In my email yesterday, I offered you a wager if you wrote in and picked the winner of this year’s SuperBowl.
The betting office is closed now.
But if you wrote me in the past 24 hours, and if it turns out you picked right, you’ll get my upcoming Copy Zone offer for 50% off.
As things stand right now, the Bengals are the clear favorite, with 17/10 odds. That’s according to all the picks I got from people on my list.
But maybe it’s not yet time to run out and put real money down on Cincinnati. Because the most persuasive handicapping analysis I got came from copywriter Thomas Crouse:
“I know nothing about football, so I will bet on the Bengals purely on the basis that tigers are superior to sheep.”
This simple comment set me off on a search for the strange origins of the word handicap.
It turns out it comes from an old trading and betting game, called hand-in-cap. Here’s how that worked:
Imagine for example, that you and I each own a football helmet. You own a Bengals helmet… I own a Rams helmet.
We want to trade. But you think your Bengals helmet is worth more.
“Come on,” you say, “look at those amazing stripes!”
Fine. But how much more?
“Let’s not haggle like lettuce-peddlers. We’ll get somebody else to decide.”
So you get out your A-List Copywriters-edition Ouija board. And, holding hands, together we summon the great ghost of Gary Halbert.
Gary will be the umpire who determines the odds — how much more the Bengals helmet is worth than the Rams.
In a flash of light, Gary appears from the after-world, wearing flip flops, a torn t-shirt, and a red baseball cap that says, “CLIENTS SUCK.”
He looks over your football helmet and mine. He strokes his beard.
“It’s a damn tough one,” Gary says. “I was born and bred in Ohio. And so I have a soft spot, I mean real soft, quite mushy, for the Bengals. But then I made Los Angeles my adopted home. And I gotta say the Rams are looking good this year.”
He thinks some more.
“So let’s just say the odds are $70. The Bengals helmet is worth the Rams helmet plus seventy bucks.”
At this point, Gary takes off his CLIENTS SUCK cap.
You and I each put $5 of forfeit money in the cap. And we each also put our right hand in the cap.
The rules are this:
If you agree with the odds, you pull out your hand from the cap, palm open.
If you don’t agree with the odds, you pull out your hand from the cap, with a closed fist.
The same for me. Result:
If we we both agree, the trade happens. We exchange football helmets. I give you an extra $70. Gary pockets the $10 worth of forfeit money as reward for umpiring, and he flies off to copywriter heaven.
If we both disagree, the trade doesn’t happen. And Gary still pockets the $10 worth of forfeit money.
And finally, if one of us agrees but the other doesn’t, the trade also doesn’t happen.
Except in this case, the $10 of forfeit money goes to whoever agreed to the trade… and poor Gary goes back to copywriter heaven empty-handed. (Really, it’s okay. He can write a new sales letter tonight and make a million dollars by tomorrow morning.)
So that’s hand-in-cap.
People played it for hundreds of years.
The term then got transferred to horse racing — an impartial umpire chose the odds between different horses — and sports betting in general.
Eventually, it morphed into the modern word (disability, disadvantage) we know today.
I’m telling you all this because 1) I like etymologies and 2) I’ve long been fascinated by how a few simple, well-chosen rules can produce complex, interesting, and valuable behaviors.
Like hand-in-cap.
The rules are simple. And yet they make it so you and I and Gary each have a stake in working towards, and agreeing to, a fair trade.
That same idea can be applied much more generally.
You might want to manage a few people who work for your business… or create a thriving online community… or just mold a group of your customers into a tightly-knit, devoted “herd.”
So my advice to you is to start by thinking of a few simple rules to drive the behaviors that you want.
That, and sign up for my email list. Sure it’s a wager. But maybe you can win some valuable insights.