Pulltabs and Shrodingers' Cat

When I first moved out West to Washington State, there were these things I had never seen before, called "games", but unlike any other games I've ever played. The first time was in Olympia, going out with some friends from the Evergreen State College.

While we we ordering lunch, I saw a strange object made of cardboard and tin foil standing on the bar.

Let me describe this contraption:

Imagine a flat, thick piece of cardboard. About an inch thick, and around ten inches wide and tall.

Looked a little like a cheap picture frame, with a sort of checkerboard design in red and white foil on the front. There were dots in the foil. Hundreds of little dots. And a wire stand propped it up. The back- that's when the bartender came hurrying over to see what I was up to.

He told me it was a game.

So where are the playing pieces?

The fellow pointed out a a short bit of wire, same guage as the stuff in back. It was attached by about a foot of string.

This is a game? I thought it was some sort of logic puzzle

A little more inspection revealed a price- 5 cents, and a list of prizes in 5, 10 and 25 dollar amounts. The back was a grid with tiny rolls of paper- ah!

Under the publicans' watchful eye, I counted the rows, then the columns. Did I say hundreds? There were thousands of little dots, at a nickle a dot.

Then I added up the prize money. He explained that when there was a winner, one of these was crossed off.

I did the math, and had to ask, so it pays out 6%?

No he explained, getting a little impatient with my density, and again pointed out that only one of the "big winners" was crossed off.

Oh. Just to smooth things over, I gave him a dollar, and punched out twenty little holes, collecting my tiny strips of paper, which I shared with my friends.

Turns out that the proper way to play is to punch out the holes first, then pay, just in case I had a winner, the explanation at that point quite confused me.

I decided I had better stick to chess and go. This was a little over my head.

On to part two.

by David E. Freeman

dfremail@yahoo.com

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