Vsauce!
Kevin here -- with a math crime so sinister the Michigan Supreme Court stated that no
other game operated more extensively or demoralized so many people.
City police forces repeatedly shut it down, and the FBI waged all-out war against it.
And it made criminals out of people like… a Detroit mom named Miss Fannie.
What they didn’t know is that they were fighting against a nearly perfect game that
was about way more than just beating the odds.
In Atlanta, it was called “Playing The Bug” -- in Harlem and elsewhere, it was still called
“Policy” after the original game that drew numbers from 1 to 78.
But the real name is just “Numbers” -- and although it was associated with black communities,
everyone played the Numbers.
When Fannie Davis set up her Detroit neighborhood Numbers game in 1958, there just wasn’t
much economic opportunity for the black community -- so, she started her own business.
And she funded it after winning big on Numbers herself.
It worked like this.
You’d place a bet on a 3-digit number from 000 to 999, and that could hit one of two
ways.
You could play it straight, where you hoped to hit the exact number -- like, 607 -- and
you’d be paid 500 or 600 times your bet.
Or you could bet a number “boxed,” meaning you’d win if any combination of your numbers
hit.
That’s 3!, so 3 x 2 x 1 = 6 possible combinations [607, 670, 760, 706, 067, 076], and it would
pay about 80 to 1.
Okay.
So.
How did they choose the winning number?
I’ve got a cage full of balls numbered 1 to 100 -- I’ll give it a crank and then
I’ll draw three.
I’m gonna play: 394.
That’s my lucky number because .394 was Tony Gwynn’s batting average in 1994 when
he was on pace to hit over .400 for the first time since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941,
but a labor strike shortened the baseball season and RUINED EVERYTHING.
Okay.
Here we go… 32.
I already lost.
Oh well let’s keep going.
Oh.
My cage of balls broke.
Oh.
I am a fool.
Oh there’s so many on the floor.
Alright let’s finish this off.
Stay closed.
86.
Last number.
91.
The winning number was 261, my number is 394.
Sorry, Tony...
But… this method is silly.
No one would trust a guy pulling balls out of a cage in his house.
To get the winning number in a more fair manner…
I could do something like… take 3 YouTube videos, reload them each day on a livestream
and use the ones digit from the view counts to pick the winning number.
And Fannie’s game worked kinda similar to that.
She used the “mutuel” from a local racetrack -- the betting totals for win, place, and
show on a series of horse races.
She’d take the ones digit from the 4th, 5th, and 6th race totals, and there’s your
3 numbers.
It was technically possible to influence those digits, but incredibly difficult -- and expensive.
Other games used independent numbers like digits from the published daily balance of
the US Treasury -- things you could open up a newspaper and see.
Look, here’s the real beauty of Numbers and why it worked so well for Fannie and her
community: You win just often enough to enjoy playing, and to validate every possible betting
system.
If you play 6 days a week you’ll probably win boxed 2 or 3 times a year, and you’ll
hit straight for 500 times your bet every few years.
Did a number come to you in a dream?
Do you think you have a scientific lottery-beating system?
They all end up winning.
And yeah, the house edge was steep -- getting paid 500 to 1 on something you know has a
1 in 1,000 chance of happening means someone’s making money somewhere.
They’re also taking bets, keeping meticulous records, collecting money from losses and
distributing money from wins -- all as they’re calculating their own mathematical risk of
ruin in real-time to make sure they can survive financially if someone hits big.
But for Fannie’s neighbors, they could see $1 become $500 overnight.
The FBI saw an opportunity to rip it away from them and give it to… someone else.
We’ll get to that in a second.
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Okay.
Law enforcement called the Numbers game racketeering, and in 1970 the FBI led what J Edgar Hoover
called the largest gambling raid in history, shutting down 58 Numbers operators.
Then governments realized that if the house always wins, they could just… become the
house.
States made Numbers illegal, did their best to wipe it out, and then gave themselves a
legal Numbers monopoly.
Wow!
What a neat trick!
Lotteries have actually had a really complex history in the United States -- from the colonial
period to early statehood, hundreds of lotteries helped raise money for schools and public
works.
By the 1830’s, lotteries were denounced by social reformers as morally bankrupt, predatory
games that generated “tainted revenue” -- and in 1895 lottery games were banned nationwide.
From legal lotteries to policy houses, there was enough corruption and game-fixing to consider
what was best for the public interest.
Now 44 states have legalized lotteries, and the Powerball is played in all of them -- to
help raise money for schools and public works.
And we’ve come full circle.
But the reality is to run a game like Numbers, what you really need is the trust of your
community.
Fannie Davis and other boutique Numbers operators engaged in a sort of prescient scholarship
decades before neuroscience and psychology research confirmed what they harnessed intuitively
-- the community element of Numbers was everything.
They seized the power of Dunbar’s Number, building on the social cohesion in well-connected
neighborhoods so everyone could play a game together — and that’s completely lost
when 100,000 strangers play a lottery anonymously at a gas station.
They knew that throwing in just one additional number meant only hitting straight once every
30 years -- that’s probably once in a lifetime.
And that’s not often enough for most people to wanna keep playing, even if it increases
the prizes dramatically.
They intuited the communal strength of Rene Girard’s mimetic desire, and how much people
love playing games together -- and need to.
And they actually knew how to make a small economy work: Numbers created tens of thousands
of jobs within communities trying to survive in the face of discrimination, segregation
and rampant racism.
A 1903 Detroit Free Press article said Numbers was “largely the gambling field of the ignorant,
superstitious, and poor… the main thing is to have the evil eternally wiped out.”
Lottery ban legislation was a patronizing attempt to protect communities from themselves.
Now we’ve got Japan’s Takarakuji, South Korea’s Lotto 6/45, the US Mega Millions
and Russia’s Gosloto -- in addition to US state games that operate exactly like Numbers
did decades ago.
Pennsylvania even named their 3-digit lottery “The Daily Number.”
But those games can’t do what people like Fannie Davis did in Detroit.
There’s no talk at the diner about who won that week or who hasn’t hit in ages.
There’s no knock on the door to deliver your lucky payout the day after your numbers
match.
There’s no playing 357 because you live at 357 Park Drive and everyone knowing when
that number hit – YOU were the winner.
That’s all gone.
There’s enough intrigue about Fannie Davis’s life and her Numbers game to fill a great
docuseries -- and there were thousands like her.
Read Bridgett Davis’s book about her mom -- that’s her story to tell, not mine.
Check out Felicia George’s dissertation about Numbers in Detroit, or Louise Meriwether’s
novel “Daddy was a Number Runner” -- you’ve heard a million stories about the good guys
and bad guys during Prohibition.
But Numbers stories like Miss Fannie’s have been almost entirely ignored.
But they shouldn’t be.
Because alongside the rackets were people who understood the social fabric of their
communities.
Making your own way in the world and making everyone else a little bit happier?
That’s not the American Dream, that’s everyone’s dream.
But the highly-regulated mass-production of fun strips the complex social function from
a game that’s the perfect blend of math and people.
It’s reduced to lonely, anonymous gambling.
And when that happens, the only thing left is just… numbers.
And as always, thanks for watching.