Two fingers poised momentarily, holding a slender punch directly above a dimple in the foil that covered the board. Then with the precision of a surgeon, the punch was pushed completely through the foil with enough force to dispel a paper message through the back of the board. The message was picked up, decoded, and then discarded in disgust.

Chances are likely that your father or grandfather lost his lunch money just that way, maybe more than once, betting that he could win a jackpot on a punchboard. What is equally likely is that you have little or no idea what a punchboard was or how it was played even though it is estimated that there were more than 50 million punchboards sold in 1939 alone, and that the popularity of punchboarding spanned the period from approximately 1900 until the mid 1970s, when this form of gambling was declared illegal in most states.

The modern punchboard was patented in 1905, as a device that would allow one customer to play a lottery, with no contribution necessary from anyone else. This amazing concept enabled the punchboard’s owner/operator to sell chances to one customer at a time, and to tell that customer if and how much he won immediately, without waiting for all the punchboard numbers to be sold — a concept that granted instant money to the player and seller alike.

The punchboard player simply paid his money to the punchboard’s owner, selected which hole(s) he felt contained a lucky number, and using a slender punch or stylus, punched out the small roll of paper hidden in that hole. The number marked on that paper, or “straw” as it was commonly known, determined the results of his selection. More times than not, the customers’ only reward was the warm feeling they had, believing they had nearly won a major prize.

Today’s punchboard collector is not motivated by the possibility of winning an instant jackpot. His thrill comes from acquiring a new and/or different punchboard for his collection.

Despite the number of punchboards produced, it is difficult to find non-punched or unusual punchboards because most were simply thrown away when their original owner felt the board would no longer sucker another coin from an unwitting player.

Although the modern punchboard was patented in 1905, the concept had been around for many years before that, with crafty bar and pool hall owners making their own punchboards. They would drill a few holes in a wooden board, then stuff small pieces of rolled or folded paper into each hole, and watch for the next gullible sucker to fleece. It doesn’t take much objective thought to realize that the customer only had the punchboard owner’s word that there was a winning number in at least one of the remaining non-punched holes, a fact that often just was not true. Too often the owner/maker of the homemade punchboard would punch out the winning hole for himself, or he would not even have bothered to put a winning number in any hole. The profit margin on these homemade punchboards was very high, as long as there was a customer who would buy a chance to win the board’s jackpot.

By the early 1900s, as most Americans realized these homemade punchboards were more than likely to be fraudulent, the popularity of punchboarding declined. It took the invention of punchboard manufacturing machines, which could cover both sides of the board with a sheet of undamaged paper or foil, to convince customers to return to punchboard gambling.

The mass-production of punchboards led to a general standardization of shapes, and to a great extent, a standardization of the themes that helped identify different manufacturers’ boards. Some of the successful themes contained drawings of shapely pinups, and titles that implied this board made big payoffs, like: Win a Buck, Barrel of Winners, and Sweepstakes Parley. For the more risqué customers there were punchboards with themes containing racy drawings and words with innuendos, like: Easy Double, Big Gusher and Lady Your Hat is Showing.

A particularly interesting type of punchboard was the pocketknife board. This punchboard displayed several varieties of pocketknives, and the player was invited to pick the knife he wanted to win before punching. After making his punch the customer was required to purchase the knife he had picked, at the price printed on the straw he punched. The amounts printed on the straw were often more than what any displayed knife was worth, but the idea of picking your own prize, and possibly getting it at a low cost, made this type of punchboard popular.

Some punchboards had as many as 10,000 holes, and some as few as 25, some paid out prizes instead of money, and some guaranteed that everyone was a winner, but they all had one thing in common — their calculated average gross profit, meaning what the board’s owner should expect as his profit when all the holes were sold and all prizes given out. Typically, a board selling punches at 5 cents each would be expected to return an average gross profit of $28.55. Not bad, in an era when lunch could be purchased for a quarter, and a gallon of gas cost 10 cents.

Several big manufacturing and wholesale companies specialized in making and marketing punchboards to places where men would gather. These big wholesalers could make big profits and these big profits often led some wholesalers to tempt their customers with the promise of larger and larger profits. These large profits exceeded the average gross profits calculated for an honest punchboard, and could only be made if the business owner bought the board’s ‘key’, a map which showed the location of all the major prize-wining ‘straws.’ Greedy business owners would buy these keys, punch out some or all of the prizes, and then put the boards out for their customers to play. This was the same scam that was perpetrated on the public before punchboards were mass produced, and it resulted in customers reaching the same conclusion — that all boards were dishonest — and by the mid 1970s punchboarding was outlawed in most parts of the United States.

Punchboard prices range from a couple of dollars up to several hundred dollars for a non-punched board in pristine condition. As with most collectibles, condition is an important factor in a punchboard’s cost, some punchboard themes have remained consistently more desirable, and more costly.

As with other collectibles, there were many knock-offs and spin-offs of the original punchboard. While some of these can be mistaken for a true punchboard by a casual collector, it is the pushcard (also known as the pushboard) that is most commonly found in antique stores and flea markets today and most commonly confused with a punchboard.

While punchboards were designed to have a potential prizewinning straw punched out of a small hole with a stylus, pushcards were designed to allow the customer to push out the prize-winning straw with his finger or thumb. Pushcards were cheaper to manufacture, but they were no more likely to be honest or to have a bigger payback percentage than a standard modern punchboard.

A big mystery lurks in the history of pushcards – the mystery of the phony patent number. For some reason, at least one manufacturer printed an erroneous patent number on several of its pushcards. Because so few were printed, and because the mystery of why the phony patent number was printed on the boards remains unsolved, these pushcards are becoming increasingly more collectible.