First up, from Faithful Readers:
“The game had no name and is probably as old as creation itself.”
— Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (1966)
You need three things for a death pool: 1) celebrities, 2) news media, and 3) people who differ in their opinions. Even if we insist that celebrities and media require civilization and cities, it is still easy to imagine that such pools – in which people attempt to predict, and perhaps even profit by, the deaths of well-known personalities – existed in Babylon, Athens, and Rome.Thus far, the earliest documented reference to such wagering dates from 1419, and finds people betting on the death of the Pope. Historian Geoffrey Clark notes:“In Genoa as elsewhere, policyholding on the lives of public figures in the context of commercial risk gave rise very quickly to purely speculative investments. The men who lent Pope Nicholas money presumably had a legitimate financial interest in his life. But other life insurance policies were taken out on the lives of popes by people who had no such financial stake and who were thus merely wagering on how long the reigning pope would live. The Venetian Senate reacted against these scandalous gambles as early as 1419 when it forbade wagers on the pope’s life… and nullified the many bets that had already been made on the life of [Pope] Martin V.“A further proclamation of 1494 forbade any insurance policies or wagers, without prior approval of the Senate, on the lives of the pope or emperor, ‘kings, cardinals, dukes, princes, bishops, or other eminent persons either spiritual or temporal.’”
"Don't Bet On It"
This, however, did not put an end to it. In 1591, such wagering had reached epidemic proportions in the Curia Romana, the administrative branch of the Church. On March 21, the newly minted Pope Gregory XIV forbade all wagering on the duration of the pontificate, i.e., when the Pope would die, and on the papal elections that followed. His concern was well-placed; he died in October, after just 10 months under the papal tiara.An early American literary reference to betting on death comes from Mark Twain, in his 1865 short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (also known as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”). In the narrator’s preamble, he sets the stage by telling us that Jim Smiley would “bet on any thing.” And he tells this story:...
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law for a more academic treatment of the subject:
Stoli is not Stolichnaya but rather Stranger-Originated Life Insurance policies.
