First Post, SWPs please be gentle :)

[Erdnaseuk]

Hey all

I have been interested in fruit machines and quiz machines for a while. I have another post to make in fruit sections of the forums.
Anyway, after reading replies to threads on here and reading between the lines I think that I have got my knowledge sorted

I want to become a quiz machine pro - I have good general knowledge that I am currently improving. I have noticed within certain games when the SWP is wanting to pay. I would only plan on playing wwtbam, dond and pub quiz.
in a nutshell - If I have excellent general knowledge and get to know the blocker questions on the machine is this enough to secure a win?? From the other posts this seems to be the case It seems also that the GW machine has a better pool of questions

Oh I am currently running an EMU which is running 2006 versions of WWTBAM and pub quiz. Just using these for the obserce questions and to get used to the speed of play

I also made a post a while ago on another forums - heres a link if anyone wants to help out
http://www.gambling.co.uk/forums/genera ... x-swp.html

[csmaddog]

SWP machines are skill based. There aren't (or should not be) any "Blocker" question.. It all remains a question of skill, or in some cases luck, (lucky guesses).
Think about it this way.. WWTBAM. A question of luck and skill. Skill, If you know the answer, and luck as you have a one in four chance of getting it right or 25%
There are 10 questions in each game to win the £20 Jackpot. 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 1,048,576. If you hit a random answer between one and four (or a and d), ten times, your odds of getting the right combination is that of over 1 million, but can still happen. Just incase you dont realise the combinations there are
a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a, or a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,b or a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,c etc etc etc until you get to a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,b,a or a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,b,b etc etc etc all the way up to d,d,d,d,d,d,d,d,d,d...
but think about this.. If you know one of the answers, your odds of getting the jackpot by hitting a random letter dramatically drop to 262,144 different combinations.. and again if you know another, your odds of winning the jackpot are that of 65,536.
Now i know thats sucked the life right out of this.. but couldnt help share the real odds of these sorts of games.. and that what your doing is a great idea and that people who pretty much know jack, should stick to sticking a quid on the lottery lol.. coz their odds of winning are slim lol

[Nil Satis]

I want to become a quiz machine pro - I have good general knowledge that I am currently improving. I have noticed within certain games when the SWP is wanting to pay. I would only plan on playing wwtbam, dond and pub quiz.
in a nutshell - If I have excellent general knowledge and get to know the blocker questions on the machine is this enough to secure a win?? From the other posts this seems to be the case It seems also that the GW machine has a better pool of questions

I'll be as gentle as I can...

While I would applaud your enthusiasm and ambition, and wouldn't ever deter you from enjoying quiz machines as a leisure pursuit, you need to be VERY realistic as to what is achievable.

To clarify a few points. If you aim to become a pro, then I imagine you would define that in terms of a reasonable weekly income. Let's just say £200 clear profit a week. As it's tax free that equates to a job paying maybe £15k gross, so better than the minimum wage certainly but nothing earth-shattering and certainly no use if you live in or near London and most of the South.

To clear that profit a week, you are going to need to travel. You are ideally going to need a car of your own, as so much of what is left that's worth playing is out in the suburbs, and you don't need me to tell you that it costs a lot to run a car. The same applies to using trains instead, and if you want to do this properly you will probably need to stay overnight at times.

The reasons for all this travelling are:

(a) like I say, better quiz machines are often located out in the suburbs and you will often find the ones in city centres significantly harder, for the obvious reason that they are more accessible to the better players

(b) there are simply far fewer quiz machines out there - the ratio of fruit machines to quiz machines must be an absolute minimum of 10:1 and indeed it's probably a lot higher than that when you consider e.g. service stations, which all now have about 30-40 fruit machines but no quiz machines

(c) if you play a quiz machine to the level you will be needing, you will find that most games take a minimum of 3 months to recover to a paying state, and even that only applies to some games and the busier locations - many current games are basically 'killed' for good once the top prize has been taken once or twice. You can't just keep returning to the pubs in your immediate area.

Even factoring in all this, the key problem is that every game (give or take - there is some sharing of question banks but many have unique lists) has a huge number of spoilers, which are the questions that you will never be asked in any other form of quizzing. To take one example, even if you were able to sit down and learn all the winning breeds at Crufts down the years, to the level where you could recall them in a few seconds, you wouldn't have learned more than a tiny percentage of the spoilers on just two or three games.

Finally, two of the three games you mentioned are either all but disappeared (WWTBAM) or are heading that way (Pub Quiz) and the DOND variant that survives will soon revert to only offering a £2 top prize if you do well on it.

So to recap as gently as possible, by all means enjoy playing quiz machines and try to improve your general knowledge as this will enrich your life anyway but it seems extraordinarily unlikely that you will be able to become a quiz machine pro from where you are now.

[Erdnaseuk]

Thanks for the reply.

By a blocker question (terminalogy I seen used somewhere else) I meant i one of those particualy hard questions. So as long as you have a good memory and are a very knowledgable person - these should be beaten

[Erdnaseuk]

Thanks for the replie - it must have been posted as I was replying
nil that was a very informed reply.
I think I will give myself a while with the emulator and if I feel I am doing ok I may venture out and stick some nuggets down a machine! Wow and three months to get back to a paying state?

Not sure if this is relevant but I was planning and taking £3-5 banks rather than going for the JP.

It seems to me the SWP "pros" are already quiz boffins and then get to know a particular game or set of questions.

[Nil Satis]

Your final sentence there is a pretty good summing up. You have to start from a base of very good general knowledge and then there are really two basic approaches - either try to become a generalist who plays lots of games or choose one game and play that and nothing else and hope that:

(a) you get sufficiently good at that game

(b) the game you have chosen has a structure that allows for repeated wins

(c) the game doesn't get removed from all the cabinets (which doesn't have to relate to someone winning too much on it, it is more often due to the game simply not being popular enough with punters)

£3-£5 is the 'Jackpot' on many games now anyway, as you will discover.

The best advice is the classic gambling one - choose an amount of money you can afford to lose and head out with that to play some games in the real world. You will soon get a clearer understanding of exactly what is involved. If at that stage you decide you will still enjoy playing now you realise you won't make a living from it, then carry on. At the very least you will soon learn everything there is to know about Hollyoaks and the Scissor Sisters... ;-)

[Topical2009]

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 from experience that people often think that "I can't do this thing" is the same as "This thing is impossible" (usually a landlord who thinks that punters who win on a game must be cheating, because he's never managed it). When I first saw Eliminator, for instance, I thought it must be literally impossible to win the jackpot when the timer was at full speed, as it would require a level of skill and knowledge that was beyond anyone's ability, but I was 100% wrong about that. If nothing else, you might get to the point where you can win enough to pay for a few pints whenever you go to your local, and there are still a few games which are fun to play whether you win or not.

On the other hand, you might want to bear in mind what they say about poker: "it's a hard way to make an easy living", and the same applies to quiz machining. Behind the nice bit - walking into a pub, effortlessly knocking out a jackpot or two, finishing your drink, and leaving, repeat to infinity - there is a back story of hard graft, tedious travelling, and learning games which are wiped from a machine just as you get to know them. The economics these days are definitely stacked against people who want to do it professionally, even if they have the ability in the first place (though if you have two jobs paying the same £15k a year for the same hours, and one of them involves flipping burgers and mopping floors, while the other one involves seeing a bit of the country, going to pubs and playing quiz machines, I'll choose the second one, please).

In short, it's been a long time since it was a good idea for someone to give up a "proper" job in order to choose quiz machining as a way of life. However, if you're in a position where it won't ruin your life to give it a go, why not? It certainly won't take you long to work out for yourself whether it's a plan with any mileage.

[paragoon]

Good luck. I used to go round the country staying at B&Bs and still turn a profit. Things are a hell of a lot trickier than that now. That was on games with a £20 JP. There were more pubs, there were more machines, technology was less advanced - no smartphones, no wikipedia. The trains were cheaper, petrol was cheaper, half a lager was cheaper...
A JP now of a tenner minus the quid you put in and the drink you bought comes in at more like £7 - and that's if someone's not got there before you. It's not that easy nowadays unfortunately.

[Erdnaseuk]

Thanks for all the replies.
I am currently doing a memory challenge that includes alot of random general knowledge - I was wondering how transferable the skills were to the quiz machines. Sounds like a pain in the ass now a days - shame im wasnt born ten years earlier

Does anybody know how many questions are on these things? Given the storage capcities, and the cheap price of storage - there has to be around 100,000 surely

[Cf]

Thanks for the reply.

By a blocker question (terminalogy I seen used somewhere else) I meant i one of those particualy hard questions. So as long as you have a good memory and are a very knowledgable person - these should be beaten

Not when there's 1000s of them. Some of them can't even be worked out, they're an out and out gamble at the right answer.

The amount of money you'd have to pay to get to a point you've memorised them all would wipe out any profit you might have.

And by that point they'll probably update the question banks.

[BFK]

Not looking good is it??!!!

[cool]

BFK like the video what happened? Punter gets bashed by arcade managers baseball bat!

[BFK]

I'm sorry, I don't follow?

[cool]

the man with no front teef.

[BFK]

Nope, I'm still not getting it!!