I was at a hole in the wall casino and ran into a fellow AP (advantage player) that I haven't seen in two years, which was about last time I was in this casino. (AP's tend to stick out among the yahoo's.) I had just cruised all the VP progressives (this place has 3 way progressive, i.e. RF/SF/Quads) and I chased a $240 quad jackpot on a $1 8/5 JOB and lost over $120 in the process -- took over 600 hands to hit the quad, but it was fun. I like this place since the majority of the yahoo's can't afford $5 to qualify for jackpot so all they do is feed the jackpots.
My friend and I spent half an hour catching up and the number of juicy prizes he won during the last year. He told me about the current promo, which is not playable for me.
He then asked about my hobby of slot reverse engineering (i.e. slot wonging) so I showed him which game I was working on and we looked at over 20 machines and I found 2 marginal candidates and I chose the last one since we was tired of walking. I put in $200 for this 50-line penny machine. I told him I will probably lose money but I wanted to show him the how the game works. Basically, you can lose BIG until you hit the bonus round. The game is beatable due to an exploitable design flaw.
After the first $100, I hit the bonus round and got 12 free spins. Now, it was a question of how much I win in the bonus round to minimize my losses. The first 8 spins were crappy and I got some small wins. On the 9th spin, I got like $40 and it looked like I might break-even. On the 11th spin, the whole screen lit up winning lines due to lots of columns of wild symbols.
The jackpot for the 11th spin was HUGE. I told my friend, I think I hit something like $160. Well, this female yahoo player to my right who had either better vision or better math skills chimed in it saying the prize was over $1,600. Without missing a beat, the female yahoo player to my left agreed with the $1,600 number. But the machine didn't LOCK UP (it locked up at the end). My friend asked what I typically make and I replied I normally make $100 to $200 within 20 to 30 minutes when the game is in the "wong mode" -- sometimes I lose. I only started playing this game within the past week and I haven't finished the math analysis.
Well, I hit a jackpot for 168,750 pennies because of dumb luck. After the hand-pay, I bought my friend dinner.