WHAT happened?
Just the other night on Friday, July 26, 2019, I even went out of the office to place an extra P50 bet on my number that I have been maintaining for the last five months even though I had a deadline to beat.
I usually don’t gamble, but I do have a soft spot for the three-digit number game, swertres. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s an addiction that forces me out of bed to make sure I place my bet for the morning draw at 11 a.m. Then I make sure I don’t forget the afternoon draw at 4 p.m. and the evening draw at 9 p.m.
If you go to the official lotto outlet of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO), your P12 will win you P4,500 if you match your numbers with the winning combination in exact order. You increase your chances of winning if you play the Rambolito, but it also means you win only P750.
I have heard of illegal swertres operations where bets are only P10 each and the cash prize is P5,000 if you match your numbers with the winning combination in exact order. For a Rambolito win, you take home P800.
I just heard this, okay? It’s not like I have an usher who I pay on a weekly basis just in case I get too busy to go out to the lotto outlet. Because I don’t.
Not even if his name on my phone directory is right next to my uncle’s, who, by the way, happens to be a priest. It’s not like I texted my “usher” and then sent the message to my uncle, the priest, by mistake.
I can just imagine it. My uncle, the priest, doing what it is that priests do--kneel, pray, contemplate, down a case of beer, write a homily--and then getting a text from me telling him to add another P100 to the number I maintain.
Not that this scenario has ever happened. Because it hasn’t.
So yeah, to say I was upset when I was told that the swertres games were temporarily suspended while the Duterte administration investigated the massive corruption in the PCSO would be an understatement.
It was the first item in my phone inbox from a certain someone who may or may not be an usher.
At first, I thought it was a joke. Or it was all a dream. Either way, it couldn’t be happening. After all, to many, swertres is life. Just like drinking. You don’t destroy life. You nurture it just like you would an ice cold glass of beer.
But then I read the text again. The message was clear. I went outside to check if the yellow STL stall across my grandmother’s house on J. Urgello St. was open. It wasn’t.
The truth sank in.
Apparently, right before 11 p.m. last Friday, President Duterte gave the directive in a video message uploaded on the Facebook page of the Presidential Communications Office.
He ordered the immediate stoppage of all gaming activities of the PCSO, including the lotto.
“Pending investigation, lahat po ng laro ng lotto, STL, Peryahan ng Bayan, or whatever nature. There’s one at that, yung gambling machine... I said all gaming activities in gambling that got their franchise from government thru PCSO are, as of today, suspended or terminated because of massive corruption,” he explained.
The PCSO and the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. are two separate entities, right? So that means casinos are open.
Hmm. I wonder if they have ushers there.