Fruit Machine Chat

I used to love the endgame on Every Second Counts, even before I started making money on it.

No, that's pretty clear, thanks. And do I remember correctly that there's always at least one Pointless answer per round? Presumably when it doesn't want you to win, the only way to force it is to get that one Pointless answer for every question. I showed a non-machine playing friend of mine how Eli...

Are the answers in Pointless dynamic (is that the right technical term?), or does the same answer always produce the same result in any given round? I haven't played enough to know, but I would certainly be quite pissed off if, say, an answer was Pointless first time it was chosen, but not the next ...

You're right about people being interested in your list - I thought I was quite meticulous in my record-keeping, but this sounds at a different level! (While I was having a clear out earlier this year, I found a random list of some of the London machines I was playing regularly in 1993; what really ...

Maybe he's spending 18 hours a day learning Pop Quiz, and doesn't have time to post here.

Pub Quiz returns, presumably with 30,000 new questions, lots of them asking which of these extraordinarily obscure films was made first...

How's York these days? Not been for a while, but if that's no longer in double figures for Paragons, things really have got bad.

We all know someone who's confidently predicted the end of machining as we know it (actually, now I come to think of it, I am that man, or was, in 1989...1992...1995...etc). I think the big difference between 1989 and now is the state of the pub trade: I bet we all know dozens (hundreds?) of pubs wh...

Sadly Wetherspoons pubs are no longer guaranteed to be home to at least one - if not two or three - quiz machines, of course, but for people who've been around since the early days, this might bring back memories of literally going on the road. It's been a very long time since I saw a machine on the...

Take that, so called quiz experts. You whine about how difficult it is to make money on machines these days, and it turns out all you needed to do was take your phone out of your pocket. No wonder you're not rinsing jackpots at will like these guys in Portsmouth, who definitely exist.

Nil Satis is not wrong in the very practical points he makes, unfortunately. I can't add anything optimistic to that summary. However, don't let that make you feel utterly despondent. To look on the bright side, who knows what game you might find yourself having a particular affinity for? I know fro...

A little bit of good news when there isn't much of it about. Presumably the people playing it have no chance of winning the jackpot whether it's £1 or £10, so it must be that they just like playing the game for its own sake, despite having no realistic chance of winning. If all games were like that,...

As I commented last time the article came up in this forum, I knew Gerry back in the dim and distant when it was written; I don't think I've seen him in the flesh since that time, so no idea if he stuck with quizzing (though in 25 years I've only once randomly bumped into another proper player when ...

Quiet round this part of the internet, isn't it? Anyway, this may be old news to everyone else, but I haven't been in a bookies since Desert Orchid was winning races, so my eye was caught by this picture from yesterday's Guardian, apparently revealing where all those vanished cabinets have washed up...

Interesting. What would be really useful, of course, is knowing how the number of machines in circulation has grown or shrunk. In the past, I've always put a positive spin on things i.e. every time a pub which has always had a machine loses it, another pub somewhere else (which maybe never even had ...