The Vegas Guy: Dodge City Saloon

VANCOUVER, Wash., Sept. 10 (UPI) -- People in the Pacific Northwest take their bar games seriously. For that matter, they take their bars seriously. Maybe it's the frigid wet winters, but in mountain country, a man's neighborhood bar is his second home.

And, of course, Washington and Oregon would have to disagree on what constitutes a real bar game -- because they don't agree on anything, right?

In Oregon, the bibulous game of choice is video poker. Every bar in the state has the machines, and they're NOT the "Jacks or Better" kind in Vegas that can be beaten with strict mathematical play. Not that anyone would try to do that in a bar, anyway.

Trying to clock 10,000 rounds on a video poker machine while consuming brewskis tends to take the festivity out of the place. But if you travel across the Columbia River to Portland's neighboring town of Vancouver, video poker is illegal. Instead, you come face to face with Washington state's bar game of choice: pull tabs. It's hard to find a bar, in fact, that does NOT have pull tabs, and since I had heard about this kind of gambling for years but never tried it, I slipped across the border one afternoon and pulled a few tabs at a fairly typical neighborhood bar called the Dodge City Saloon. (Hitchin' post out front, hip-hop on the jukebox, burgers, pizza, and LOTS of suds.)

Chris Ogber, the personable but no-nonsense manager of the joint, treated me, appropriately enough, like a space alien. "You know that the only kind of gambling we have here is pull tabs, right?" (She must have said it at least three times.)

Yes, I sheepishly admitted, and I've never lived in a state that had pull tabs. I don't really know what they are. Oddly enough, they're not even legal in the state of Nevada. They tend to be popular on "Class II" Indian reservations (the ones where slot machines are banned) and in states where they got started as charity games. In fact, the original name for pull tabs is "jar raffles."

To show you how clueless I am, though, I always thought it was some kind of cashless slot machine. I look around the Dodge City Saloon, and I'm not finding pull tabs. There's a pinball machine. There's a little pari-mutuel betting area the size of a walk-in closet. (The Dodge City Saloon is also the only place in the county where you can place off-track bets on racing at Emerald Downs.)

So just as I'm about to make a further donkey of myself by saying "Where are the pull-tab machines?" Ogber senses my naivete and points behind the bar to a long row of plexiglass containers with big colored cards on the front of them and names like "Black and Gold," "Red White and Blue" and "Casino Action."

Each card has giant dollar amounts on it -- 400! 300! 250! -- and little cartoon characters and gambling symbols to draw your eye to it. Anybody drinking at the bar can't avoid staring directly into the advertising for infinite riches. (Well, maybe not infinite -- the highest payoff I found was $599 -- but in a bar that sounds pretty good.)

The plexiglass containers, as Ogber soon demonstrates, are full of little cardboard rectangles. When a new game opens, she tells me, there are 6,000 of them inside. You pay 50 cents for the bartender to reach in and pull out one of the cardboard rectangles, and it has -- voila! -- a pull tab on it. A pull tab is similar to a scratch-off card at McDonald's, only instead of rubbing out that silver stuff, you pull up on a perforated square that reveals your fate.

If you get a cute little cartoon character, then ... you lose. If you get a heart, club, spade or diamond, then ... you lose. If you get anything that doesn't show a cash value somewhere on the square ... you lose.

But there's more to it than that. I quickly learn that the colored cards on the front of the plexiglass hoppers are called "flares," and on the flare you have a list of all the winning tickets. For example, on the more or less typical game I played, the payoff board showed winning denominations of 400, 10, 50, quite a few fives, and quite a few ones. If you add up all the winning tickets, it comes to $2,020.

Calculating the quick odds on that, you've got a whopping 32.67 percent edge to the house. There's not a slot machine in the world set that low, not even on Mexican cruise ships.

But there's actually a way to make those odds better. Every time somebody draws a winning ticket of $5 or more, the rules of the Washington State Gambling Commission state that the bar owner has to prominently mark the flare to show that that ticket is no longer in the bin. So most of the 24 bins at the Dodge City Saloon had X's over some of the numbers, leading to what I suppose is the following gambling strategy ... study the bin. Calculate how many pull tabs have yet to be drawn. (They won't tell you, so this is going to be a guess.) Compare that number to the number of big payoffs that have yet to be drawn. Then decide whether the odds are tilting in your favor.

For example, if all four 400s were still in the bin after a third of the tickets had been drawn, and the rest of the payoff tickets were being drawn at a predictable rate (one-third paid off), then the house edge would be reduced to 13 percent, which is probably about as low as you're going to get it.

But there's a wild card in the equation. Just as casinos are allowed to reshuffle a blackjack game when they think someone is counting cards, bar owners are allowed to shut down a pull-tab game at any time! So in the example I've just given, chances are the game would simply be pulled before you got your reduced house edge.

Ogber didn't want to tell me how much she pays for the pull-tab games, but I found out later from another source. The whole kit -- flare and 6,000 pull-tabs -- costs $27.50. (Maybe this accounts for the bar's expected payout of $2,020 -- that extra 20 bucks covers the kit itself -- keeping the odds right at 33 percent in favor of the house.)

So what we've got here is a small-scale lottery -- or, in the case of the Dodge City Saloon, 24 small-scale lotteries. In fact, in some states the pull tabs are run by the state lottery, and you can even participate in pull-tab games at convenience stores.

In the states where they're legal, the best odds I've found are in Minnesota, where the house edge is 25 percent, but in every state the pull-tab odds are better than lottery odds. It's a sucker bet, but it's not the WORST sucker bet on the market, and it's obviously designed as a bar diversion.

There's even a casino called "Agate Pull Tabs." It must be the loneliest casino in America, though, because all they have is 10 pull-tab dispensers. It's run by an Indian tribe in Sand Point, Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands.

The only other variation on the game is that, in some states, you have pull-tabs that are done with traditional slot-machine symbols. You pull three tabs on each card to see if the cherries line up. It's a little more work, and perhaps a little more fun, but it doesn't change the nature of the game in any way.

Pull tabs, then, turn out to be the OLDEST legal game in America. They're almost identical to the original national lottery, the one set up by the commissioners of the District of Columbia in 1793 after consultation with President Washington, who was a lottery player his whole life. The district needed money to design the plan of the federal city, and so officials sold 50,000 lottery tickets at $7 each -- and the odds were almost exactly the same as Washington state pull tabs: 16,737 of the tickets offered prizes, and 33,263 were blanks.

In those days, the way the game worked is that you paid your seven bucks and were given a numbered ticket that matched an identical stub that remained with the lottery operator. Then, on a certain date, the stubs were placed in a wheel and drawn out one at a time on a pre-arranged schedule.

The problem was, there were so many competing lotteries in the new nation that ticket sales, after starting off well, slumped badly. So at the first drawing, lottery agent Samuel Blodget was accused of fraud, as it was claimed that the numbers for the larger prizes had never been put into the wheel. Blodget ignored the criticism and started selling a second round of tickets before he had even finished the drawings for the first round. Washington was alarmed by this, and forced Blodget to pledge his personal property and stocks to guarantee the payment of the prizes.

But things got worse. The grand prize winner was supposed to get a hotel worth $50,000 -- but he found out the hotel was still under construction. He sued Blodget, and the litigation went on for years.

The second drawing was postponed for a year and a half and then never completed. Two and a half years after that, Blodget resumed the drawings, but by then the Federal Lottery, as it was called, was a source of general ridicule so it was almost impossible to sell any more tickets. In 1799, Blodget discontinued it entirely.

The first Federal Lottery, in other words, turned out to be a total ripoff.

Pull tabs are more honest. You get the lottery ticket as soon as you pay your 50 cents. But be quick about pulling the tab, because some latter-day Samuel Blodget can discontinue the game at any moment.

DODGE CITY SALOON

Vancouver, Wash.

Theme: Cowboy BBQ Chic

Known for: Only place to bet the ponies in Clark County

Marketing niche: Locals

Gambler's Intensity: Low

Cocktail speed: Rapido (it's a bar)

Dealers: Friendly (it's the bartender)

Bosses: Pro

Tables: 24 pull-tab games.

Rare games: None.

Slots: 0

Rooms: 0

Surrounding area: Strip malls and residential subdivisions. The closest real casinos are four card rooms in La Center, 20 miles to the north.

Web site: none

Overall rating: 55

Joe Bob's bankroll: Down $20 after pulling 40 tabs, plus some $1 winners that were redeemed in additional tabs: total to date +$165

(E-mail Joe Bob Briggs, "The Vegas Guy," at [email protected] or visit Joe Bob's Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail-mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.)