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too much roulette can lead to mental Illness. I used to be a croupier and have seen people go mental over roulette. One bloke genuinely believed that the casino was conspiring against him - every time your hand dipped below the table he shouted ' you're pressing a button' Another turned up with a couple of petrol cans and started splashing it about. There are loads of stories I could tell about the things people do to play at casinos. People posting here are already showing signs of being mental. Next time you go to play roulette stop, take a deep breath and smell that unwashed smell around you, look at the gibbering wreck beside you telling you what number to back, look round at all the fcuk ups playing the machines and wake up. If you really have to punt try getting your gambling**from something you can control and improve with. Like poker ! the thing about roulette is if you win you lose and if you lose you lose. If you win that good feeling you got stays in your mind and that will make you play again.
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i am not really say ing anything new here, but I was in the local hills on wed during the day as I was in the post office next door.
Thought I would stick a fiver on a horse, that ended up 2nd to a 33/1 shot. Anyway with my fiver change I decided to try my luck and didn't fancy roulette so decided on the £1 a go fruit machine. I kind of secretly hoped I would cop a nice winner or get on the feature. The fiver disappeared quickly and so did another twenty. Fired in another £20 and got into the feature. (3 thingys in a line took you to a snakes and ladder feature). It seems you can only win a meximum of £35 in the feature with 3 symbols. IF you get 4 symbols its £100 or £150 and 5 symbols means you can win £500. I won £16 from the feature and it kicked me out. I reckon my net loss was about £30 (in less than 5 mins). These things swallow an incredible amount of dough, and they are playing on gambling addicts. I have played puggies since i was a kid, (Arcade on a Saturday its what you did). And when i regularly went to the bookies (rare now - on here mostly / online) I pretty much always stuck some change in the machine, sometimes too much, but the maximum loss was no where near what it could be on these machines. How many normal people can actually afford to play these machines? I earn a decent wage, and my wife even better, but I can't afford to be losing £30 in five minutes very often!!! How many people who CAN afford to play these machines, would play them? assumption is that someone with decent dough must be fairly sensible in the first place? These £500 machines should not be on the high street - they should be in Casinos if anywhere at all. I don't like the idea of nanny state etc either but these things are all about huge profit for bookmakers and I am pretty sure they are the single reason bookmakers now have ridiculous opening hours. I am not blaming the bookmakers for maximising profits, but the govt have made a huge mistake in making these legal. I haven't read this entire thread, and i don't doubt people have said much the same as I. |
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I was reading the Billy Mountain Annual Report for 2007 the other night (an exciting life, I know), and their retail division posted profits of £227M, of which £200M came from the FOBTs.
They on average has 8,200 machines across their estate during the year, and each machine made a net average (after rentals etc) of £466 per week. I know that these machines were only allowed initially because of a loophole, can anyone expand on that? How come you can lose over £100 every 15 seconds, with a maximum payout of £500 every 15 seconds, when this is blantantly against the licensing laws as I know them. What rules do FOBTs come under? |
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Nemo you have answered your own question mate its a loophole? The goverment are also gaining not to bad of these so why should they G A F. They earn tax of your wages and what you have left. if your daft enough go and blow on these crazy games, that are clearly rigged. I learnt early unlike other people I know, If you all stopped playing, they would remove them, and put the old classics back like adders and ladders etc.... I never minded losing a few quid on these as I actually enjoyed playing.
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This was discussed on another forum and you can believe me or not but a person who had worked in this field said exactly what someone said above. To change the percentage they can add extra numbers that cannot hit, say 37, 38, 39 etc, while keeping it at 2.7% if these numbers where available, but they are not and that's how they get around it, it has been discussed in length and although i have only played them a couple of times and of course lost very quickly and never again, I have seen these in Corals with poor payouts, but in my local independent bookies they are incredibly poor payouts and all this random thing is utter rubbish.
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By the way if one of these numbers hit, i.e 38, 39 it goes on to a losing number, hence why they are so tight. I go to my casino about once a month with a friend and we come out many times up, not over time but we do come out up a few times, there is no way this could happen in a shop if you stayed there for a couple of hours.
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Does anyone know exactly what loophole was exploited for these to be allowed? Why don't they come under the same laws as other gaming machines with a max £35 payout?
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Rugbyleaguer - I could not agree more and in my view that is the crux of the matter. In a casino you will win regularly, not overtime but regularly, 35/1 for a 36/1 shot is much better value than the majority of horses that ran today. On these machines the chances of winning regularly are tiny. There has to be a reason for this.
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I think originally the ''loophole'' is/was that they are Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, so in theory that is the difference between them and other slot machine like games.
Although I think that if there are signs displaying percentages on the machines that may contradict that - but I suppose it is similar to the fact that say bookmakers bet a tennis match to 107% or whatever, so that may still be the loophole, maybe not though. |
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There is more than 37 balls in the random selector.A lot more infact.
Heard this via a 3rd party,someone who knows. |
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I often pop into this thread as somebody i know is bang into these machines....an old guy who frequents the high street c@rals & the like.The man loves a bet used to be £20 ew £50 win that kind of thing....He always had money,a window cleaning round kept him stuffy on top of the usual pension.....he now owes loads of people round the town money, £1500 to the provident loan company these machines are taking everything that man has & more......I have tried telling him but to no avail....he even said "I couldnt care if I didnt wake up"
It's all been said before but these machines should be removed & if the thing about the extra numbers is true then that tells you all you need to know about the paracites on the high street....they even bend the rules of a game that you cant win at anyway..... |
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I had a look at the blurb on a machine in Cor@ls tonight, it stated payout of 97.3% (can't remember if it said minimum or average).
I know this sounds very naive, but surely they can't just blatantly lie?? All the stuff about extra numbers is believable, and clever wording can get around this legally, but surely they can't just make the payout percentage up? |
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It would appear over time that the % is true - however, over time tends to be a much shorter time frame than for a normal "casino" operator operating a "normal" wheel.
Ok, I think we can all say that a game which offers a house edge of 3% (approx) will in the long run (let's say 6 months or a year) produce that profit of 3% on "turnover" - this is the important word here - people will go into a betting shop or into a casino and play these machines/tables and here's a likely scenario: You go in with £60 - and you play an average of £20 a spin You like to cover quite a lot of numbers - so that when you win, you tend to win fairly small - and on those odd (well fairly frequent on the FOBTS!) occasions you lose, you will lose big For arguements sake, this is how your day goes: Spin 1: you win £6 2: +£3 3: -£10 4: +£4 5: +£4 6: +£2 So after 6 spins, you have "turned over" £120 and your current balance is sitting at £69 Let's say you hit a bad run in the next 6 spins - you have a couple of £20 wipeouts - but the other four spins win you a combined £18. So now after 12 spins - you have stakes £240, and have a balance of £47. To cut this story short, you play for another 40 spins, and lose the lot on your 40th spin - so now you've played a total of 52 spins @ £20 a spin Turnover is £1040 and you've lost £60 - this equates to 6% (ok, you've been "unlucky") - but those 52 spins (assuming you've been using the repeat bet button (which most people do - and is another major danger factor for addiction)) have probably only taken you about 12-15 mins to play - you walk out disgusted that you've lost £60 in 15 mins - and scream that the machines are fixed!!! I for one do agree that the machines are fixed - and going back to long runs and short runs, what my point was (which kind of got mixed up with the example I tried to illustrate above) is that my limited knowledge of bookmakers machines are that they regular show a steady profit each and every week - I once spoke to a manager of a "high-turnover-in-FOBS" shop and he said that if they ever did have a losing week, that the next week was always a guaranteed winner because the machines would get the money back?? - I don't know whether this was inside knowledge or just heresay - but compared to a proper casino, as much as I believe that over a 6 month period a casino will look at the turnover on their roultte tables, and their profit margin will be pretty close to the 2.7% expected - however, I'd be willing to bet that they'd have more ups and downs than a FOBT. People suggest that these are outside the "law" and should be more tightly controlled - but where do we go - will a letter to the gambling commision achieve anything? Will a letter to Jacqui smith achieve anything?? I know for a fact that these machines are highly addictive and can and have ruined lives - although people can undoubtedly become just as addicted to betting on horses or dogs or football - it is not the same - for one, you tend to be betting with "real money" - not a figure on a screen - you supposedly have to go the effort of "reading the form" - then you have to rush up to the counter - etc,etc, etc, you have to write out a separate slip each time - you can't just say "rrepeat my last bet please" - So who do we complain to? are the govt worried that if bookies lost FOBTS that shops would close, opening hours would diminish and in turn, unemployment would rise?? There's also the lost "tax revenue" to consider. |
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you cant ban fobts if you did where would people write their drivel then?
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Spin 1: you win £6
2: +£3 3: -£10 4: +£4 5: +£4 6: +£2 this would probably be the worst bet in history to have these results. and if you only have 60 to lose. then you dont bet 20 a spin |
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http://www.fairandopengambling.net/
Should be of interest to anyone reading this thread. Note that the guy behind the campaign invented Three Card Poker, is a very well respected casino guy, and says nothing about them being fixed, simply because they aren't. As the website details, they don't need to be. |
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I heard this week they use 500 numbers,and alternate the quota of the different 37 combinations
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At risk of repeating;
Only roulette claims to run at 97%; the value of the actual game. All the other nonsense on the machines runs at lower. They generally run at 2-3% profit with 90odd% of it from roulette. My thoughts: In five years, i'm only aware of a skew of -2000 to +2500 to any one player in any one day. I feel that a random lucky/unlucky streak should occasionally bust these apparent limits. Perhaps someone could do the maths. Since the £500 win per game limit was introduced i've never seen a 'double jackpot'. Often, a player can be playing one machine whilst the others stand idle and seemingly 'turning over' with little profit or loss. Someone comes in and loses a few quid more quickly than the first player who's profit grows by roughly the amount the second player has lost. Second player leaves. First player goes back to 'turning over'. If a player has 'done' a large amount; £2k let's say, the machine WILL pay a large profit reward within about 3 days. None of these things detract from the 'crack-cocaine of gambling' concept. Anyone spending more than a few minutes 'trying their luck' for a bit of cheap [expensive!]entertainment needs to evaluate their entire relationship with gambling. They do cost people marriages. I no longer play them and am financially and mentally better off as a direct result! |
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I was standing with a chap in Corals only yesterday. He was banging away covering loads of numbers with the max £100 stake. During play he was moaning about how 'fixed' the machines were and got quite annoyed when I didn't agree with him.
Just in the time I was watching him he turned over 116 spins @ £100 each before he ran out of money. At this point he got quite aggressive towards me saying that the fact he'd just done £300 in about an hour proved how fixed it was. I didn't have the heart (or bravery) to point out that with his total stakes of £11,600 his loss of £300 was ......... 2.586%!!!! |
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ttt
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went in to the billy mountain at the end of my road cos i wanted to watch a race today
amber brook came to win the race then emptied for nothing, so horse bet down the drain throw 60 quid into the FOBT do 35 quid on the reel king slotto with only one 'bonus' for a tenner put a 25 quid spin on roulette, goes no where throw last 20 quid till pay day into the roulette, all on 1st 12, number 5 comes in play it a bit more winning average of quid per spin, get back to 80 quid, shud ave quit but carried on .... back down to 64 quid, very annoyed now so throw the lot on in one spin, end result £91.80 in conclusion today i dont think these machines are fixed |
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5 is a "trigger" number...... back 1,2,3,4,5,6 after you see it ;-)
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"throw last 20 quid till pay day into the roulette"
That sums these machines up |
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When will people wake up and realize that you CANNOT play
roulette in a betting shop. However, you can play an ELECTRONIC game that may look like roulette. This ELECTRONIC game looks like roulette, but is NOT roulette. Electronic games are CONTROLLED by COMPUTERS that are controlled by people. The computers KNOW your selection(s) BEFORE they pick THEIR winning number. The name FIXED ODDS betting terminal might be a clue !! They are FIXED. |
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There is I believe 500 numbers in the selection.
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little des my machines turned over just over a million in 12 months, turned over not money in, and the profit was £26740 or 2.67% pretty much exactly the same as the casino would expect to make.
They are not fixed they are fixed to pay out marginally less than the true odds of the outcome you are betting or playing on. It really is that simple. |
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Are you really saying that a machine would make less than a £100 a day?
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I only have 2 and the more they take the more they make, the busy shops in town centres obviously make more, cause they are being played a lot more.
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maineroad
Thanks for your reply. .................They are not fixed they are fixed to pay out marginally less than the true odds of the outcome you ................ By the above comment, I would understand that they COULD be set for a better percentage for the operater. Naturally none of the Big 4/5 would take advantage of this facility and so risk their whiter than white reputations by **ing Joe Public. |
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LittleDes I dont see the need for the big 4 to**em they are that busy on em that they will win fortunes regardless, but i will admit that they could be fixed, maybe the ones they wheel out in private members clubs are hookey.
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maineroad
If the Pope had a thousand FOBTs, I think even he might be tempted to squiggle the odd 0.1% or 0.2% per machine. By the way, I once asked a Director of one of the Big 4 what the % was on a FOBT and he replyed that " I'm not really sure". I took this to mean - "I know it's more than 2.73%, but I'm not telling you" |
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Des I have the same fobts as the ones is Lad crokes and if theirs are twisted and mine arnt then I suppose its just another nail in the small Independant bookmakers coffin.
Tell you what I will do I will go out and put 20p on every number except 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 and see what happens. Here goes 1st spin 0 |
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next spin 21
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now 22 now 4 now 9 now 10 now 13 now someones come in the shop so gonna take my small profit all be it my own money
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I thought the minimum bet on a number on a laddies FOBT was 25p.......
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I think it's fixed personally but a mate doesn't think it is.
Someone in a local shop kept going big on about 5 splits, he handed over a wad of notes to the counter and they automatically filled it up, he kept running out of the shop after about 10 minutes (i presume to the bank) and coming back in with another wad and repeating himself, thing is he always wanted the same machine, hence him running out and to the bank, and always looked cautious when coming back in going back to the same machine, don't know how much he lost. Another guy as someone has previously said just backs 2 numbers and the split. I always liked to back the same colour after a run of 4/5 of the same colour as it does seem to come up quite alot as people do chase thinking it must be black after a run of 4 reds. Another thing i notice is the number of repeats within the last 10 spins, as numbers do come out twice in a row or twice within four spins an awful lot, especially when you have hit repeat bet and not covered that number. What do people think about machines having a certain spell of numbers, in my local Koral, i find on machines that none of my numbers come up or they do alot (picking the same 10 numbers), i once hit 10 out of 12 numbers, and it does seem often that they come up on the machines quite often, while all the numbers i don't like seem to come up in a period |
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bertiesmalls 04 Dec 16:41
I thought the minimum bet on a number on a laddies FOBT was 25p....... Well they do do the 20p chip version now aswell in sadcrookes as well as the the 25p chip version but you have to place a minimum of a pounds worth of *****if backing numbers, splits etc. |
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I wonder just how many people are going to do the families Christmas money on these things.
I know I won't be. These things bring misery to so many..... |
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anyone who has read all the posts on this thread needs mental help.
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Plenty of food for thought on here. I have played these FOBT as is the common name, for about the last 3 years solid. Firstly on the laddies cash quest, on hills and occasionally the global draw found in most corals. Now I have had really big wins consistantly from all bookies except the cash quest. Im not saying this to look good or bad, but my point is that iv always done the same numbers(£5 on 1,9,12,15,19,25,27,29 £10 on 30,33.
I found that if i went into the shop and straight away did the above bets i would invariably lose 1st spin, resulting in me feeding the machine. I would generally go into the shop with around £500 and usually would get at least a couple of numbers so would leave happy. However, the last 3 months i have noticed a clear change in the machines, with numerous repeat outcomes, and in my opinion, blatent **ing by the system... Ill explain, the above numbers covered id lost around £400, the last numbers being 28, 31, and 34, i lowered my stakes to £2 from £5 and £5 from £10. The next sequence was 30, 1, 33, and 30. Anyway my point is they no how much your betting, how much has been put in ALL machines in total nationwide, and were all fools for going on them. Any thoughts |