25 years on

[Properpro]

Of course there is the occasional money making gem every now and then now but rarely.......

Too true. The main difference I've noticed over the years has to be inflation. Any given amount of money was obviously worth more in the Eighties than now, and only rarely can the total income from playing machines be dramatically increased, however it could be argued that a bag of sand is still a bag of sand.

[QuizMaster]

I agree it's harder for the casual semi-pros to make as much money as they used to.

[cool]

totally agree with QM its only the truly addicted (or vocation) that can really succeed today whilst in the old days people would make a tidy sum then would take it easy for a while.Myself ,QM,Proper Pro I presume are driven not just through making money but through a neccessity to play the machines to get us through the day,being our drug of choice.People that are not so dedicated or have such an all consuming need to play them , play part time.Others,were just not good enough to survive over time.

[Istenem]

i disagree. you could term me a semi-pro so here is that rationale: i do take SWP relatively seriously and i can rely on it for pocket money (food, drink, gadgets, nights at the theatre, football season ticket etc.) but it doesn't and will never pay the mortgage so i need a mainstream job to maintain a quality of life. it is no secret that i am more accomplished at the non-Q&A games but i do have a level of proficiency to get by.

for me, the last couple of years have been more productive than previously; in part due to five or six games which have been pottable. (two of which repeat-pottable) and also contacts i have made through fruitchat who have twice tipped me off to unobvious ruses.

so while i am not and couldn't be a full-time SWP player, when i do set aside time to play parlour games, i now do so with an unashamed financial motive.

[quizard]

It is correct about inflation. £1000 per week which some people were making in say 1987 would be over £2k now. If QM is making £2K or even £1k a week now good luck to him.

I wouldn't say playing the games is any sort of drug. Without the money it would be downright boring. It is really just the making money easily part of it that gives a buzz.

[cool]

I would think that making money in a way that few can gives us an extra buzz and that its entirely down to you.
I cannot for example see the excitement in betting where the outcome is taken out of your hands .

[Nil Satis]

I cannot for example see the excitement in betting where the outcome is taken out of your hands .

An interesting point. I always try to explain to people that what I do is not gambling - you can have bad machines and bad days when you win very little but it's not gambling in the sense that I am risking a major stake each time.

The risk element for me would be whether I could stop doing a 'real' job permanently and live solely off my winnings from quiz machines. I'd say I've only really been playing them seriously for about 6-7 years and there have been two occasions during that time when an opportunity occurred where this might have been a tricky choice, but in both cases this was related to a single game and individual games can disappear as quickly as they appear.

At the moment through personal circumstances I am basically playing full time and it's doable for now but I don't think the wider market is there any more for this to be a longterm proposition. All but one of the major cabinets (the Paragon) are in a really poor state in their latest versions and I can't foresee this getting any better. The general dropoff in the pub trade and the multiplicity of other similar opportunities for non-committed players to spend a few quid that simply didn't exist 20 years ago, plus the desperate state of much of the product from most of the main players in the market, are trends that just don't look positive.

As for the comparison between 'now' and 'then', I only feel partly qualified to answer that. I played all the games that were around back in the 80s/early 90s but never attempted to make a fulltime go of things, and I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have done so. I'd say there are certainly more machines around now, given the appearance of chains like Wetherspoon's, and there is more opportunity to play them - who else remembers the pubs shutting between 3.00pm and 6.00pm?

The key change however is the proportion of worthwhile games - in the old days, a pro could pretty much rely on a decent take from any machine visited, unless a fellow pro had visited recently or the machine was faulty etc. Nowadays a good deal of the skill is being able to separate the 5% of wheat from the 95% of chaff.

[cool]

true

Talking about wheat and chaff , something I always wandered about was the phrase sorting the sheep from the goats.What is better and why as I cant see the difference? (apart from the obvious way they look).

[j2k7311]

Probably for the wool...? That being said, goats have plenty of hair! lol

[Nil Satis]

something I always wandered about was the phrase sorting the sheep from the goats.What is better and why as I cant see the difference? (apart from the obvious way they look).

If you don't sort the sheep from the goats then you might get more than you baa-gained for.

[quizard]

A nomination for the quiz machine of the quarter century. Give us a Break the best selling SWP ever with over 13,000 units made.

[cool]

shows how easy it was then I used to trail in the wake of my old maths teacher , Dave Scott who found GUAB remarkably easy then sank without trace after they left the scene.I didnt particularly like guab but did well on the Quizmasters,Blockbusters,Suit Pursuit amongst others in the early days.

[QuizMaster]

If you were old and lucky enough to remember GUAB and you didn't find it easy, you shouldn't be on this board. In terms of SWP's over the last 25 years, this was the equivalent of learning to boil an egg for chefs, i.e. the first step towards greater challenges and skills.

[cool]

Everybody has games they like and dont like.I think Pub Quiz is shite but total respect to you for dissecting it , and there must have been games in the past that you didnt like that I did.If GUAB was out now Id expect my opinion of it would be a lot different to then though.

[BigEd]

A nomination for the quiz machine of the quarter century. Give us a Break the best selling SWP ever with over 13,000 units made.

Where was that taken from?
I played GUAB when I first went drinking in Pubs, and they were all over the place.

However, my nomination would be for JPM's WWTBAM?
Quiz machines were dead and buried until that game. It went from virtually no Quizzers in Pubs back to everywhere in a matter of months.
My guess is that they must have sold 1000's of the things.
This machine was also the daddy of the multigame terminal, as they all turned into gamebox.