***. Charts show recent real history where available.The game began in the 1950s as Ankada Jugar - figures gambling - built on cotton rates telegraphed to Bombay from the New York Cotton Exchange. Punters bet on the digits; the commodity was incidental.
When the exchange stopped transmitting those rates in 1961, bookmakers improvised: slips folded into an earthen pot, drawn at random. The pot was a matka, and the name stuck.
Kalyanji Bhagat began running Worli Matka in 1962; Ratan Khatri followed two years later. The markets carrying those names today - Kalyan chief among them - descend from that period.
Each market runs twice daily. The open declares first, the close hours later; together they make the result. Three digits form each panel; the last digit of a panel's sum gives one half of the jodi.
2+3+4 = 9, 1+5+0 = 6, so the jodi reads 96 - arithmetic on the panels, not a separate draw. No regulator, no official source; every site, this one included, reports at second hand.