How to Win at Totocalcio

The Italian betting slip that hid a perfect code

On 5 May 1946, in an Italy still counting its ruins, a small company called SISAL took the first bets on twelve football matches. You marked 1 for a home win, X for a draw, 2 for an away win. Massimo Della Pergola, who had spent the war interned in Switzerland after the racial laws pushed him out of Italian journalism, had worked out the idea with Fabio Jegher and Geo Molo and put up three hundred thousand lire to start. Two years later the state took it over and renamed it Totocalcio. In January 1951 a thirteenth match was added to the slip, and the number thirteen entered the Italian language as a synonym for sudden, undeserved fortune.

Thirteen matches, three outcomes each. That is 3 to the thirteenth, or 1,594,323 possible slips. Exactly one of them is right. The entire history of Italian betting systems, an industry of paperback manuals sold at newsstands next to the schedina itself, is the history of people trying to make that number smaller without giving up the guarantee.

What almost nobody at the newsstand knew is that the answer had already been found, twice, by people who did not know about each other. Once by a Finnish pools enthusiast writing in a football magazine, and once by information theorists inventing error-correcting codes. The best totocalcio…