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