past this was a company with a large following, especially among the lower middle class. The major event it staged was selling a kind of coupon or ticket with a specific number. They came in several classes and even quarter and half-tickets could be purchased. But the numbers lottery has pushed them almost into oblivion. The only assets the company possesses is its monopoly rights in specific forms of gambling, and that proved a major attraction for an American company which agreed to finance future operations based on installing 35,000 video-lottery terminals in all bars, railway stations, small restaurants and similar places throughout the country.
In such a system, bets are placed in a kind of roulette game by entering money into a special device and marking the combination required on a screen. At a certain moment the system prevents further betting and winnings, if any, are paid. The present Gambling Act does not permit such games as video-lotteries, so a bill to amend the act and allow the games to be managed by the state monopoly was presented to Parliament some time ago where it encountered heavy, negative lobbying by persons and groups affiliated to businesses distributing and managing what are popularly called "one-arm bandits". So the American group threw in the towel, declared its Polish company bankrupt and withdrew what was left of the money it had invested. That, of course, is not the end of the story and the parliamentary bill will ultimately be approved in one form or another. But the fact remains that the planned profits will not be delivered to the national budget.
All of which brings me around to a gambling business which has proved a roaring success, though without trace of any kind of state monopoly. Gambling casinos have very definitely come to stay in Poland. They have become places where you meet all the most prosperous nouveau riches, unusually attractive ladies clad in bespoke dresses, the quiet hum of roulette wheels and the discreet slap of playing cards, the voices of croupiers, and also where huge sums are regularly won and lost.
These casinos, almost entirely situated in five-star hotels in all major Polish cities, are owned by one major and three minor registered companies which enjoy privileges unmet with elsewhere. But when you look around at the banks of gambling machines - those one-arm bandits - you get an inkling about just who stands behind the venture.
These casinos bring huge profits. The bets are placed and winnings are delivered with limited paperwork concerning just how much was gambled. They have been on the scene for not very long but are already making what is not always a good impression. Gambling addicts have emerged, requiring psychiatric treatment, embezzling to cover debts, bringing ruin and despair to families, and causing marriages and businesses to collapse.
But even so, the media and officialdom prefer to turn a blind eye to all these goings on for reasons one can only conjecture.
Luckily there are other places and forms of betting which do not have such horrendous results. There is bingo which is being organised. But if you like open spaces then there is always horse racing. At the Warsaw racecourse you can not only see some fine examples of horse blood stock but also place bets for the results of races mainly staged every weekend during the season. There are official betting booths as well as the not quite official bookmakers who take bets mainly from people they know.
So are the Poles a betting nation? You could risk saying they are, especially when you look back at their history and see how much bad luck they have experienced. Perhaps something better will come along by placing a bet on a series of numbers, the draw of a card or a fine horse with a good jockey.
