The World of Secret Knowledge!

How to play Fruit Machines and win!

Do you often feel that you are getting a really bad deal when you play on fruit machines and other gaming machines? Although you pile in huge amounts of money you only seem to get a few small wins just to keep you playing. Well this is of course exactly what the manufacture and the machine owners want. However, it does not have to be like this!

In this guide I will show you everything to know in order to take on the fruit machines and win! I will give you the basics, tips for all the most popular machines and provide some dirty tricks where luck does not enter into the equation.

For convenience, I have divided the guide into 4 sections.

1. Machine Basic

2. General Tips

3. Cheats and Dirty tricks

4. Specific Game Tips

Machine Basics

Fruit machines are designed to make money and they pay out between 72% and 98% of the money they take. This does not mean you will win 7.20 from a machine if you put in 10. Machines save up for streaks or a series of jackpots and pay out a lot of money in a short period of time. All manufactures of machines do this in different ways and it is up to the player to work out when a machine is paying well and whether he will make any money by continuing to play it. The first thing to look for is where the money is paid. A machine that is backing has taken any money that is paid out so you are likely to be closer to the point of another big pay out. For this reason many sites will refill machines so that players will then have to rely on judgement of how well the machine is paying before deciding to carry on.

Many players believe that by leaving money in the win bank the machine will continue to pay out better because it hasnt paid out yet. Wrong! If this were the case the machine would keep on paying into bank until you collected. In actual fact the software thinks its been paid. Its like taking money out of your account and putting it your wallet. Then take it out of your wallet and put it in pocket. While it is in your wallet the bank knows you have withdrawn it and will not pay you any more!!

Almost all machines have skill stops on them. These are two kinds. True skill means that what you actually hit is what you get. Pseudo skill means that the machine will stop on its own choice and not what you hit. You might see a player trying to judge what to hit when the lights are flickering all over a feature board but it usually pre-decided what the final results will be. Pseudo skill is very common when the machine offers nudges. Just when you need only 2 nudges for a win you always seem to only get 1 which is useless!

Most machines have a hi-lo reel also. This is used to progress around a feature game of to gamble for bigger wins. The hi-lo gamble chance is no way related to how good the number is. Your chances of winning depend entirely on whether the machine has decided it can afford to pay you the better win. Many machines will regularly lose on a 2 or 11 because they are designed to make you continue playing to chase your money back. JPM machines are notorious for losing on good numbers when your get close to the jackpot. Maygay machines will nearly always win on 1, 2, 3, 10, 11 and 12 when gambling wins, but usually lose on the feature game. The reasons being you are often given a good number machine will want you to win the gamble, but on the feature board it may have to spin a 2 or 11 to get the hi-lo square it has decided to kill you on. Hence on many machines you will repeatedly lose when going higher than a 2 or lower than an 11, and it should be pretty obvious these numbers are not random!

Many machines these days use the cancel button as an added feature. When it lights up you can use it to show down skillstops and random selections. Almost every player knows how to use it nowadays so it is pretty useless now. The main advantage a good player has over a bad one is to know which features to take for a jackpot and a repeat chance. Usually a feature will pay an amount depending on how difficult it is to get, unless the machine is in an invincible mode where almost anything the player does will get him the jackpot. Invincible can be spotted by a logo changing colour or flashing.

In the UK there are two main types of fruit machine. The first is AWP (Action with Prizes), which is the type you find in pubs. These can have a jackpot of up to 15. They usually have 3 reels and a repeat chance on the jackpot. The major manufactures of these machines are BELLFRUIT, JPM, BARCREST, MAYGAY, ACE, MAZOOMA, GLOBAL and PROJECT. The other type machines are the 4 reelers. These are called club machines and have jackpots from 75 to 250. The stake is usually 25p a go, compared to APWs which for some incredibly silly reason now have a 30p stake in may pubs although this is to be phased out as it has proved very unpopular.

At long last it looks like we are losing token machines all together. The law in this country is ridiculous to the pint of patronising the punter. Your Gran can win 250 down the legion on a Sunday afternoon but your mate can only win 15 on the bandit while hes in the bookies doing a hundred on every dog race. Pub machines have only recently gone from 10 to 15 jackpot and although this increase is good its still far too small. Most punters would like to see jackpots of 50 or 100 in pubs, something that is worth winning. 80% of players in my own personal survey said they played machines to win money and not for entertainment purposes. So if a punter wants to gamble big there needs to be more deregulation.

There is one other kind of machine that has been recently introduced, and that is the casino machine. At the moment these machines are 1000 jackpot and are clones of some popular 250 machines.

The basics of playing Fruit machines;

Club machines. There are some very simple guidelines you should follow when playing club machines. Firstly you should have a good idea of whether a machine is ready to pay out or not. This is a lot easier than it sounds. Once you have got the jackpot/cashpot once, all you need to know is how many days before return to that club again. This is trail and error and varies for about 3 to 10 days depending on how busy the club us. The British Legion for example is usually very busy at the weekends so a trip on a Friday night and a Monday morning might work ok. Most clubs I would leave 10 days just to be absolutely sure. Players in Legions and CIU clubs tend to be far less aggressive than players in Snooker Clubs or Casinos. For this reason you can leave a machine a bit longer without worry of someone else getting it. Once you are, in the club you need to know it is worth playing. If the machine has tubes you can often see if they are full by looking through the reels. On most machines the money should be the clip on all the tubes. Hoppers are not so easy to tell so the best thing I find is to put 20 in and see if the machine is backing. If not then it is to leave it and try to get what you can, unless the machine is showing signs it is paying very well.

Once you have decided it is worth playing you must make sure you have enough time to play it to get the jackpot/cashpot and you have enough money/pound coins to achieve this. I would always carry 200 float of pound coin in my car in case the club ran out. Check the machine pays out - 1 coins sometimes stick in the tubes causing the machine to pay short this can be very frustrating on a ferry for example. Always make sure you are either a member of the club or you are correctly affiliated and signed. As long as you abide by any committee rules there is very little they can do to stop you playing than turn the machines off when you arrive, which does happen!

For every machine you play you must have an objective. This may be to climb up to the cashpot gamble to the jackpot or just collect a good feature. It is not good enough to fill it up and hope it rolls the jackpot in this hardly ever happens. Most machines have a cashpot and these are usually the ones with the best value. Many people do not realise that in most cases the machine is totally unaffected by paying the cashpot. This is because the cashpot has been paid for over a long period of time. With most machines the method of play is the same. First you must make the machine happy by refusing all wins offered to you. This will force the cashpot out then you win back most of your stake. This technique is a basic fundamental of fruit machine play.

Every fruit player strives to achieve the same goal and that is to understand and hopefully master the machine so he or she can finish playing with PROFIT. About 80% of players pay to win money, the remaining 20% play for amusement. The problem is, just when you feel confident going up the pub to win yourself some beer money, the machine has changed! And you have to start all over, spending loads of money working out how the new machine operates. This cycle repeats itself again and again, with manufactures creating new machines all the time to attract new players. Now just imagine if you have up to date player guides when new machines are released, you could make a fair bit of profit over the following 3 months while the machine is sited in your local pub or club. Wouldnt it be great to go to a pub and know how to get a streak of 50 plus from the SIMPSONS machine? Or know which feature to take on IMPULSE for a quick 30? Or go down the local club and know how to get a quick 75 from CLUB GIVE US A BREAK? Getting information early is the key to making a profit from playing fruit machines. You dont need to be Einstein to become a professional style fruit machine player, nor do you need much money to get started. What you do need is discipline and persistence.

General Tips

Ready to pay out

If the machine uses tubes, they can often be seen through the glass behind the coin slots, then if you here your quid dropping in to the bottom of the machine, it is LIKELY to be near pay out time. In reality its a lot more complicated than this.

Hold Buttons Flash

The machine has three matching symbols in a row directly above or below the win line and the hold buttons flash differently to a normal hold then hold all three and the win will just drop in. Some machines require you to press start first after holding the reels before the win drops in.

The Cancel Button

Very often machines will allow you to slow down a skill selection by pressing the cancel button try it!

The Three Holds

You have two matching symbols on the pay line and the machine allows you to hold them three times in a row then on the third time they will drop in to give you the win or the feature. (This doesnt work on some machines)

Hold After Nudges

When you have nudges and no chance of getting a win from them then nudge in two matching symbols if they hold then you win but only if you dont hold tem. An exception to the rule is machines with a screen you will normally need to hold them itll usually tell you.

Bar Codes

According to a Barcrest engineer, there may be a problem that he had found on all Barcrest machines. Apparently there is a problem connected to the cancel button if you repeatedly press this button while playing eventually it causes some sort of power spike back along the circuitry which gives 99 credits (the same as putting the machine into test/engineer mode. Slightly older Barcrest machines would be better to try this on.

Cheats and Dirty Tricks

Pattern Detection All fruit machines work according to pre-programmed logic chips. These chips set the system

By which the machine operates. If you work out the by which any given machine operates, this will help it to give you more money than you are giving it. By watching the running process of a machine and acting on knowledge acquired is very useful. New fruit machines are computer controlled and rely on fizzy logic random numbers. These random numbers determine the position of the rotating reels and consequently the number and frequency of wins. These random numbers are usually generated by a real time clock inside the fruit machine and the random seed is generated from the reading on the clock when the machine is turned on, or accepts input from the user (buttons pressed). Some of these machines can have millions of patterns before the pattern is repeated. Some fruit machines regularly regenerate the random seed and consequently the pattern is never repeated.

However, older machines rely on mechanical systems. These can only hope to simulate random effects in a very basic way this is a big weakness, which can be exploited by cunning players. This random effect can be seen to repeat itself regularly. For example, the pattern might repeat every 200 credits. Watch for situations that you recognise from previously the next results should be predictable. Watch heavy gamblers and try to observe how the machine operates if you can, note the results the result might be very profitable indeed. If you are very lucky, you might know someone who has personal access to a commonly found machine you could ask to use it (offering them a few notes) and try and get used to the machines workings.

One case for this where the profits are potentially excellent are trivia machines