Did anyone here used to travel around playing

In my deep and distant past I used to play quiz machines for a living and at the same time I would do a bit of card counting to supplement my income. I probably played about 1000 hours in total and averaged about 15 quid an hour. I never had any heat at all, although once I had to stop playing as the only other guy at the table was a card counter too. £45 an hour sounds feasible, but he will have to be betting noticeably big to achieve that.

Do you remember your average bet size to achieve the £15 an hour Bayes? Around £25 I'd imagine if you were dealt 100 hands per hour.
I used to cc a bit in days gone by but things became far too difficult for my liking (and for my hourly rate)

I'd play two hands of £5 minimum, probably £100 maximum (although I would more like do something like one £50 and one £100 maximum to make it more random looking). So yeah, about £25 per hand if you define it as hand dealt.

Did you always work alone Bayes?
I used to know a couple of teams but they spent a hell of a lot of time travelling all over the shop, a job for the single man and one who wants to remain single.

Yeah, on my own. The quiz machines were better though. I would earn 300 quid a week cash and then go and blow it at the racecourse!

You frequented a fair few pubs back in the day then Bayes. I take it the quiz machines were in the early 90's.

how did u win on quiz machines????? always thought when u was about to win decent cash they wud ask a total random question

I don't know about modern machines but an excellent memory and/or recording equipment and trivial pursuit could give you an edge over twenty years ago.

Bayes, I used to do that too. Not quite a living, but it provided quite a lot of drinking money in my undergraduate days.

The old quiz machines - from the 80s/90s - used a surprisingly small memory bank of questions. Somewhere between 1000 and 3000, I believe. They were therefore quite learnable.
The next generation, though, used a similar-sized bank for most of the questions, but would then draw from a further bank when it needed to trip up the player. Even if you learned the main set of questions, you could never see the mainly hidden set often enough to be able to learn them.

Used to do this with the old Give Us A Break machines. Went round pubs on my moped. Some nights made £150 in pound coins. Got barred from quite a few pubs in my area!

I'm surprised to hear that 80/90's quiz machines were beatable to that extent, were you guys honestly ahead over time?

There's a guy that's often in my local playing the fruit machines, often clatters out a jackpot, says he's a professional, I usually just nod and grin :)

Trev, back in the day you could buy second hand machines that were still in use for a reasonable amount  and memorise the answers in the comfort of your own home.

Early quiz machines didn't have that many questions and it was quite possible to remember all the anwsers. There were also the strike it lucky machines which showed you the board for a fraction of a second. That could be recorded and you then knew the correct route to take.

the old quizmaster machines were simple to learn as they were the first and in every pub, it was rumoured they had 10,000 questions but i guessed it was less than that

they held £40 when full in 10p 20p 50p and £1 coins, after a few months a full machine was rare


you could set the high score which made it harder for anywon else to win the jackpot and gave an indicator
if anywon else had been about.. the highscore would become the new jackpot target and would reduce by 50 points for each pound played in the machine

these were followed by blockbusters machines which gave a run and then took 4 correct answers to reveal a prize from £1 to !10 after you had qualified

giveusabreak came shortly after


there were also some american machines doing the rounds, where the sports questions were maining boxing and baseball and gridiron, these had sections on acid jazz (lol) and sex !!!... these machines were points based and you could gamble as many of your points as you wished, and you were betting them all at evens
with the prizes often taking millions of points it was usually best to go all in all the time,

No operational card counters around then

maybe they were taken into a back room and had their hands broken

I was at a London casino with a blackjack hall of famer last year. He was betting small chips for fun. When another member of our group started betting large amounts, they closed the table.

Most of the best blackjack players will move to something more profitable / sustainable. It sounds like the same applies to the best quiz machine players!

Trevh There's a guy that's often in my local playing the fruit machines, often clatters out a jackpot, says he's a professional, I usually just nod and grin :)

The earlier quiz machines were very beatable. I remember cleaning out all the "Give us a Break" machines. They had a very limited database of questions. As for fruit machines not sure nowadays but there were plenty of machines that had bugs on them that meant you could clean them out within 45mins to an hour if you played them in a specific way. One particular scam was on a brand of fruit machines called "Ace" in the early 90's - there about 7 or 8 machines that had the bug. I could make 60-70 quid in a hour. The bug lasted less than 2 months but made almost 20k in that period. I met several "pros" on my travels looking for these machines that knew the bug too. Another bug was on a machine called "Monte Carlo or Bust" which lasted longer but there were fewer machines.

I think it would be pretty naive to think that there aren't any bugs nowadays but I'm not in that circle anymore to know for sure.

All the games makers of bandits and quiz machines give you no chance now, there a rip off...back in the 90s quiz games were fair and a joy to play, Coronation Street, Monopoly, Every Second Counts were all easy if you had a decent knowledge of films/music.

With the Quizmaster the quicker you answered the more points you got.
one guy said I must know the sequence of the answers ie A B or C as
no one could read the questions that fast.

indeed sica but as you will know you usually recognised the question after a few words and knew the answer you were looking for..so casual players would still be reading the question when the next question would pop up

it was almost sad getting one wrong once you had the jackpot, but pointless increasing your own future workload

I remember being told back in the 90's a system re the fruit machines. Basically you had to "confuse" them into the "loop".

This meant that when for example you had £2 and the dice was on 12 and you have a high/low option for £3 you would take the money rather than go low. The machine expects you to go lower, gets confused as it isn't paying out it's set percentage and then after a short while gets confused and goes "loop crazy".

Never tried it and have no idea whether there was any truth in it or just so old myth that is rolled out and a load of old garbage. Curious if anyone else has heard of this and knows any more.

By the way Trev that man in your local is probably going round saying to everyone...

"there's this bloke who claims that he just watches football all day and bets on correct scores, makes loads of money and says he's a professional, I usually just nod and grin"

I know what you're saying U.A, but the difference is I would never dream of trying to win against a machine that's been designed, developed and built to make money. I just struggle to believe that fruit machines are beatable long term. I thought all the books explaining how to beat them were probably published by the manufacturers to drum up business, in a similar way to how Norton and AVG probably employ people to create viruses.

If the old quiz machines were beatable, and I can see that does sound possible, but why did they survive so long? If I was running it at a monthly loss I would have got rid of it pretty damn quick.  :)

presumably the losses to the 2 or 3% who made money from them were more than offset by the majority of not very bright and quite drunk people that played

when the quiz machine was empty you couldnt win !

at the start they were filled to £40 which was 4 jackpots, but soon the situation became that they were milked when there was £10 to pay out, and sometimes even before that

it was 20 p a go and when empty 10p would go to jackpot and 10p to machine so it would take £20 to
reset the jackpot to £10// approx anyway

the machines were popular but i guess people seeing them emptied put them off playing


so the themed ones came out, that is , themed to tv programmes

Ah that also reminded me of the other trick of trying to look through the bits of the fruit machine to see whether it looked full of coins or empty. Ah those were the days.

Trev, i'm only messing with you, he probably is some half drunk who lives in some kind of dreamland but it did make me think whether there was some kind of gambling pecking order, something like:

Everyday non-gamblers look down on Sports bettors
Sports bettors look down virtual game bettors
Virtual game bettors look down at fruit machine bettors
And then I suppose right at the bottom are the investment bankers.

Cathy Hulbert made six figures a year from slot machines, employing a team of geriatrics so as not to arouse suspicion. They we're playing for a progressive jackpot when the size of the jackpot got large enough to create a positive expectancy.

All so called 'unbeatable games' can be beaten under certain circumstances where the way things are supposed to work is not the same as how it actually works.

"You can't have a positive expectancy in roulette" for instance, is only true if the way the game is supposed to work is also how it actually works. It assumes that the spin of the wheel and the ball lead to a random outcome ,which it doesn't, (although that can't be measured by humans without aid of computers as far as I know). It also doesn't acknowledge the possibility of mechanical defects such as a biased wheel.

Does anyone remember the "find the lady" machines. There were 4 cards, and they would flash "randomly" you had to select which one was the last to be lit. The flashes would get faster and more subtle as the prize rose, and if you got to the prizes, you could collect if you didn't know the next answer. For some reason I was better than anyone locally at this, and took the top prize out whenever I came across one. They didn't last long though.

there was a brief spell when domino machines were in the pubs, rather like the find the lady
they didnt last long

I tried to make a list of the quiz machines I played seriously but I struggled to remember a few. I played professionally from about 85 - 88 and then again 92-93. Firstly, I played..

Quizmaster
Give Us A Break 1 & 2
Suit Pursuit 1 & 2
Numbers Game

and then from 92

Treasure Quest
Crossword
Question Of Sport

There was another Maygay machine along the lines of Crossword but I can't for the life of me remember the name. Anyone?

In the early days I would travel up from Swindon to London to play the Quizmaster's. I think the most competitive machine at the time was the Punch and Judy in Covent Garden and I would go there once a week. Eventually, though I couldn't compete there.

There was another SWP machine that was very lucrative for me, called Quintoon. I think it was around in '93. It wasn't a quiz machine but was a card game where you could win a small prize fairly easily. The design fault was that you could then gamble the small prize up to £20 based on a memory based skill game. My brother and I, armed with pen and paper, managed to "memorise" enough of this stage to empty a machine in half an hour or so. I had a decent network of fellow pros that would locate the right machines for me but they still didn't last very long.

Topically there was a game featuring ballons whose
name i cant recall.

I've decided to have a two week trip playing blackjack again, it's been a long time, after Cheltenham. A change is as good as a rest, they say.

For non 'Advantage Players' there are junkets coming up
later this month. See casinota dot com for details.

I thought it was in June Al?

I'll check the website though

No. Either just before Easter, or after the Easter rush. It all depends on the
air fares and hotel availability. Then it could be every week after that!

Thanks Al, it's strange because last night I was browsing through junkets and looked at casinota.co.uk where their next junket is June hence me thinking, originally, it was the same website.
Are you an active blackjack player or a promoter or do you have anything to do with modern day blackjack?

Buzzer, Casinota dot com is a new site to replace the original dot co uk - it's my site!

No idea how old that June junket is
The mid April to Malta looks reasonable.

Do the casinos not offer the same comps direct to the players?

Buzzer, I had to go out, hence the slow reply.

The Dublin deal is exclusive to us. However, you can get the same
deal with Malta, but if you turn up on your own then you might
get charged for the local transfers.

Other casinos will be added to our junket list shortly, hopefully
with free, or reduced rate golf included.

You will not find any casinos giving the amount of comps that we
are able to secure for low-to-medium rated players.

Ok, thanks Al