[steeljack]

Originally Posted by jambutty

The pools checking operation was extremely well organised and the girls doing it were highly skilled in the art of doing so.

In those days, if you were posh enough, you could use your home phone to send a telegram and the rest of us had to go to the local phone box armed with lots of change and send a telegram from there. Or wait until Monday to use the post office. I was never troubled by that decision.

My first win on the football pools was when I was eleven. My dad let me pick one line of 10 matches on the 10 results for 6d on his coupon. I won one pound, one shilling and the postal order arrived in mid week. Then in later years I hit on a plan where I won on 6 consecutive weeks. It wasn’t a lot but a win, is a win, is a win. After that I had few minor wins here and there.

I would select 10 matches that I thought would end up as a draw or an away win. Then I would use those same matches on the 3 Draws and 4 Aways using a perm plan that I had worked out. A full perm of any 3 from 10 came to 120 lines but in my plan I eliminated many lines to end up with 20 lines. Similarly a full perm of any 4 from 10 came to 210 lines that were also cut down to 20 lines. The lines that were eliminated were those that contained three consecutive matches, every other one, two together and one elsewhere etc. My plan guaranteed that if 5 of the ten matches ended as a draw I would have at least one winning line. If 6 of the matches ended up as an away win, there would be at least one line of 4 aways.

My maths lessons at school were not wasted.

In fact the pools companies supplied these cut down perms in a free booklet or you could work out your own and register it with them.

Happy days - but mainly losses.

This should probably be a new thread , (the moderators will move if they thing needed) but one good thing about the old football coupons was that they taught a generation of English youth the geography of the UK , wonder how many of todays youngsters could look at a map of the UK and stick pins into a map of the towns of the various teams (Port Vale and Tranmere Rovers being the exceptions ......how many folks actually new which towns these teams played in )