Years ago, if you were inclined to place a wager on a sporting event you might have looked for a bookmaker. Hopefully you knew somebody who knew one that could be trusted to pay off if you won. But over the years gambling on sporting events has snuck into our environment little by little.

The door to legal gambling was kicked open when states began selling lottery tickets. Instead of playing numbers by placing a $5 bet with a bookie a few times a week, you could now play those numbers on the sanctioned game offered by the state. People were hungry for those sanctioned games and the original lottery evolved into spin-offs like Powerball and Mega Millions.

When the Powerball and Mega Millions crept towards a multi million-dollar payout even the most tight fisted figured it was worth it to plunk down a few dollars and get a ticket.

Betting on sports at first required you to be in Las Vegas to place a wager. Eventually states got involved in the game when they realized how much money was being gambled. Now to place a bet on a sporting event there are a myriad of online sites that offer legalized gambling on all sporting events. Not to be shut out of the lucrative income gambling brings to the owners of the site the National Football League and Major League Baseball and others became partnered with some of the online sites.

For major events like this Super Bowl you can place wages that most of us are familiar with such as beating the point spread, and the “over under” the total points.

For me the favorite way to gamble on the Super bowl is to partake in a game that exists in almost every bar and establishment where people gather to watch televised sporting events. Like Johnny Appleseed, a few weeks before the Super bowl, I go and spread my $10 bills buying a box in many Super Bowl Box pools. Those boxes are the subject of this column.

Unlike gamblers who study the race program at the track or learn all the statistics on the two participating teams competing in the Super Bowl, buying a box requires no knowledge of anything about the game. It is pure luck and a lot of fun.

Super Bowl box betting is a game of chance where anybody can participate even if they don’t even know anything about football. The game is played on a 10 by 10 grid with each square corresponding to a unique combination of the last digits on each team score at the end of each quarter. To entice you to participate in next year’s Super Bowl here’s how the game works.

The game is played on a 10 by 10 grid of boxes. Until the 100 boxes are sold you have no idea if you’ve picked a lucky box or not. Once all the boxes are sold it is time for the establishment that manages the game to “pull the numbers”. The two teams competing in the Super Bowl have the name written one across the top of the box and the other on the left of the board. 

Now comes the fun part that is usually supervised to make sure no funny business goes on with the assignment of the numbers 0 through 9. Once the random numbers are assigned you could look at the 10 by 10 grid and see what numbers you need to root for. Generally the payoffs are after the first quarter, at halftime, at the end of the third quarter and at the end of the game.

 Your box is a winner if the last digit of the score matches your box at each payout. For example, if the score at halftime is The Jets 14 the Giants 3 the winning box would be 4/3.

Although most people are happy betting 5 or $10 to buy a Super Bowl box there’s one group of people that have been notorious for going for the big money. They participate in the famous Wall Street broker boxes. These are exclusive boxes that you have to be a very prominent broker or financial executive on Wall Street to get in on the action. They play very high stakes. Here is one example. One of the big financial companies, known for having a very opulent and exclusive Super Bowl party, has a Super Bowl box that could be bought for $10,000. 

Various hedge funds also participated in the high stakes games using the opportunity to entertain clients and foster business relationships. But since I always thought hedge funds referred to the money you need to trim your bushes I’ll stick to my $5 and $10 boxes at my local pub.

Hudson Cooper is a resident of Sullivan County, a writer, comedian and actor.