The "Numbers Game" is a lottery game where the bettor attempts to pick three or four numbers from zero to nine that will be randomly drawn. Before the advent of state-operated lotteries, the gambler would place his or her bet with a bookie. Today, state lotteries offer this game as the Daily Numbers Game. Jump to: navigation, search A lottery is a popular form of gambling which involves the drawing of lots for a prize. ... A bookmaker, or a bookie, is an organisation or a person that takes bets and may pay winnings depending upon results and, depending on the nature of the bet, the United States, with Singapore and Canada, the only legal bookmaker is state_owned and operated. ...

In the old numbers game, the payoff for a one dollar bet was six hundred dollars. One of the game's attractions to low income and working class bettors was the ability to bet small amounts of money. Usually a gambler could bet as little as ten cents with the possibility of winning sixty dollars. Also bookies, unlike state lotteries, could extend credit to the bettor. The term credit can have several meanings in different contexts. ...

In the northeastern United States this game was known as the "Nigger Pool". This reflected the belief that the game originated in black neighborhoods. Jump to: navigation, search Nigger is an extremely controversial term used in many English-speaking countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia (but also in other countries where English is spoken such as Germany) to refer to people of African descent. ... African Americans, also known as Afro-Americans or black Americans, are an ethnic group in the United States of America whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Sub-Saharan and West Africa. ...

One of the problems of the early game was to find a way to draw a random number that the bookie could not be accused of choosing unfairly. One method was to take the last three numbers in the published daily balance of the United States Treasury. When the Treasury began rounding off the balance many bookies began to use the "mutuel" number. This number consisted of the last dollar digit of the daily total handle of the Win, Place and Show bets at a local race track, read from top to bottom. In statistics, a random number is a single observation (outcome) of a specified random variable. ... The United States Department of the Treasury is a Cabinet department, a treasury, of the United States government established by an Act of U.S. Congress in 1789 to manage the revenue of the United States government. ... A race track (or racetrack), is a purpose-built facility for the conducting of races. ...

For example, if the daily handle was:

• Win.. $1001.23
• Place. $582.56
• Show... $27.61

then the daily number was 127.

This variant of the numbers game, where the number depends on an event beyond the bookie's control, is sometimes called a policy game.

Today, state lotteries use mechanical devices to draw the number. They also pay under a parimutuel betting system. Parimutuel betting (from the French language: pari mutuel, mutual betting) is a betting system in which all bets of a particular type are placed together in a pool; taxes and a house take are removed, and payoff odds are calculated by sharing the pool among all placed bets, rounded down...

Since most bookies in the United States operate outside of the law, there is no way to gauge what effect the legalization of state-run gambling has had on the Numbers Game. Some gamblers still prefer to play with a bookie for a number of reasons. Among them are a guaranteed payoff, betting on credit, and calling in one's bet on the telephone.

In illegal numbers games, typically certain more popular numbers, known as cut numbers, have reduced payoffs.