While the majority of Capiznons are desperate to survive on their needs, some have tried their luck on various schemes in high hopes to exponentially grow their money in a short time.
In the book of Mary Helen Fee, the first principal of Capiz High School, “A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines,” you could understand this kind of value is recurring since time immemorial.
During the 1900s, according to her, gambling was a national vice. She wrote, “the men gamble at monte and pangingue, and over their domino games, their horses, and their game-cocks. The women of both high and low class not infrequently organize a little card game immediately after breakfast and keep at it till lunch, after which they begin again and play till evening. Women also attend cockfights, especially on Sundays. Often the cockpit is in the rear of the church and the convent: and the padre derives revenue from it.”
Fee also noted that taksi is already played by her students and which she observed, “the commonest form of child gambling, however, is that of pitching coppers on the head and tail plan. You may see twenty or more games of this sort at any time around a primary school. Sometimes the game ends in a fight.”
In the early 1900s, three successive municipal treasurers in the Province of Capiz were caught red-handed in using public funds for gambling purposes.
A controversy hounded a pre-war provincial governor of Capiz after he was caught in the middle of a high-stakes monte in a gambling den in Manila including an undersecretary and representative of Negros Occidental. Later, they were acquitted after a convoluted 95-page decision.
Even during the Japanese Occupation, in the middle of Japanese atrocities and hunger, some Capiznons still held cockfighting and of course, the betting using the Emergency Notes also known as Cone Money.*
