As a novice floor clerk in the cacophonous options trading pit of the American Stock Exchange, I was still learning hand signals when one of the traders tore off his Walkman earphones and yelled: "I'm losing my shirt! What a long shot!"

     Shirts were being lost several times a day, so I didn't give his outburst a second thought. But his next line stopped me cold: "How can Marvin Gaye be dead! I mean, what about Helen Hayes? She's 83!"

     Being all of 18, three weeks off the Greyhound from upstate New York, with six summers on a farm constituting my entire work experience, I looked to someone else, a specialist in Motorola options, who explained, "For almost 10 years Dave's been betting on the actress to take a dirt nap and then out of left field Gaye gets himself shot to death by his father."

     "Meaning?" I asked, still confused.

     "Meaning that at 42, Gaye was half Hayes' age and so the payoff is going to be really big."

     You've heard about the office football pool, and the baseball Rotisserie league. But incredibly tasteless as it seems, countless workplaces are also offering the dead pool, a funereal game of wagering on when celebrities will meet their demise.

     Neatly pairing two of America's prime obsessions — fame and death — the game is another variation on your typical water-cooler sport. Only instead of betting on scores, players toss pennies against death's door.

     To beat the odds, poolers scour the tabloids and gossip columns for hints about their candidates' continued viability. The aged or the terminally ill don't score the ghoulish competitor many points, but who could have foreseen the recent untimely exits of Sonny Bono, Chris Farley or John Denver?

     As appalling as betting on the prospect of death may be, wagering in the twilight zone is apparently appealing to a growing number of Americans — if the rise in the number of Web sites dedicated to the subject is any gauge.

     Dead-pool playbooks vary, but the most common version requires contestants to compile a mortfolio of 10 celebrities they expect to die and then submit it with an entrance fee by the beginning of each year. Come Dec. 31, the most prescient player wins. Deaths — and celebrity — are typically confirmed by an Associated Press obituary. Without that, you're nothing.

     In some games, only one player can hold rights to a given celebrity; others require a payoff upon each celebrity's passing, rather than a once-a-year accounting. In many pools, the payoff is far greater for choices with lower odds of mortality, which is what so troubled trader Dave about Marvin Gaye.

     Death pooling has been around since the 19th century. Guy de Maupassant, in his 1885 novel "Bel-Ami," wrote of a Parisian parlor game in which players drew up lists of doomed academicians and their possible successors.

     In America, the pools can be traced to Damon Runyon's New York City of the 1920s and 1930s. As recently as 1988, Clint Eastwood's last Dirty Harry movie not only featured such a game, but also took its name from it: "The Dead Pool."

     But perhaps not until it got to Wall Street — where betting is like breathing — did the ghoul pool find a permanent home.

     "The death pools have been around as long as the exchanges, because during market lulls traders sit around for hours looking at one another in utter boredom," said Tony DeMartino, a former Amex employee who started on Wall Street in 1950 and now works as a celebrity photographer. "They do stuff like this to stay awake."

     In large law firms, ghoul lagoons are often gurgling in the back of some paralegal's cubicle. A mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City says his name would be the next to surface in his firm's pool if such unjudicial shenanigans were publicized.

     Still, he readily acknowledged being a better lawyer than prognosticator. "I can't win the stupid thing," he whispered into the phone, "You'd think that Abe Vigoda" — who played Det. Phil Fish on "Barney Miller" in the 1970s — "would have died by now; he looks terrible."

     Vigoda, doing fine at 77, was recently in the TV miniseries, "Witness to the Mob."

     Just as laptop computer technology has enabled day trading and desktop publishing to flourish outside the office, so the Web browser has brought ghoul pools to life for the average investor.

     It is now possible to play such diverse — and painfully tacky — venues as the Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool, Not Your Mother's Dead Pool, Dewey's Death Pool, Chalk Outlines and Dead Club, to name but a handful.

     The Atwater Invitational, named after the take-no-prisoners GOP campaign strategist who died in 1991 at age 40 of brain cancer, was started that year by Zachariah Love, a venue-booker in Los Angeles.

     Love moved the game to the Web in 1996, where it now has almost 600 players paying an $11 entrance fee for a shot at the $1,500 annual prize.

     Love reports that Frank Sinatra, at the time of his death at the age of 82, was on 447 players' lists. And though that pool is closed for 1998 — sign-up for the 1999 pool is Dec. 1 — a secondary, or "Lee Jr.," pool can be entered monthly for $5 to compete for a $300 award.

     "Look, it's not like we're killing people," Love said. "The site has to do with the twisted way people relate to fame and the way they deify celebrities. Remember how the world went insane over Princess Di?" (Not surprisingly, at 36, she seemed to be on no one's list when she took that fatal midnight ride last August in Paris.)

     Speaking for himself, but perhaps for many other candidates to appear on pool lists, Milton Berle, who is 90, said last week that "these pools are all well and good — as long as I'm not a part of it."

     The most successful player in the Atwater pool, winning more than $500 for each of the last two years, is Julie Horowitz, development coordinator for the Los Angeles Commission on Assault Against Women. Her secret: "I take notes all year long in the back of my date book and then use it to create the list of 10 names at the end of year. It's a game of research."

     Ms. Horowitz, 34, described the game as "totally addictive" even though "some people I work with are horrified by it and think I'm really sick." Though colleagues may not actually play the game, she said, "they sort of get obsessed by it, too."

     Interest in Internet versions has grown to the point where some pools are specializing in picking death days for one celebrity. Several months ago, Michael Moore, a student at California State University at Long Beach and the operator of Tregoire's 1998 Dead Pool spun off a Sinatra-only site. Lucas Trerice, 20, a student at University of Washington, won by taking the midpoint of guesses.

     Who else plays these games? "Mostly people with a good sense of humor," said Melody Rutherford, founder of the Celebrity Death Pool, which is based in San Francisco, though one e-mail entry came directly from the Senate floor in Washington.

     Ms. Rutherford's celebrity ghoul pool — as well an offshoot she dedicates to politicians and musicians — is open year-round and charges no entrance fee, nor does it offer any monetary awards. "Just your name on the winner's page and bad karma," she said.

     To indicate how quickly attitudes have shifted on the subject of death — or of good taste — when Ms. Rutherford first asked Yahoo, the Web indexer, to list her site three years ago, executives said the content wasn't appropriate. Today, Yahoo lists 18 ghoul pools, including Ms. Rutherford's, which gets more than 1,000 hits a week.

     To those who suggest that Ms. Rutherford is running a tasteless game, she has a ready response: "Do you carry life insurance? Because you're betting money on your own death."

     And as for Dave, my disgruntled Amex floor trader, the first lady of the American stage was in no hurry to accommodate him. Helen Hayes took her final bow nine years later, with dignity, at age 92.