TOUCH LINE PLAN 32 (16K Spectrum)
SU8501w034091TouchLinePlan32.tap
=================================

Just because you get eight draws on the Pools does not necessarily mean you scoop the jackpot. If you do one of those complicated systems with lots of different lines to check you may only end up with a handful of fourth dividends for your pains.

Touch Line Plan 32 by L M Cook of Oldham in Lancashire will not predict a winning choice but it will take out the drudgery of checking all those lines. The plan works on Littlewoods, Vernon and Zetter Pools coupons and runs on any Spectrum.

You must enter your selections according to the points they scored - 3, 2, 1.5 etc - and the program will run through the 72 combinations and tell you what dividends, if any, you have won. Although it will only work for the specific plan, it should be possible to adapt the program for use with other systems.


NOTE: Obviously this program is not much use now, but I've typed it in for historical preservation purposes. And being a mere 15 years old when the National Lottery usurped the Pools as the nation's main source of morally acceptable gambling, I have very little idea how the Pools coupons worked - except that, in typing in the listing in BASin, where every statement is written on a single line, I could see patterns among the Xs in the array a$. I assume that must have been something to do with it. I generated a series of football results using "F.A. Cup" from ZX Computing's April-May 1983 issue (which I've also recently submitted, having recovered it from a tape from about 1991 or so and that I first digitised circa 1999), noted all the draws and away wins, chose 18 results at random and gave the program their details - with 16 score draws, all the dividends came up zero. The program at least appears to be working and doesn't stop with any error messages that I have found so far.


===================================================
Text and program typed by Jim Waterman, April 2020.
===================================================