Be Excellent To Each Other

There’s a lot of chat in matched betting circles about mug betting and whether it’s worthwhile, but you’d need to take poor matches (where the back and lay odds are far apart) and it can eat into your profits. There’a no real evidence it works so I’ve tended not to.

Honestly once I lose Bet365 I’m probably done as I make so much money from that account. Although a lot of bookies are partner friendly so I’ll pprobably just sign Sal up to them all and start again.

I just mean if you're making £200 a week, place a couple of £1 bets on 5-1 bets, don't worry about matching them. Take the 1% hit and occasionally some of them Will win any way.

It’s not about the odds at the bookie. It’s about how close the back and lay odds are. Plus putting £1 bets on after I’ve been putting £100 bets on would be so weird and probably futile.

Saw this on eBay earlier and thought I'd mention it in case it was of interest to someone here - Jet Set Radio machine. Pachislot rather than traditional fruit machine, but it does look rather nice and £200 seems a good price. Not that I have the money, the room or a mean to collect it, but still.

Think I’m jacking matched betting in. Don’t have time for casino and with sports I’m restricted on most of my best accounts. Don’t have the time or energy and would like to use the remaining £2.5k I have left.

It served a purpose and I made £5.5k from nothing when times were tough, so I’ll always be thankful for that! If I have time in the future I may do it all again in Sal’s name, but for now I think that’s me done.

A 'Pub Fruit AWP' online slot with a 1000x stake jackpot, what could possibly go wrong?

I skipped along through the video just to watch the balance go up and down, but even at 20p, it looked like you got a fair bit of playtime for your money. The base game looked deathly dull though.

The base game is basically just the 'feature entry' trail (even though the game has the standard style 1-8 number entry that is fed by the base game), you just totally ignore it and concentrate on the feature board. Towards the end of the video I do designate the 'base game' as essentially being non-existent, and the focus being on the DOND game/BIG MONEY delineation up top, which is basically where the entire game is.

Certainly it's not like proper AWPs whereby the reels are an integral part of the game in terms of getting wins and being connected to the feature board, note that not a single one of the features actually references the base game reels in any way, i.e. Super Hold or Step To Nearest Win or Stepper features or suchlike.

It was a fun game to play though, far more so than normal online slots.

Its definitely an odd one - there was a Deal or No Deal like it a while ago and actually there are now two more - another DOND with the 3 hi low reels in the middle and a Top Cat game that has a RollerCoaster look to it

From what I've seen on them they basically pre set what you can get to - so you have a board - the best it will offer you is X times stake and as soon as you have the chance to get above that that you will get the cash out square - however sometimes the cash out squares give you the big prizes

Here's a bit of a dodgy one!

Online casino reduces payouts for a load of games and decides not to tell their players about it.

What's the TLDW version?

A major UK facing online casino increased its house edge by 50% and decided not to tell their players about it. So you log in one day and you're getting 96% RTP, log in the next day, load up the exact same game, no visible differences whatsoever, but behind the scenes they've changed the maths model to a 94% RTP version.

Very shady.

Buggy new online slot. Quite unacceptable IMO.

This chap was playing £10 spins (!) when it crapped out on him.

£2200 from a 40p spin. Quite nice.

Asshats.

How long were you logged in? (I only skimmed through bits of the video). On my bad sessions, I could easily spend 12 hours logged in to one site. Not sure how I'd feel about being kicked out halfway through - I'd have probably just gone elsewhere for a bit.

I was logged in for about 12 hours, but I wasn't actually playing for the vast majority of that, I was just 'logged in' the same way you could be logged into BEEX all day.

Anyway by all accounts it's total bullshit and there's no actual requirement for them to do what they did, it's just some crap that they decided to pull on me.

Docs still not verified, withdrawal still reversible. Quite a few folks saying over at Casinomeister and in comments on the video that this is deliberate tactics by the casino to try and get me to cancel the withdrawal and gamble it all back. A few people have said they've done that in the past, so clearly it's a dirty ruse that does sometimes pay off for the casino.

It's not going to work though, I will be camping this one out and walking away with my £2339.

So - new laws arrive this week lowering the maximum bet on a roulette FOBT from £100 a spin to £2 a spin
What does the industry do ?
Two firms have a 'new' game that has the numbers 1 to 36 and allows a £100 bet ....

(They have both 'withdrawn' them now but you do wonder if they think the rules are just there to be bent)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47792709

£142 profit in about 5 minutes.

Not a bad result.

What’s your long-term graph like?

I'll never recover my lifetime losses because of the decade I spent as a fruit machine addict.

However, since I got a clue on fruit machines in about 2001, I've definitely made a decent profit overall. I'm also a fairly canny online player in the main and did well out of bonus hunting a few years ago. (Before the casinos really clamped down on EV+ bonuses.)

On top of that, I had a seriously good run on £70 jackpot fruit machines when we got a load of old UK machines over here that were taken offsite in the UK 'cause they were getting hammered so much. Fortunately for me a mate is a player across and he cheerfully fed me all the play methods for the £70 machines and I made out like a bandit. I remember Mrs Hearthly chiding me to take all the cash to the bank as there was just so much money sat on a shelf in the kitchen.

Plus once in a while I just get flat out lucky, like the £2350 I won on an online slot a couple of months ago playing 40p spins.

I kept a meticulous graph for well over a year back in 2001/2002, to make sure I wasn't deluding myself, and I did record a genuine sustained profit.

Do you still experience pangs of addiction when playing now? Or is it easy for you to drag yourself away from it these days? It's kinda nice to see someone actually make a bit of money from it all as so many others, myself very much included, just lose and lose. Thanks to Gamstop, I pretty much can't gamble anywhere online now and the bookies have a number you can phone to ban yourself from multiple shops in the area. Plus I got myself excluded from the two local arcades as well. So if I want to gamble now, I'd have to travel out of town and that's enough of a deterrent to any spur of the moment urges I get. Only 83 days without gambling so far, but steady progress.

"Only" 83? That's excellent going!

Keep it up, man.

To echo Grim..., that’s an excellent achievement. Eep being fantastic.

The old addict me is still in there somewhere, I like to keep that wanker caged up and poke him with a stick. He doesn't get to gamble the way he wants to anymore.



Keep it up fella, abstinence is definitely the best approach most of the time IMO, I wouldn't recommend my 'controlled former junkie' approach to other people.....

I remember back in my hardcore fruit machine addict days when they pretty much cost me everything, 'quitting' time and time again, and despite the carnage they were wreaking with my life and often those around me as well, I generally did well to manage a week. 83 days is a fine achievement, stick with it

I've tried controlled gambling before, but with me, it very quickly progresses to uncontrolled, so I just have to steer clear.

At the moment, with being busy with work and the website swallowing up my spare time too, the time that's left over is at a premium, so the thought of wasting hours of it gambling is a good incentive for me not to do it. That and I should be debt-free in around 2.5 years, all being well (thanks to Stepchange.. pretty much saved my life going with them)

Still got some way to go, but thank you, and Grim and Mimi for the positive comments

The last 'true skill' fruit machines ever released. Players loved them but the blasted remains that were left for everyone else helped to put the final nails in the AWP's coffin as a mainstream pub entertainment proposition.

One of the finest fruit machines ever made, with a seriously tricky true skill jackpot feature.

Copies of my FME collection are available on request, I've just sent one over to Cavey complete with a full video tutorial.

Completely agree - but it had a lot of skill features as well , and there were setups to wedge for the Stop'n'Step jackpot or let it timeout (at work so cant watch the video just now so I don't know if you've covered those)

Damn, I'd forgotten all about Big Bucks - that was my favourite machine for a good while.

That series of machines released by JPM all in the vogue cabinet were all pretty great

Indiana Jones (+ untouchables clone)
Money Talks
Big 50
Big Banker
Big Bucks
Casino Crazy
Snakes & Ladders
Monopoly 60
Bonanza
and of course Rollercoaster (plus its fireworks clone that i've forgotten the name of)

This was a dangerous time for machines , as if you knew how to play them (and knew about numbering) your exposure to a loss was still there but was quite limited - you could slowly get them back down to 'level' after they had took in some money

I didn't cover everything (and the video was still nearly 50 minutes long!), but Wild Nudges jackpots are in there, along with the hidden features, Stop N Step, and how you can get various things set up in particular ways.

Remember this is from back in my hardcore addicts days so I didn't play it 'properly' and I didn't know about numbering at the time either, so it was kind of what I worked out for myself to a large extent, and probably a long way off perfect too.

So much going on in a single machine, fantastic stuff.

If any of you want to give this fruit machine emulation lark a go yourselves, but don't know where to start.

New version of the emulator released, exciting stuff for FME nerds!

Fucking awful cropping there the actual image I used wasn't cropped off at the sides like a bastard.

Awesome when this happens, a 'doable' ROM revision of a machine was uncovered, CUE TRUE SKILL SHENANIGANS.

Something very good happened to a friend of mine.

Crikey. Is he dead yet? I would have succumbed to too much celebratory hedonism by this point.

He's absolutely over the moon, I've told him to GAMSTOP himself to the hilt (which he's agreed to do), he's already installed GAMBAN on his PC and self-excluded from the casino.

The idea is that he'll never gamble online again, that's a huge amount of money to him, genuinely life changing.

Any one I've heard of?

Amazing result I just hope he doesn't lose it all

Life offers you lots of chances to start afresh I just hope he takes it.

Yes you'd know him from the fruit machine emulation scene

He's determined to keep it all out of online casinos, and put it to good use for his family.

It's a proper once in a lifetime hit, people over at Casinomeister have been lumping away at that slot for weeks and never even managed to get a single wildline in that feature, let alone what he hit there, and on a crazy big bet for such an incredibly volatile slot at that.

What was the total? I watched bits of the video to try to find out but it kept switching to him driving along

My mate did this, the lucky bugger.

Your mate must have good eyesight.

I fixed it

The entire win sequence is between just after 10 minutes and runs to 12m30s.

Well he will know me then. Tell him I said congrats.

I've not stayed in touch with anyone really from FME. It wasn't really a good time in my life. Sometimes I wonder, but tbh it's better I don't go there. Like many things it's addictive. Far more addictive than real gambling or any drug for me. I had an easier time distancing myself from drugs than I did walking from that scene. Good old autie obsessions, eh?

So yeah abstinence for me. Best way really.

£27k

A cheerful and upbeat tale of how much fun addiction is.

No, wait, the other one.