Some interesting thoughts on this thread.
As UP said, I doubt there are many, if any, true machine "pros" left in the sense of making enough to live on. I've been playing machines for about ten years myself, as well as doing lots of other quiz-related things, and I'm certainly not good enough to live off my winnings - far from it. Every so often a badly-programmed SWP is released which does offer the potential for making decent sums, but they are usually withdrawn pretty quickly - consider e.g. "Big Match" on the ItBox about eight or nine months ago, which was easily jackpottable once and which a number of players (famously the Brewises) made £1k plus from. It was jackpottable through reasonable knowledge, ability to do the skill games, and most importantly spotting the potential in the first place - none of those really an "emptier" though. Anyway, BM soon got withdrawn as will anything which is paying out too much.
As you say, the old WWTBAM threw in bonus questions at the higher levels to stop people winning. I'm not sure I've seen new WWTBAM do that, but it doesn't really need to: it makes better use of outright spoilers early on in the game, forcing players to use lifelines (the ones about the comic characters really annoy me). Note also that none of the lifelines give a guaranteed right answer, and some (audience, PAF) can be outrightly misleading - this does reflect the show though, I guess. Additionally WWTBAM has a lot of hard but fair questions on the database, too many for all but the most regular player to start learning. It's rare for questions above 32,000 points to be general knowledge in any real sense, although often they aren't spoilers either. Basically, it's a myth that we SWP experts know every answer. Sure, we are knowledgeable and know a lot; we are able to guess well (and as Wigwam says, to discount implausible answers); we remember questions we've got wrong. But as UP says that's still only a tiny bite out of the enormous world of knowledge, and there's still loads we don't know.
The comment someone made about the amount of work needed to be a good SWP player sounded arrogant, but is probably true: I'm 28 - I've been doing quizzes and interested in facts etc. pretty much since I was 8; I attend pub quizzes regularly; own hundreds of reference books, read the paper daily, and play SWPs probably six days out of seven (if only for half an hour), and the worst bit is there's still humungous amounts I haven't got a clue about. SWP manufacturers can and do exploit that and that's why an SWP can be really hard to beat even if it's not outrightly unfair.
I have had VERY little dealings with pro quiz players
I'd be surprised if there were any more than three 'pros' left in the UK, two of which post on here and maybe one more somewhere else (using the same sort of logic that proves that ET is out there somewhere 
). What constitutes making a living varies from person to person of course and also on where you live - a good income in Scotland wouldn't be enough to live on in London. It would also depend on whether a pro's winnings were the only source of income for their household, i.e. if they had a partner's income or some other source of funds to fall back on in lean times.
I know one thing for sure though - I would have the utmost respect for anyone who can make a living off the machines now; not so much for the skill and knowledge they need but the sheer determination and will involved. More and more I find playing quiz machines soul-destroying given how poor so many games are full stop, and how empty even the few good games are so often, and this is speaking as someone who has played them for 20 years and who loves quizzes etc. in general.
). What constitutes making a living varies from person to person of course and also on where you live - a good income in Scotland wouldn't be enough to live on in London. It would also depend on whether a pro's winnings were the only source of income for their household, i.e. if they had a partner's income or some other source of funds to fall back on in lean times.I know one thing for sure though - I would have the utmost respect for anyone who can make a living off the machines now; not so much for the skill and knowledge they need but the sheer determination and will involved. More and more I find playing quiz machines soul-destroying given how poor so many games are full stop, and how empty even the few good games are so often, and this is speaking as someone who has played them for 20 years and who loves quizzes etc. in general.
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Matt Vinyl
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Pop over to 'their' forum and see why you should probably not bother with this one...theyve got the DOND fruitie near my usual quiz machine
I've always been into the more 'puzzle-type' games, than straightforward quizzes. They just appeal to me more - although having said that, the two main games I play in pubs 'are' quizzes.
As a kid, I had a huge collection of those 'word shuffle' things and various puzzles from the Rubiks (sp?) range - I remember my Nan showing me some tatty sheets of paper when I was about 9, that my Grandad had written - it was a complete Rubiks' Cube 'solver'...
I wish there were more puzzle-type games on the SWP boxes, but I guess they're pretty hard to implement.
"And do you ever contradict yourself, Minister?" "Well, yes and no..."
The difference between a pro and part time player apart from the obvious
is this - and it is the same across the board in sport and I count playing swp's as a mental sport. I am a keen chess player (although poor) and one of the first books I read was 'Chess is my life 'by Victor Korchnoi circa 1980 and this is how it is for Woods, Beckham , Federer and Johnson! Without swp's I would slip back into the writhing mass of humanity.There would be nothing to distinguish me from anybody else and being different is what I want to be ! Knowing that I am near the top of the tree gives me a great feeling.People saying that they are more successful than me because they earn say £75k a year and play swp in their spare time misses the point. Every £1 I win passes through my fingers, no taxes and the greatest satisfaction in knowing that I am 1 of only 3?! pro's in the country.
is this - and it is the same across the board in sport and I count playing swp's as a mental sport. I am a keen chess player (although poor) and one of the first books I read was 'Chess is my life 'by Victor Korchnoi circa 1980 and this is how it is for Woods, Beckham , Federer and Johnson! Without swp's I would slip back into the writhing mass of humanity.There would be nothing to distinguish me from anybody else and being different is what I want to be ! Knowing that I am near the top of the tree gives me a great feeling.People saying that they are more successful than me because they earn say £75k a year and play swp in their spare time misses the point. Every £1 I win passes through my fingers, no taxes and the greatest satisfaction in knowing that I am 1 of only 3?! pro's in the country.
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QuizMaster
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Istenem
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there is always going to be acrimony. my dad's a policeman and all that nonsense.
if there are ranging pros who can support themselves and a family solely from the swps then good luck to them. i couldn't do that.
as for the "real boys", i've witnessed people spending maybe ten minutes to get up to JP on games like bling/don't be a donkey football T/F game and similar.
by my arithmetic, assuming the following:
- average 20 minutes between pubs,
- £1.50 overheads for credit, 1/2 of coke
- working week of five days of eight hours each
- £20 travel costs per day
- the real boys never lose
- no faulty payouts/machine off/machine being played already/etc.
- all pubs have the real boy's game(s) of choice
they can expect to earn c. £30k a year tax-free which is not bad at all.
the assumptions might not be particularly scientific. and my sums might be wrong.
if there are ranging pros who can support themselves and a family solely from the swps then good luck to them. i couldn't do that.
as for the "real boys", i've witnessed people spending maybe ten minutes to get up to JP on games like bling/don't be a donkey football T/F game and similar.
by my arithmetic, assuming the following:
- average 20 minutes between pubs,
- £1.50 overheads for credit, 1/2 of coke
- working week of five days of eight hours each
- £20 travel costs per day
- the real boys never lose
- no faulty payouts/machine off/machine being played already/etc.
- all pubs have the real boy's game(s) of choice
they can expect to earn c. £30k a year tax-free which is not bad at all.
the assumptions might not be particularly scientific. and my sums might be wrong.
nobody ever wins on those things.
The figure of 3 pros was my guess so I am responsible for that one. All I can say in my defence is that it is based on what I have seem myself while travelling around and playing machines for a long time. My doubts are really based on the lack of lucrative games that are out there and how rarely I encounter someone I recognise as a true pro.
Also unknownpseudonym hints at my other main area of doubt, namely that I'd find it very hard to swallow all the assumptions about how much you could make on a particular game. To take the example of Bling Bling say, I realise you could in theory learn every question over a period of time on something like that but you then have to come up against:
- broken machines, either not working at all or not paying out properly (or at all!)
- people playing the machine you need for long periods - common in any student town in particular
- the relative rarity of a game like that and hence the travelling time involved to get between them
- the game itself disappearing or the question set changing
- unlearnable spoilers - maybe not on a True/False game like that but on many other games
- the sheer length of game - if one of those True or False type games is in 'tight' mode, it's not impossible to think it might take 30-40 minutes at least to JP it even if you did know every single answer
I had all these questions about the Brewises story re Big Match - not the basic story that they won a lot of money (and fair play to them for that!) but that they won so much in such a short space of time from a game that I think anyone would agree only has ONE jackpot in it (and hence would have already been 'hit' in some pubs before they got there) just seemed to be media exaggeration for me.
If I'm wrong and I meet one of these guys and see them in action, I'll apologise for having doubted them!
Also unknownpseudonym hints at my other main area of doubt, namely that I'd find it very hard to swallow all the assumptions about how much you could make on a particular game. To take the example of Bling Bling say, I realise you could in theory learn every question over a period of time on something like that but you then have to come up against:
- broken machines, either not working at all or not paying out properly (or at all!)
- people playing the machine you need for long periods - common in any student town in particular
- the relative rarity of a game like that and hence the travelling time involved to get between them
- the game itself disappearing or the question set changing
- unlearnable spoilers - maybe not on a True/False game like that but on many other games
- the sheer length of game - if one of those True or False type games is in 'tight' mode, it's not impossible to think it might take 30-40 minutes at least to JP it even if you did know every single answer
I had all these questions about the Brewises story re Big Match - not the basic story that they won a lot of money (and fair play to them for that!) but that they won so much in such a short space of time from a game that I think anyone would agree only has ONE jackpot in it (and hence would have already been 'hit' in some pubs before they got there) just seemed to be media exaggeration for me.
If I'm wrong and I meet one of these guys and see them in action, I'll apologise for having doubted them!
I'd say that's a further assumption we're making, or do we know for a fact that someone has learnt every question on the true/false style games?Nil Satis wrote:To take the example of Bling Bling say, I realise you could in theory learn every question over a period of time on something like that but you then have to come up against:
it is in my opinion virtually impossible to learn every question in games as the capacity in each game is immense and the questions tend to vary in their frequency of appearing depeding on the situation with the game.Some games just ask more questions but more often blocking questions appear. The definition of a pro is open to question as well. I make more than I lose , however I have my savings to fall back on in hard times (like now!). People who claim benefit as well as playing fruit / quiz machines cannot be classed as bona fide pro's.
It's something of an exaggeration granted but it is possible in that I have once or twice got to that stage myself (or near enough - say 95%) on a particular game simply through playing it so often.
My more general questions are always these - how do you get to that stage with lots of different games? How much do you need to lose to get to that stage? Or if you did manage to 'obtain' the question sets somehow, how would you then go about learning the answers? More generally than all this, for someone to do this as a living, how can they continually refresh their knowledge to the extent that say twice a year they get to this level the way modern games are programmed?
Take Deal or No Deal. We would all agree that there is a core of say 70% of the questions that are fair and that most of us would know already or could soon learn by getting the answer wrong and remembering. There is there another 10-20% which are harder and we might not have seen them before but again we will be able to learn some of these by trial and error. How do you then learn the remaining 10-20%, which are simply spoilers of the nature of "Which of these three films picked from a databank of 1000 possibles was released first?". Do you write down the three every time they come up, compiling an ever-changing list as you go along? Yes, I know that you don't HAVE to know all or even any of these to win each time but if you wanted to make Deal or No Deal your main game, you would need to as I can guarantee that any machine will use them quite soon after you or anyone else has taken a few quid out.
In the past when question sets were smaller, spoilers were rarer or non-existent and games changed less frequently, you can see how learning every question (to all intents and purposes) was both possible and worthwhile. But now...?
My more general questions are always these - how do you get to that stage with lots of different games? How much do you need to lose to get to that stage? Or if you did manage to 'obtain' the question sets somehow, how would you then go about learning the answers? More generally than all this, for someone to do this as a living, how can they continually refresh their knowledge to the extent that say twice a year they get to this level the way modern games are programmed?
Take Deal or No Deal. We would all agree that there is a core of say 70% of the questions that are fair and that most of us would know already or could soon learn by getting the answer wrong and remembering. There is there another 10-20% which are harder and we might not have seen them before but again we will be able to learn some of these by trial and error. How do you then learn the remaining 10-20%, which are simply spoilers of the nature of "Which of these three films picked from a databank of 1000 possibles was released first?". Do you write down the three every time they come up, compiling an ever-changing list as you go along? Yes, I know that you don't HAVE to know all or even any of these to win each time but if you wanted to make Deal or No Deal your main game, you would need to as I can guarantee that any machine will use them quite soon after you or anyone else has taken a few quid out.
In the past when question sets were smaller, spoilers were rarer or non-existent and games changed less frequently, you can see how learning every question (to all intents and purposes) was both possible and worthwhile. But now...?
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Guest
I'm planning to spend a month this Summer attempting to be a proper quizzie pro - to see if I could be able to pay London rent, afford other costs and mebbe save a bit each month. I will be playing only skill games.
I suspect that the main obstacle to success might well be the sheer physical and mental fatigue of trudging from pub to pub ad nauseam.
If I do take up my own gauntlet, I'll post some kind of daily blog about it somewhere, so you lot can laugh at my new-found poverty.
I suspect that the main obstacle to success might well be the sheer physical and mental fatigue of trudging from pub to pub ad nauseam.
If I do take up my own gauntlet, I'll post some kind of daily blog about it somewhere, so you lot can laugh at my new-found poverty.
if you are based in London then probably its not so bad with the advantage of the tube.I find the travelling more exhausting than the playing except when I'm concentrating on learning one game. Since 1990 Ive racked up 120,000 miles in a Nissan Micra,462,000miles in a Corolla and 220,000miles in a Yaris !
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QuizMaster
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