Be Excellent To Each Other

...What I've been saying for the last 10 years, basically. It is utterly scandalous that such flawed, bent devices are STILL around (only just, mind), purporting to be "the pub fruit machine" whereas actually, they are nothing more than a scam to fleece those ever-dwindling hapless punters at the expense of those "in the know".

In a way though, I take heart from the enormous popularity of online slots and random machines - total vindication. The UK public hasn't fallen out of love with the fruit machine per se, in fact anything but. No, they've only fallen out of love with predetermined AWPs. I believe decent, fair AWPs could've still been *huge* in the UK, if they played fair. I don't have a problem with reasonable skill advantage and skill features; all of the great machines of the past rewarded the skillful player within reason.

Ironically Barcrest only "make" random machines now; again, something I long predicted when everyone else laughed. The AWP will very shortly only be remembered as a shameful episode in UK gambling, akin to the bent horse race.

They've rechipped that machine and its clones four times now, and they're still open to that kind of battering by the pros.

(The original machine was Alien (proper licensed job!), that Leprechaun's Gold is a clone of it, they all run the same code.)

Do note it's not a case of 'walk up and empty the machine', I've had the method on those explained to me and it's really quite complex and involved, especially on the P4 chip which is the one that machine is running there. Basically the code doesn't look far enough ahead and it's possible to trap it into moving to a jackpot feature square when it doesn't want to (and even then you have to do the feature right), with a combination of hi/lo steps, bonuses, and getting the hi/lo reel into the right position, at a point on the board where the code doesn't 'see' the danger coming.

As for the other clip I've just posted (the true skill one), I'm a little bit 50/50 on that line of machines (the machine in the clip is an Electrocoin called Dead Man's Treasure, but they made about five or six of them that are literally all just straight clones of each other) - on the one hand they do genuinely reward the skilful player, there are two features in the top zone that are jackpot capable, the reel skill feature you can see in that video, and also a reel stepper feature which requires knowledge of the reel strips and quick hands holding the reels as they step.

However, on the other hand they 'number' (i.e. you look for particular numbers on the hi/lo reel during normal play and that will tell you if it's going to offer one of the jackpot features or not), and they also maintain two separate pots for the different stakes, which isn't indicated to the player in any way whatsoever.

They also maintain a 'hidden' streak pot that will randomly just drop a £140 invincible board.

As such, for the player who knows everything there is know about the machine it's possible to get:

1) A skill jackpot on 25p/50p stake (in the form of a mega streak that can go for £80-£90)
2) A skill jackpot on £1 stake (in the form of a mega streak that can go for £80-£90)
3) Possibly trigger the £140 streak pot as well.

That brings the 'maximum jackpot' if you will to over THREE HUNDRED FUCKING POUNDS on a pub AWP, which is absolutely mental. Needless to say the suck cycle on this family of machines is incredibly brutal, they can literally take £25 or more and not offer a single win of so much as 50p.

Make no mistake though, even today, there are guys making a tidy living out of the pub AWP, although competition can be quite fierce for the 'good' machines.

While it's good to see that random machines are becoming more prevalent, I've not really seen this on the lower jackpot ones. So it's all very well a £500 Jackpot machine being random, but they can still be incredibly tight. I remember putting £250 through a Rainbow Riches once without even seeing the feature.

True enough mate, but there again someone else would've randomly recouped 90-95% of that £250 you ploughed in, them's the breaks. Point is, it wouldn't be the SAME person (or very small group of people) 'in the know' each and every time.

I'm not defending £2/play, £500 random-based casino fruit machines masquerading as pub fruit machines, far from it, but at least in their case their only problem is their too high price-per-play and corresponding jackpot. If they were exactly the same but all prizes reduced to one tenth and similarly the stake reduced from £2 to 20p per spin, thus giving a sensible £50 jackpot, I'd have no issue with them at all, really.

Mind you, as AE says, so-called AWPs are still £1 per spin and actually offer a £300 effective jackpot, except in their case ONLY those in the know can ever achieve it in 99% of cases. I know which I think is the better and fairer of the two, and so do most other punters voting with their feet.

Yeah, same here. In my local 'Silvers', hardly anyone touches the £500 machines - it's the Party Time variants that are the most popular or the few AWPs they have left, but they still bring more of the big jackpot machines in. Probably a good thing they got rid of my 'favourite' though.. Double Decker.

Here he is spanking one of the clones for £390 (!!!!).

This is a £70 jackpot pub AWP on a 78% payout.

He got the wins as I outlined above, but also managed an extra 'trap' on the red lines for a further jackpot.

VOLUME ALERT - There's some really noisy karaoke at the start.

From the description:



How'd you like to be the poor fucker playing this one next?...... (Note he's edited out the skill and trap jackpots, as these machines are still considered 'earners' hence he's not going to put the whole thing up on YouTube!)

Interesting thread here, it appears that Betfred's casino has a cheating card game on their books.

http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/cas ... games.html

Fuck me, that's appalling.
I waded my way through most of that thread. Bottom line? Don't trust casinos or their claims of "fairness" and "randomness", any more than believe that that the 'pub fruit machine' is fair.

Wrong help file, my arse. Love the way it's also up to the players who've lost money on this game to have to find some obscure thread on an obscure internet forum themselves (rather than being automatically refunded), in order to find out they can be refunded their money as well, wow, nice touch.

Gambling = rigged, end of. The house always wins.

Scum.

AE mate, one key point that seems to not have been picked up on in that thread at all, it seems to me, is this: that there is clearly evidenced behaviour of a game behaving totally differently for 'free play/demo' mode, as opposed to actual playing for real money mode, even to the extent of clearly evidenced, differing 'commands' to the online RNG resource etc.?

This, to me, is utterly scandalous and very likely liable to mislead would-be players, sampling such a game on free play in order to decide whether or not to play it 'for real'? The (IMO lame, inadequate) "wrong help file" explanation offers nothing to explain this away. In effect, the free play and real play games are totally different games.

I wonder if this is a one-off eh? I'd bet the farm that stuff like this is likely widespread and this could be just the tip of the iceberg?

I think the issue with that side of things is that there are no logs for the free play mode.

You don't get very far at Casinomeister with 'I think that this game does this' or 'I get the feeling this isn't random' and so on.

They work on numbers and maths and proof, and whilst it's pretty much a dead cert that the game behaves differently in free play compared to real play, there are no logs to prove it.

That said, it's probably worth me chucking it into the mix on that thread, since the software has been proven to be adaptive and rigged, so it's not a stretch to conclude that it cheated the free play/real play issue as well.



It is part of the Casinomeister accredited standards that software must behave identically in free and real money mode, so I will mention it on that thread.

TBH I think Betfred are shady anyway, they wriggled out of awarding someone a Jaguar a few months ago who won it in a pontoon promotion they were running.



This is the real issue here of course.

Personally speaking I think not all softwares are bent. There are a few I have complete confidence in, a few that are sort of 'middle ground' and a couple that I think are definitely shady.

The problem with a lot of casino games is it's impossible to prove that they cheat, for example there's a constant and ongoing debate about whether or not online slots are truly random, but unlike card games or roulette games - (where the odds of anything happening are known and fixed, thus it's relatively easy to prove cheating once a certain number of standard deviations from expected results is noted) - slots have such huge variance and are designed to take millions of spins to reach RTP, that it's basically impossible to prove anything.

You totally misunderstand. I'm not talking about anecdotal evidence; see here this excerpt from the very first post of this entire thread:



Thus, given this only possible RNG I/O, it is proven that there must be a difference between free and real money play?

A-ha! Yes, I'd forgotten about that, it's a fair few days since I read the original post to the thread

It definitely warrants having some extra attention drawn to it then, since there's more going on here than just the game cheating.

Heh

Told ya

I always steered clear of the free play modes on casinos as I often suspected they'd play differently, giving me a false sense of confidence that I'd win in real play.

/shrugs

Oh well, that's up to them, I guess. Personally, I'd say this was right up there with the actual vs advertised RTP and would be seeking clarification from the casino.

Now confirmed that real play and free money mode is different.

Heh. Nice.

Is it me, or does it seem that Betfred have now gone awfully quiet in that thread, now that further information and analysis has come to light? It'll be interesting to see what now transpires, particularly as there now appears to already be hard evidence showing that this issue isn't only related to this one game, and yet more people are now getting involved.

My guess, though, is that more or less fuck all will happen, basically. No-one outside of gambling seems to really give a hoot about the welfare of gamblers, most especially fruit machine players - just look at the shit that was raked up during the Fair Play campaign as regards UK fruit machines, then near ubiquitous in almost every pub, and most certainly every arcade in the land (not to mention cafes, chip shops, minicab offices, airports, all manner of public spaces). Despite being banged absolutely and irrefutably to rights, are fruit machines fair now? Has the 'pro' fruit machine player gone the way of the dodo? Oh no, that's right, things are still just as fucking bad as they ever have been. (Btw, of course I'm not saying this as any criticism of the FP Campaign)

You should read the Guardian more often then Cavey, front page news yesterday:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/0 ... NTCMP=SRCH

and page 2:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/dec/2 ... NTCMP=SRCH

Quite an eye opener this thread!

We got a sticker!

Yeah I know, not much, but something.

That's brilliant Kalmar, thanks very much mate.
I've had a quick look through the first article, and will properly read both later today, but one thing that leapt out of the page of the first, was our old friend John Redwood:





What a **** that guy is. I lived out of a bedsit for nearly half of my adult life, even now (from 16 onwards). His words - and sentiment - make me ashamed to have anything whatsoever to do with the Tory Party or its politics. I get awfully annoyed with people like Stu, tarring all Tories with the same brush, but then I read stuff like this, spoken in absolute, unashamed seriousness, and even I think 'fuck me, the bloke (Stu) has a point'. I just simply cannot stand stuff like this.

Hey man, I absolutely was not saying it like that. You know what I mean here.

Official response from Betfred.

It'll be interesting to see what the CM community makes of this..... There are a lot of smart people on those forums (far more so than me ).

Nice white wash from the goverment on the machines in betting shops

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20981962

No doubt the lobbyists went to work saying how many jobs they create by opening shops every 3 meters on the high street.

There's an app available for iThings from a real UK AWP manufacturer for a real £70 jackpot UK AWP, and it plays exactly like the real thing (i.e. totally shit and you can force it).

For free, folks may wish to give it a try. It's quite good fun I think, although I doubt it would be much fun if it was real money that it was destroying.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/alices- ... 03357?mt=8

You get £25 of money to play with and an additional £7.50 every day, although you can buy extra money from the store

Here's the real thing!

Got to the feature about 3 times I think, each time I hit mystery the button press landed me on party over.
All £25 gone in about 10 minutes

You can press the 'PARTY OR OVER' button on a mystery, which is a 'random' award or lose, instead of taking the risk on the mystery itself.

I'll be playing my £7.50 through it per day without collecting anything (fucked if I'm spending real money on pretend money to play it with), to see if it progresses like a real AWP does. The longer you go without collecting/winning anything, the closer it should get to a jackpot until it finally tips over into an invincible board, which is how a real one would behave.

As it is only you that wil be playing it, it should surely give out 78% of what went in, then?

Well it depends what percentage payout they've set this version to, real machines can be set from 70% to 98%, (you can see this using the emulators, because you can get into all the operator menus that the player would never normally have access to), it's only because the operators are stingy-ass fucking robbers that they're generally set to 74-78% out in the wild.

If I were Reflex Gaming I'd have kicked this iThing version out with a payout of 90% or more, to give a kinder experience than a real machine would deliver, as £70 jackpot AWPs are absolutely ruthless on low percentage payouts.

But ultimately Mali yes you're right, I'll only ever be playing the machine myself so I'll only ever achieve its set percentage payout in the long term.

I don't mind that though, I've been happy with fruit machine emulators on that basis for over a decade now! In fact, it's interesting to see how machines behave over an extended period of time and how they respond (or don't respond!) to particular play styles, because of course with real machines you only ever get brief periods of play and the vast majority of its play is from other people.

I've got emulated machines that I've put tens of thousands of pounds through over the years, and because the emulators save the machine state using a RAM file (this would be a battery-backed RAM chip in a real machine), I've been able to see entire play cycles that would be impossible to observe out in the wild.

It hasn't given me another £7.50 to play with

Unless it's every 24 hour period rather than every 'day'.

At this rate I may actually end up buying some play money to have a go with, which would be the saddest and most pointless thing ever.

There's no way I'm going near any of the mobile slots. Part of the reason I switched to Ubuntu is to make it harder for me to gamble.. not about to undo that by gambling on my phone.

It's not a real slot, you can drop £70 on the SUPER PREMIUM POINTS PACKAGE and you'll still never win anything back. It's amusement with no prizes.

They're basically charging for an emulation of a single £70 AWP. (Which I have to say I am finding quite appealing, since FME basically stopped at the £25 era, with a handful of £35 AWPs running in door open mode.)

No, I know that, but I also know there are real slots out there too. Stepping stone and all that.

Ahhh right fair enough

When I had about 18 months completely quit from gambling a few years ago I still ragged the arse out of the emulators as I never felt any crossover between emulation and the real thing, but you must do whatever works for you!

Had a quick play. Won 35 quid fairly early on via the Deal or No Deal bit. Then played on, accepting nothing but a big win, and was offered precious little until it ran out.

Well someone's over £20,000 richer than they were ten minutes ago....

(I was playing Glitz for free money at the time.)

It's only giving me £2.50 in free credits per day.

I'm going to crack soon and buy some money to play with, I'm almost finding it as compelling as the real thing, which is odd.

Same here - I dont know if it will allow these to be 'saved up' in which case I might just not play it but launch it every so often to just grab coins until i get the chance to sit down and play it later.

Like with real fruit machines.. I just don't get it. How do you know what to press?

I think you can stack them up to £12.50 in credits.

I was vaguely interested in this, but CBA to just do it five spins at a time.

Play it on 25p per go and you get more spins!

And yes, you can stack up to £12.50 maximum.

Do you reckon it's sufficiently advanced so as to have separate 25p and 50p pots? I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that it does, meaning that you'd have to play all stakes to get the "full experience" as it were (and, potentially, streak both pots at one sitting )

The real machine doesn't maintain separate pots for the different stakes, and the cashpots aren't free either, which they are on the DOND machine it's cloned from.

A few guys over at Jackpotty got absolutely fucking hammered by it as by all accounts it's a straight reglass of DOND Gold/Banker Rings Twice - but whereas the DONDs have a cashpot on each stake that is free, plus a cross-stake standard streak pot, Alice's Wonderland holds onto the cashpots with absolute ruthlessness, and when they go they're paid for anyway.

It does have separate cashpots for each stake just like the DONDs, but them not being free makes them effectively worthless.

I've just spent £2.99 of real money on £60 of pretend money to play through on an emulated fruit machine I can never win anything on.

Well to be honest that is indeed very belmy.

"Very" doesn't even come close.

I've lost it all

Stupid game.

Amazing scenes....

I pressed spin a couple of times and got "777". then a thing happened. Then it flashed yes/no and I hit yes 4 times in a row, then a no, and I got points.

Let that be a lesson to you, young man

Seriously though, I suspect this sort of thing defines the difference between a "gambler" and a "non-gambler". For me that would be a cue to say "fuck that" and not do it again, i'm guessing for the gamblers in here, that is a cue to try again and beat it next time?

Well I don't think I'll spend any more real money on it, probably just let my free £2.50s mount up and play those through every four or five days.

Emulation of a £70 jackpot AWP is sort of the holy grail in a way, as 'proper' emulation never went past the £25 jackpot era. There were a handful of £35 jackpot AWPs that ran on the original emulators, but only in door open mode which is a ridiculously generous sort of test mode.

£70 jackpot AWPs have never been emulated, so short of playing a real one at the pub, this is the only way to play them.