Decoder Ring | The Scratch-Off Ticket’s Instant Win
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Ian Koss is a podcaster for WGBH in Boston, and he's working on a new series that in its way is about gambling, which you might have noticed is suddenly all around us. Yeah, it's everywhere. You don't have to be a superstar to spin your favorite slots on Hard Rock Bet. Enter a palace of play all your own with Caesars Palace Online Casino.

I don't really remember somebody firing the starting gun and saying, let's just do it. Let's just go no holds barred on gambling and let's see what happens. BetMGM's got all the sports betting in one place. Fan duel, it's easier than ever to place your bet before the next play. I think we forget that it took a long time for the ball to get rolling and now it's rolling really quickly.

60% of Americans gambled at least once last year. We also spent $13 billion on sports betting and more than three times that at casinos. The Super Bowl was just held at Caesars Superdome, Caesars being both the casino company and the sportsbook. It's the kind of mixing of sports and gambling that would have once been unimaginable. Even just back in the 1960s, things were totally different.

The only casinos in America were in Las Vegas. That was it. There were no tribal casinos, there was no Atlantic City casinos, there was no sports betting, obviously, no online poker, prediction markets. So that's like, in a couple generations, gone from a world where gambling was something that was mostly run by the mob to something that is a massive, massive industry.

When people explain the change, they often point to important events chronologically close at hand. Like in 2018, the Supreme Court loosened the restrictions on sports betting. And sports betting is now legal in 38 states. But Ian thinks the broader acceptance of gambling started long before then. And the thing that does it is state lotteries. The first number is 13. The second number is 32. 32.

I think there's something very powerful in taking something that was vice and then putting the legitimacy of the state behind it. It's funny because I don't even know that I thought about the lottery as gambling. It's not the first thing you think of when you think of gambling. And it's almost because it is so innocuous.

Forty-five of the states in America currently have a lottery. That means they provide their residents with games of total luck, games in which those residents bet money in the hopes of making money, even though they mostly just lose money. There's Mega Millions and Powerball, Numbers Drawings and Keno.

And then there is the most lucrative and popular game of all. The scratch ticket. I think more than any other form of gambling in the 20th century, just it kind of put it out there in everyday life.

The scratch-off ticket, that ubiquitous, colorful slip of thick paper, that impulse purchase, that stocking stuffer. Was it the thin edge of the wedge leading to contemporary gambling culture? You know, if you walk into a convenience store, you see that row of scratch tickets behind the counter. You don't think you're walking into a casino, but that's what it is. It's just a slot machine on paper.

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you're anything like me, you may never have thought very hard about scratch-off tickets. But that's part of their power. They're a form of gambling that's just a pedestrian fact of American life. But not so long ago, they were risky and innovative. And when they were first introduced, they became the killer app, the must-play game of the state lottery.

In this episode, Ian Koss, the host of the new series Scratch and Win, is going to walk us through the history of the scratch-off ticket, its invention, its popularization, and its connection to the explosion in gambling that's all around us. So today on Decoder Ring, how did the scratch-off ticket hit the jackpot?

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Ian Koss has always liked scratch-off tickets, even before he was legally able to buy them. My mom used to get them for us when we stopped for gas. There's something about that, the tactile feeling of that film. It feels really good. But he had a pretty eye-opening experience with them when he went to a convenience store in Quincy, Massachusetts, called Joe's Market. All right, thank you. Long time no see. Thank you.

Some convenience stores just seem to, like, find this niche for themselves, that they become lottery destinations. And Joe's Market has become one of these stores. Joe's is one of the stores that sells the most lottery tickets in the state. And Ian didn't have to hang out there long to see people hardcore scratching. Do you come in here every day? Of course I do. I live right across the street.

This guy I met was there on his lunch break. He's a mechanic and he plays the $50 scratch tickets. I play at $50 every day.

Have you won yet? So far, I only spent $300 on the bucket. There's nothing. When I met him, I think he was on ticket number six or seven for the day. And I watched him. He won $100 on one of those tickets. You got a winner. Right now, $100. O-H-N. Like, if I won $100 on a scratch ticket, it would be an event. And for him, he's chasing something much bigger than that. I'm dreaming to get that big one so I can retire. I'm 75 years old.

And yeah, so he goes back and spends $100 on more scratch tickets and goes round and round and round. And I watched him spend $500 in one go on scratch tickets. Yesterday I had $1,500. Count that. Only about $900 left. $600 already out. And that was one of those things that made me realize, oh, this is a casino by another name, run by the state, and it's all on paper.

States only got into the gambling business in 1964, when New Hampshire started its lottery, the first. A handful of states followed, but as the 1970s dawned, we did not have scratch tickets. And Ian's going to take over from here to tell us how he got them. It's hard for me to imagine a world without scratch tickets. Americans spend more on scratch tickets than we do on pizza, more than we do on all Coca-Cola products.

Yet the scratch ticket as a consumer item has only existed for 50 years. Not so long ago, the very idea of an instant lottery was odd, scary even. We're talking about huge sums of money at stake, all bound up in flimsy pieces of paper sitting on the shelf of a convenience store. What if the tickets could be copied or rigged? What if they could be hacked?

The leap to instant was perilous and almost didn't happen at all. In fact, the creation of the first scratch-off lottery ticket unfolds something like a Rube Goldberg machine. A long chain of events, each of which had to happen just so. And I'm going to pick up the chain with a man named John Koza.

As a kid in the 1950s, John used jukebox parts to build his own computer. It was a computer that calculated the day of the week for the date, which of course is a fairly simple calculation. But at the time, this was all wired up with relays and rotary switches and so forth.

Back in a time when computers could be the size of a room, John became one of the country's first PhD students in computer science. I think I might have been the 12th or 13th in the country. When he was still a student, John sold a board game about the intricacies of the Electoral College that hit shelves right in time for the 1968 election.

It flopped, but not before getting John some attention from a company that made supermarket and gas station giveaway games. They were looking for somebody who knew something about probability and combinatorics and finite mathematics, which, as it happened, was something I was very much involved in as a student.

Supermarket games were popular in the 1960s. Stores would give them out for free as a little treat for customers. And the prizes were fairly small, sometimes less than one penny. But these games did already use a kind of rub-off film. They were, in effect, proto-scratch tickets.

And we got to talking, and it turned out that they were trying to produce a kind of game where every ticket could be a winner. So while still chipping away at his PhD, Koza worked with this game company to develop a system for generating and printing up to 500,000 different ticket combinations, each of which had the potential to win. In the 1960s, that took some doing.

But with the stakes fairly low, the security around these games was also fairly low. Probably in about half the games we ran, there would be sort of a little run of tickets in a little town, and you'd realize that somebody in that town figured out some weakness in the game that we had missed. For example, a player might figure out a way to actually see what was printed underneath that scratch-off film and know where the matching playing cards were. And of course we would fix it,

for the next game. So we never had a big problem, but it was...

a knife-edge process. I don't know if you were thinking about this at the time, but it was giving you a chance to beta test and experiment with this idea of scratch-off tickets. And you sort of worked out all the bugs. Right. So the biggest single game we ran was the one for Shell Oil in the United States with 150 million tickets. And we had no problems at all with that game. We had perfected a system that...

could produce a very, very secure ticket. Unpredictable and unhackable. A perfect game of chance. And just when it seemed like they had it all figured out, this game company he was working for, J&H, went bankrupt. In December of 1972, Koza was cut loose. Which coincidentally was exactly the month when I graduated and got my Ph.D.,

So now you're a newly minted PhD, unemployed, with years of experience in the nascent instant ticket business. What do you do with all that? Well, again, a lucky coincidence. In the last year of J&H's existence, we actually made some sales calls on state lotteries trying to see if they would like to run a game like this.

The idea was to take this ticket design that Koza had perfected in the form of a fun promotional gimmick and bring it into the big leagues of actual gambling. Instead of fractions of pennies, the ticket would offer up thousands of dollars. That is, if they could find a state willing to try it. In 1972, there were just seven states operating lotteries, and it turns out none of them were interested in a scratch ticket.

It's hard to imagine passing on that pitch now, but you have to understand that these early lotteries were fragile and extremely conservative agencies. Gambling at the time was largely associated with the underworld, the mob. You don't come to Las Vegas and talk to a man like Mo Green like that!

In 1972, just as Cozza was first pitching his idea for a scratch ticket, The Godfather was the number one movie in America. It showed the extortion and murder lurking beneath the glitz of Vegas, the almost magnetic attraction between gambling and crime. Don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again.

This was a shadowy business the state was wading into. And any whiff of irregularity, a fixed drawing, a forged ticket, would shatter the public's trust.

Jonathan Cohen is the author of For a Dollar and a Dream, State Lotteries in Modern America. They were so concerned about organized crime and this imprimatur of legitimacy that they didn't get people who designed games for a living to run the lotteries. They got FBI agents. In fact, the directors of the first three state lotteries were all former FBI men. To assure the public that the games were fair, even if they were designed poorly.

That was the focus: security, integrity. Not innovation, and certainly not combinatorial mathematics. But without innovating, illegal gambling was eating the lottery's lunch. In Massachusetts alone, $2 billion were being gambled illegally every year. So to compete with that, the state lotteries needed to get better. To be more exciting, enticing, frequent, and fresh.

And John Koza, the unemployed computer scientist, had the perfect idea for them: the instant ticket. To Koza, the potential of this game design seemed obvious. You could print millions of lottery tickets, ship them to every corner of the state, and packaged within each one would be suspense, entertainment, and the promise of instant riches.

So after he was laid off, he and another jobless colleague, Dan Bauer, decided to start their own company, Scientific Games. It was just the two of them, operated out of an apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a kitchen table in Chicago. They started going back to those same lotteries they had pitched before. But this time, there was one that was ready to hear them out. Massachusetts. Massachusetts.

Even better, the director of the Massachusetts Lottery was no FBI agent. The director there was a Ph.D. in mathematics. So he happened to really understand the scientific basis for what we were doing. Everyone called the lottery director Doctor, Dr. Peralt.

And in addition to being a mathematician, Dr. Peralt also happened to be an expert bridge player who once took his eight children on a family vacation to Las Vegas, in part to study the wheels and cards as illustrations of statistics.

So when John Koza, Ph.D. in computer science, arrived in Massachusetts, things seemed promising. The man in charge spoke his language, combinatorics and all, and the people around him were eager to try something new. The Massachusetts Lottery was very innovative. That is, they were prepared to try an instant game. There was just one problem. They had already given a contract for the instant game to another company.

When we come back, John Koza's scratch-off ticket faces some long odds. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, just hoping it all works out? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill, too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help you find options within your budget.

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So the early 70s seemed to be like John Koza's time to shine. He designed an instant game that he and his partner felt was perfect for the needs of a state lottery. And in Massachusetts, there was a state looking for an instant game. A perfect match. Except, well, Ian's going to take it from here. Another company had beaten them to the same idea.

It was not a scratch ticket, exactly, that this other company was offering. It was much more low-tech, like an advent calendar with little paper flaps. But still, it claimed to offer the same basic novelty of an instant reveal.

The brand new tickets, it turned out, were already on their way. And Koza could see immediately that those tickets were deeply flawed. And had they run it, it would have been a disaster. And there would never have been an instant lottery in any state for decades. It would have been a totally discredited idea at that point.

The genius of an instant ticket was that it offered something no illegal operation could, and it did that by playing to the state's advantage, technology. The only way a ticket like this could work was if it was so sophisticated no one could copy it, no one could alter it, and no one could hack it.

The Massachusetts lottery had already rejected nearly 20 prototypes by the time they settled on a final design, the one with the paper flaps. Only to have John Koza, this recently graduated whiz kid with a dimpled chin and a comb over, show up and tell them it was flawed. So on the spot, they made a deal. Koza could take home 50 tickets and do his best to prove they could be hacked.

They gave us the tickets. I went back to Ann Arbor, Dan went back to Chicago, and they gave us a week or so. Armed with his obsessive personality, plus years of experience playing cat and mouse with would-be scam artists on his supermarket games, Koza got to work. The competitor's ticket was made of pretty thin paper with flap doors over the hidden numbers, held down by glue.

Koza's goal was to reveal those numbers without visibly altering the ticket. And within 24 hours, he had done it. Not just once, not twice, but three separate ways. As I said, they were extremely flimsy tickets. So the two salesmen got back on a plane and flew back to Boston. This time, Dr. Peralt was waiting on the runway to greet them and carry their bags.

Everyone reconvened at lottery headquarters. Probably half a dozen men in dark suits gathered around a conference table, eagerly awaiting the presentation. Remember, they had not only given a contract to this company to print the tickets, tickets were already printed and in the warehouse ready to be issued. And there were 25 million of them.

Patiently, Koza walked the lottery staff through each potential vulnerability. One of them involved a cystoscope, which is a medical device. A cystoscope has a tiny lens on the end of a thin, flexible tube. A doctor might use it to examine the inside of a patient's bladder. Koza used it to peer underneath the ticket's flap doors. That was one way in. And these tickets were printed on just really thin,

ordinary paper with line printers, or line printers like a typewriter. It would make a physical bang impression and indent the paper. So method number two was that if you ran the tickets through a photocopier, that raised impression was just prominent enough that the hidden numbers would come out in the copy.

The danger in all this is that any convenience store clerk with a stack of tickets would be able to figure out which ones are the winners and decide who gets them. Again, lotteries were terrified of losing credibility, and this would have done just that. Now, the average convenience store clerk might struggle with the first two methods Koza demonstrated, especially the cystoscope. And so to drive the point home, he had a final foolproof technique.

In a dramatic demonstration, Koza opened a bottle of Fresca, something you could certainly find in the average convenience store. He poured the Fresca on the ticket, and the glue, which was supposed to be the ticket's sacred seal, simply let go. You could peel the whole thing apart, read the numbers, and glue it back together again. The lottery staff were horrified. It was compelling, let's put it that way. The...

When the demonstration was over, there was no doubt. The lottery canceled their existing contract and put out a new bid. John Coase's company, Scientific Games, won the contract. Their product, which used heavy paper, an indentation-free printer, and of course, that famous shiny metallic film, became the world's first scratch ticket. Now, mind you, this was the very first ticket. As you can see, it was...

Not very artistic. Koza kept one of those original tickets, preserved like a rare plant specimen in a block of solid resin. Yeah, I mean, the first ticket looks more like a receipt or something. A receipt, yeah, that's right. It's not very glamorous looking at all. It's not glamorous at all. Very boxy and wordy. It says, one in five tickets wins. And then it says, using edge of coin, rub square spot it right.

And a number appears. So we had to tell people that. So rub the spot. Yep. Then rub the four round spots. And if four matches, you win $10,000. And with three, you win $1,000. And two, you win $10,000.

And one match, you got two free tickets. Wow. I love that you have to explain on there that you have to use a coin and voila, a number will appear. I like the fact that you explain that. It's hilarious. Absolutely. Nobody had seen a ticket like this before in a state lottery. On May 29th, 1974, just over 50 years ago, people walked into convenience stores and gas stations around the state and saw that ticket.

Could you just introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Geraldine Stewart. I live in Springfield, Massachusetts. And can you take me back to 1974 and how you first heard about this thing called an instant ticket?

Do you remember the store you went to? Yeah.

Stewart won $1,000 on that first ticket. And she wasn't the only one playing. These people were ready. They knew it was coming. Like they were lined up in the morning when you opened? Yeah. Yep. Lined up. In 1974, Glenn Myatt ran a country store in Hanover, Mass. People would scratch him immediately on the counter.

Some would take two steps away and scratch it on an ice cream chest. Some would feel like they had to go outside and sit in their car. He remembers the very first customer of the day was a lottery regular, and she just kept coming back up for more tickets, then going back to scratch them in the freezer section. It was just crazy. It's like I thought she was going to lose her mind.

The appeal of the instant game is the same appeal as the slot machine. There's no waiting. So if you don't win, you can always try again. And if you do win, well, now you've got more money to play with. It was self-feeding in a way that no lottery had ever been before.

One liquor store owner described the scene as instant insanity. A pharmacy set up a separate sales counter at the back of the store just for lottery tickets so non-lottery customers wouldn't be disturbed by the unruly crowds. Within a day, stores across the state had run out of tickets and were waiting to be resupplied. People just like it fast. They don't want to wait.

It's the drama in it. It's like fast food. You go pull up at a McDonald's, you don't even have to get out of your car. Give me this, that, and the other thing. Fast and snappy. Sometimes, well, if I scratch the ticket, if I'm sitting in my car after I buy it, will it be a winner? Or will it be a winner when I scratch it when I'm home? You just think of all these crazy things that, no, hopefully you're a winner.

Did you realize that you had created something that would be huge? Absolutely. That would spread? In fact, when I submitted the business plan to our local bank, I had predicted that we would sell $6 million in tickets the first year.

And the vice president of the bank that I was working with at the time, he said, I can't submit this to the loan committee. They will just laugh at this. So we cut it back to a million. And the first year sales was $6 million. Wow. And that was because the other lotteries in 75, I think it was five or six other state lotteries simultaneously started instant games. Wow.

The other states had waited for someone else to take the plunge, but once they saw what was happening in Massachusetts, they jumped right in. We knew we had the world by the tail.

As the '70s became the '80s, scratch-off tickets would keep a hold of the world's tail. The tickets multiplied. There were more games available for longer with a much wider range of payouts. And fears about scratch-off tickets and the lottery more largely dissipated. When you go back and you read newspaper accounts about the launch of lotteries, there is so much fear.

over what these will do to society. It's like, you know, society is going to fall apart. That you'd have just like rampant corruption, you'd have the mob would be all over the government, everything would be rigged, broken homes and like, you know, everyone like spending all their money on it. And so there really was a kind of moral panic. And I think the most important thing that lotteries did

to kind of grease the wheels of the gambling machine was that they kind of proved the doomsday scenarios wrong. And I don't want to say that there are no harms caused by lotteries, that it's not true, but like society didn't fall apart. You know, government didn't collapse. The mob didn't, you know, infiltrate and take over all the lotteries.

Like, those worst fears were just not realized.

The lottery was like a giant experiment, exposing more Americans to legal gambling than ever before. And the experiment not only went okay, it proved immensely popular. I mean, we spend more on scratch tickets than we do on concert tickets, than we do on movie tickets, than we do on sports tickets. We're now in the middle of another such experiment. And as popular as the lottery is...

It's now worried about keeping up. Massachusetts, you know, where I live, approved online lottery sales for the first time in the last year, specifically to compete with all the other forms of gambling that are out there. Right. It's like the lottery is going up against, you know, FanDuel and, you know, DraftKings and everything else.

But around the same time the state made the lottery available online, it also approved funding to help prevent youth problem gambling. The state is so invested in the success of their lottery that, like, they have to do everything they can to keep it growing and to reach a younger audience. But at the same time, they're, like, they're worried about the effects of gambling on young people. If you had to describe this kind of

core tension around gambling where like we kind of love it but we disdain it like how how would you describe that tension almost everyone I talked to even people who are very close to it would always have this kind of like reservations about it they would come to the convenience store and play their numbers every day but then they would joke about how they're throwing their money away

Talk to the person who helped pioneer, you know, scratch tickets and lotto games. But then they look at sports betting and be like, whoa, that's way too much. That's way too much. And it just seemed weird that like all of these people carried that that kind of divided soul within them.

That it's fun, it's entertaining, you know, it has this promise of transforming your life. And yet there's so much shame around it and hand-wringing and gloom. And I don't know why that is, why it's so impossible to shake. And I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon. We're just all mixed up about it. It's all mixed up in there, yeah.

And if the history of the scratch-off ticket tells us anything, it's that we can be all mixed up about gambling and even stay all mixed up about gambling. But that's not going to keep us from gambling. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. I want to direct you to Ian Koss' new eight-episode podcast series, Scratch and Win.

It's about far more than just scratch-off tickets. And what you've heard is just a small part of the whole intricate and fascinating saga it relays about the birth of the Massachusetts State Lottery, the biggest state lottery in America. It's coming out weekly right now, and you should really go listen wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode of Decoder Ring was produced by Katie Shepard. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Katie, Evan Chung, and Max Friedman. Derek John is executive producer. Merrick Jacob is senior technical director.

Scratch and Win is a production of GBH News. It's produced by Isabel Hibbard and Ian Koss. It's edited by Lacey Roberts. Its editorial supervisor is Jennifer McKinn with support from Ryan Alderman. May Lai is the project manager and the executive producer is Devin Maverick-Robbins.

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