Fruit Machine Chat

I've noticed a correlation between having less players and winning more, on any given game.

I could be playing on an SWP with four mates helping me (I'm 20, mates are 20, 20, 23, and 19) and I often walk away with nothing, yet play by myself or with my girlfriend (17) and I can do OK.
Then I play with my family (dad 42, mam 44, bro 22), and despite the greater knowledge covered (dad for history, films, tv etc., mam for food n drink, religion, science, languages) the fortune doesn't rise.
I often (ridiculously) thought that wouldn't it be shit if heat sensors or infrared cameras were put in SWPs, which would increase the hardness of questions if they sensed a large group around the machine! Obviously it's not true, but I just hate how it always appears apparent.

Do you lot have odd thoughts about stuff like this? Or do you wonder why you can't win with some mates but you can with others? Or do you purposefully assemble teams to take on SWPs?

Or or or......

More heads defintely helps on a game like Millionaires where you have a low ratio of questions to potential jackpot. Having just one person who knows something extra can be a real benefit and I would argue that in this case it makes a difference.

Only issue with more heads is when you get people diasgreeing over the answers, where if you're by yourself, your first instinct is generally the answer to go with, plus you've only got yourself to blame. You tend to remember the answers other people get wrong more often than the ones you get wrong yourself.

Doesn't always apply though - you could have everybody who's ever appeared on University Challenge standing behind you on Cops & Robbers and you'd still win f**k all.

i once heard a rumour that some itboxes had remote cameras which would take a snapshot of anyone who did too well. hooey.

about the number of players: it depends what game you are playing but avoiding duplication of knowledge is sensible. but it is likely that your mates will have similar interests to yourself. if i play with friends i stick to Q&A games, if on my own i play the games i enjoy and/or am good at.
the prizes don't motivate me, as long as it pays for my pint i'm happy.

sorry for half-hearted reply, i'm off to conquer somewhere.

I think it's probably the old two many cooks spoil the broth thing. I find I play machines so much that even on questions I don't know my guesses are usually correct far more frequently than one would expect from chance alone which leads me to conclude they're not really guesses but vague memories of a question having seen it before. That's often the case with gut feelings / first instincts when you do a lot of quizzes.

That said, when others are about it's often hard to justify gut feelings / first instincts if another person is suggesting an answer that sounds reasonable but your gut feeling is that it's wrong. You'll go with the answer the other player suggests and more often that it'll be wrong.

Also, in my experience if playing machines with others I'm more likely to have been drinking, which will impede machining ability.

I agree with the gut-feeling notion. I've often found myself getting a 'streak' of questions correct that I really didn't know the answers to by going with 'intuition'.

As you say, it may well be that some nugget of information has been stored previously from having the same question. And as is believed by many people, your brain remembers everything, it's just recalling it that most of us can't do to any 'supreme' extent!