Fruit Machine Chat

Classic

I like this bit:

'We found a bar in Manchester which had 4 of these machines next to each other.. we walked out with just over £300.. in coins. The only reason we stopped was because we couldn't carry any more coins and ran out of pockets!!'

Did they not think to change some up at the bar?

Add to it this...

'The beauty of these machines is that if you know the answer to a question then you win the money. it's not like 'fruit machines' where the outcome of any given game is pre-determined. If you learn the answers then you'll make loads of money, it's that simple'

A great analysis there.

All of this for £25. Something smells here...

Matt

The guy is a complete arse.1000 questions.I dont think so. The couple won £10k not £15k.If it takes an article in The Sun to give somebody the idea of playing a quiz machine they have got to be dim.I would never pay anybody cash for questions. Part of the enjoyment in playing them is learning them yourself and then defeating them(occasionally!).

This guy has been advertisung on e-bay for a while now, he's only just started mentioning the Big Match. I love the line that he used to tell e-bay that 'this is not illegal'. What a cock!!! As for the couple who who let on to the media about Big Match they should be forced to play 'Take It or Leave It' for the rest of their natural lives.

That particular 'auction' has closed but he has started up a new one.

"80 pubs in the Birmingham area with GameBoxes"? - if that were even 10% true I would quit my job tomorrow.

What is more, it has never been remotely true - I'm sure I don't have to tell this to any of the regulars on here but if any newbies or occasional visitors are reading this, can I assure you that in virtually everything he says the guy is talking complete and utter b******s!!

Just curious as to what he is supposedly talking bollocks about.

Are you saying that it is impossible to learn the questions? Or are the questions different in every machine?

Would this not work if he was telling the truth?

not sure whether i'm just being a journalist but i enjoyed the spelling of your name Conner
1000 is a ridiculous estimate; it is possible to learn the Qs but unlike the old days, updates are more frequent than you'd think so the days of knowing a game are behind us. also most games can generate unique spoiler questions from banks of data which are manipulated locally. so each game in each cabinet is potentially different from every other.
in short that auction is hooey.

unknownpseudonym wrote:not sure whether i'm just being a journalist but i enjoyed the spelling of your name Conner

No sweat man.

unknownpseudonym wrote:1000 is a ridiculous estimate

Why is this a ridiculous number? Too many? Too little?

unknownpseudonym wrote:updates are more frequent than you'd think

How often are the machines updated, and how do they update? Is it via network connection or do technicians come out and manually update them?

unknownpseudonym wrote:also most games can generate unique spoiler questions from banks of data which are manipulated locally

OK, I get that most games can generate spoiler questions, but if all they do is stop you from winning the jackpot, you've still won upto ten pounds, right?

It just seems that if someone had a machine, and was able to get the latest updates, it would be possible to learn the questions.

So, if I'm correct here, what is hooey about the auction?

2. far, far too few. even HHH has more than 1000 phrases and that is the easy bit of the game.

3. both are possible but i'd imagine that they are done centrally more routinely. i am not inside the industry so i don't have any figures, maybe another poster has better info on this.

4. multiple spoilers can kick in even before you have got to the £1 threshhold.

4a. don't get me wrong; it is possible to learn the Qs but even if you legitimately had a machine (e.g. you are a publican or whatever) you wouldn't be able to decrypt the software to get question lists; you'd have to slog through thousands of games (and therefore 50pees) noting and learning any questions you didn't already know. so any victory would be pyrrhic. when standalone wwtbam was everywhere it might have been worth learning the questions. occasionally a game like TBM comes along where this still holds true but one person who knows what he is doing will exploit it and the game vanishes. without a very good starting point of knowledge and a good memory the SWP will beat you.
learning a game like hex appeal would give you a much better return.
hope you don't consider this flaming (or whatever the term is) just trying to help. welcome to the board.

conner wrote:Just curious as to what he is supposedly talking bollocks about.

Are you saying that it is impossible to learn the questions? Or are the questions different in every machine?

Would this not work if he was telling the truth?

Hi conner

The others have covered how difficult it is to learn question sets but for me that is only a small part of why this auction is complete cojones. Here is my best summary of why, using quotes from the guy's current ad:

"2. Do you know a pub with one of the following machines:
Who wants to be a millionaire, Cluedo, The Pepsi Chart, Hangman 2, Winning Lines
3. Are these games on the popular gamebox machine?"

All of these games, apart maybe from Cluedo, are great games and have been good payers in their time and there was an edition of the Gamesbox (which uses the same Proteus cabinet as the classic standalone Millionaires) which included all these BUT that cabinet is a very rare beast now - I know of only three left in all the thousands of pubs I visit/know of.

"5. If you knew you could make thousands of pounds by working for half an hour a night for a couple of weeks would you do it from the comfort of your office chair?"

Yes, it is possible to win a lot of money on a single machine but to win that sort of cash you need to have built up the skill and knowledge over some time to have a chance of exploiting a good machine, you need to travel and you need to visit several pubs in a day/evening. You can only 'empty' a machine around once a month unless a location is really busy so you need to cover a wide area.

"If you read the Sun newspaper you may have read a story a few weeks ago about 2 graduates who started playing pub quiz machines.. they got so good at it that they won over £15000 in less than 1 month"

As was pointed out above, the 'true' figure they claimed was £10,000 so this is factually inaccurate but even that lower figure seems for me hard to believe. To win £10,000 on Big Match they would have needed to win the £20 Jackpot on 10 pubs a day (=£200 winnings less say £50 average cost of stake money, drinks, travel, accommodation) for 70 consecutive days (£150*70=£10,500). As I understand it Big Match does not realistically pay out the Jackpot more than once per machine, so this would have needed them to find an average of 10 suitable pubs a day every day for more than two months in all the different towns and cities they visited, while still allowing for all the travelling time, waiting for punters to finish, moving on from broken machines etc. I don't doubt they won a lot of money but for me the timescales and/or totals seem unfeasible.

"I expected there to be thousands and thousands of questions on this machine, there aren't. Two people could easily learn all the questions in no time at all.. it would take one person a little longer, but it could easily be done with commitment.

We then hit on the idea of selling the questions from the machine on ebay, and letting other people share in our knowledge, for a fee... obviously! So, we have put 1000 questions onto a CD for you to learn. We struggled to find more than 1000 questions on the machine which would suggest that there aren't many more on the game. Either way, you should be earning money from these machines in very little time."

As has already been pointed out, this is the fundamental weakness of the whole argument. My estimate would be that there are several thousand questions PER GAME, and many of these questions are unique to that game. So 'learning' Winning Lines would give you very little head start on Cluedo, for example. Then you need to consider that question sets and/or game versions do change - the 2006 Millionaire has no questions in common at all with older Millionaire games - and that all the games have spoilers to a varying extent - these are either ridiculously difficult questions that only a few people in the world would know, such as four Latin names for obscure species of ferns from the Carboniferous period, or mathematical questions which are generated on the hoof - 'How many years between Book X and Book Y?'.

Even if the CD is genuine, 1000 questions and answers would only give you a head start on one of these games he mentions, or if in fact they are spread evenly between the games then the help would be minimal indeed.

"I found that nightclubs were the best for me... loud music, loads of people and very little attention paid to the guys playing the machine in the corner.. We found a bar in Manchester which had 4 of these machines next to each other.. we walked out with just over £300.. in coins. The only reason we stopped was because we couldn't carry any more coins and ran out of pockets!!

I have found over 80 machines in birmingham alone.. and i've not spent more than 3 hours looking for them, so I know there are hundreds out there."

Finally we come to the pièce de résistance. I would be astonished if any bar in Manchester has EVER had four Gamesbox machines, or indeed four of any single type of machine, next to each other. Similarly I'd be surprised to find one Gamesbox left in central Birmingham but even if the guy was able to visit all the suburbs and check out every pub and club he'd probably only turn up two or three and it would take him WEEKS to do so - the claim that all this information is kept up-to-date and available on the Net is just garbage:

- the ItBox does have a 'finder' site but he explicitly states that this is not what he is talking about
- sites such as http://www.beerintheevening.com are useful for finding pubs but the information on machines is never going to be comprehensive and up-to-date enough to use for such large scale searches as this guy claims


So there we are. Sorry for the world's longest post but if it saves one of you from wasting your £25 it will have been worth it! Send ME your money instead - I'll make sure it finds a good home!

Good stream of posts in response to this e-bay charlatan.

I could write a massive post about this scam but I wont, since current posters know the score.

Never buy a question set. You'll get fucked. And if by a miracle somebody ever sold you a complete one, your brain would get fucked trying to learn it.

Quiz Machines are like anything else. If you want to win consistently on them, practise.

Well, thanks for the explanations and opinions.

unknownpseudonym, I don't consider it flaming, man. I am new to this board and I wanted to ask some questions.

Thanks for the insight.

Nil, you say that the gamesbox 4+ is a rare machine. My question is how rare? Aside from the itbox, what other machines are there?

And, while I wasn't going to buy the cd, I was interested in the theory behind it. But, I guess this whole thing would only work if you could ascertain how often the machines are updated.

Must admit tho I have noticed over time playing a pretty wide range of machines/games that some of the questions on one game eg Ant and Dec, turn up unchanged on another game eg Snake quiz. Its exactly the same question with exactly the same choice of answers. Which begs the question, if all the games have got completely different databases of questions, then how can this happen? Surely not coincidence. Not saying for one second there arent loads of specific questions to any one game, just that the games seem to 'share' questions more frequently than you'd make out just reading this thread.

conner wrote:Nil, you say that the gamesbox 4+ is a rare machine. My question is how rare? Aside from the itbox, what other machines are there?

It varies a lot from area to area but I'd say a rough estimate of which machines are out there would be:

50% ItBox
25% Gamesnet (either a large oval cabinet or a shorter, wider one)
25% Other common machines - Paragons, FatBoxes, Ind:Es etc.
<2% One-offs - older standalones, Gamesboxes etc

(and let's have no pedants pointing out that these figures don't add up to 100%, I am trying to illustrate the point! )

conner wrote:And, while I wasn't going to buy the cd, I was interested in the theory behind it. But, I guess this whole thing would only work if you could ascertain how often the machines are updated.

You've not quite understood. The updates are only one issue in terms of the feasability of winning money by buying question sets. Equally important issues are:

- how someone would ever get access to such a set in the first place
- the number of questions involved - think 5,000 per game not 1,000
- each game having a mostly/fully separate question set
- the actual difficulty anyway of trying to learn a random set of facts by simply reading a list without any context to place them in

Think of it like this if it helps - in the same way as you should always be suspicious of someone offering betting tips - why should they tell anyone if their tips are so good? - you should wonder why this guy would sell such allegedly valuable information when he could keep it to himself - imagine how annoyed he would be if he sold the CD to someone who lives in his area who then started to take 'his' £300 a week from the same machines.

Trust me, the whole thing is bollocks!

ZAX wrote:Must admit tho I have noticed over time playing a pretty wide range of machines/games that some of the questions on one game eg Ant and Dec, turn up unchanged on another game eg Snake quiz. Its exactly the same question with exactly the same choice of answers. Which begs the question, if all the games have got completely different databases of questions, then how can this happen? Surely not coincidence. Not saying for one second there arent loads of specific questions to any one game, just that the games seem to 'share' questions more frequently than you'd make out just reading this thread.

Hi ZAX

You are right in that there is some sharing of questions between some of the more recent games, presumably those that come from the same development company, but most of the decent games have a fundamentally different set of questions put into them when they are created - the Deal or No Deal questions don't seem to be shared with anything else, for example.

More importantly the older games on the Gamesbox, which this guy is supposedly selling a comprehensive question set for, all had a unique question set to all intents and purposes - after all they didn't even have the same style of question/answer format:

Cluedo - general questions, three answers
Hangman - general questions, three answers
Millionaire - general questions, four answers
Pepsi Quiz - Pop Music questions only, three answers/True or False/pick 6 from 12
Winning Lines - all questions were A-Z format but you had to search for the answer from up to 49 possible options

If you play one game a lot, you will no doubt see questions you know on other games but in general you have to assume that each game is unique. This is just one reason why such an approach is doomed to fail.