Cultural reference · English

History of jogo do bicho: from a Rio zoo raffle to national folklore

1892 — the zoo raffle

On July 3, 1892, Baron João Batista Viana Drummond launched a daily raffle at the newly opened Zoológico de Vila Isabel, a private zoo in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro. Zoo attendance had been disappointing since the opening two years earlier, and Drummond needed a way to keep the gate revenue up. Each admission ticket now came bundled with a mystery animal from a list of 25; at closing time, one animal was drawn, and every ticket holder who had that animal received a prize of 20 times the ticket price.

The raffle worked immediately. Within weeks, people were buying tickets outside the zoo grounds, then reselling them at markup. Within months, informal "bookmakers" — the first bicheiros — were writing down bets on animals, paying out if the zoo announced that animal at day's end, and pocketing the rest. The state took notice.

1895-1941 — the game goes underground

In 1895, Brazilian authorities revoked the zoo's permission to hold the raffle. Rather than dying, the game slipped into the streets. Because the drawing mechanism had already migrated to the Loteria Federal (a government-run lottery whose results were publicly announced), operators no longer needed the zoo at all. They just needed a public source of random numbers, and they had one.

For half a century the game grew in what historians call a "tolerated illegality" — technically prohibited, but so embedded in working-class daily life that periodic crackdowns produced no lasting effect. The bicheiros organized into territorial networks, with each bank (banca) controlling a specific set of neighborhoods.

1941 — the Contravention Law

In October 1941, President Getúlio Vargas signed Decreto-Lei 3.688, the Law of Criminal Misdemeanors. Article 58 explicitly criminalized jogo do bicho: a fine for the bettor, up to a year of "simple imprisonment" for the operator. The law is still in force in 2026. Its practical effect over 80+ years, however, has been minimal — operators are occasionally prosecuted, but the game itself has never stopped.

1970s-1990s — samba schools and organized crime

The most consequential development in the game's modern history was its convergence with the Rio de Janeiro samba schools. Starting in the 1970s, many of the major carnival schools (Beija-Flor, Portela, Mangueira, União da Ilha, among others) came under the patronage — and eventually the control — of bicheiros. This turned the game's principal operators into public figures. It also drew the attention of federal law enforcement.

A 1993 Rio state investigation, driven by judge Denise Frossard, convicted 14 leading bicheiros (the group later known as "a cúpula") of forming a criminal enterprise. Most received four-year sentences and were out within a few years. The game continued.

2000s — the digital transition

The internet made the last major shift. What had been a hyperlocal, cash-and-notebook operation slowly migrated to websites and, eventually, to messaging-app-native operations (WhatsApp, Telegram). By the late 2010s, players in São Paulo were betting through smartphone apps on draws happening in Rio, paying with Pix, and receiving winnings in the same channel within minutes.

2023-2026 — the Bets Law and the current era

In December 2023, Brazil passed Lei 14.790, regulating fixed-odds online betting (sports betting and iGaming). Some early commentary suggested this would formalize jogo do bicho too. It did not: the Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (SPA) issued a technical note in 2024 confirming that jogo do bicho falls outside the Bets Law and remains under the 1941 misdemeanor regime. As of 2026, only the state of Paraíba (through the LOTEP state lottery) operates a formally licensed animal-lottery product.