vpFREE2 Forums

GWAE - 22 Dec 2016

#1

In the Oklahoma locations that Peter Liston described it takes an AP with multiple skills. Sitting around waiting on Mystery Progressives to ripen will get real boring really fast… First, there are a host of other slot games that offer short term positives, although I can’t say that any of them are in Oklahoma. But one should do everything they can to learn those games too. And I think the real money in Oklahoma would be in the live poker games. Grinding poker and working the MP’s would be what I would be looking at if I were there…plus anything else I could find.

Oklahoma poses somewhat of a problem for professional gamblers. They are one of the worst states for civil asset forfeiture. There are warnings over the internet about traveling though Oklahoma across I-40. There are about a dozen counties involved and the police in every county are profiling long distance drivers for the potential of carrying large sums of cash. They can even seize the money on your prepaid debit cards.

Additionally, I know that there is a sizeable team working Mystery Progressives and all the other exploitable slot games. Their territory runs on both sides of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans.

#2

Mickey wrote: “In the Oklahoma locations that Peter Liston described it takes an AP with multiple skills. Sitting around waiting on Mystery Progressives to
ripen will get real boring really fast.”

It sounded like he was mostly talking about chasing slots with progressives on the top jackpots. He mentioned a similar technique to the one Wizard described for estimating the cycles on virtual slot jackpots. It is probably the future as progressive video poker and keno is being phased out.

#3

Noti, Liston did speak about uncapped jackpots and his technique for estimating the odds on the top line hit. I use the same technique and the Wizard used it to determine the odds of the top line hit on the Lion’s Share machine at the MGM Grand. But that was a three reel slot machine.

For video line games there is a much better technique that the Wizard uses. A few years back he filmed 200 spins on a Jackpot Party video line game. Its a nine-line five-reel game. He was able to use the film to determine how many 3-symbol combinations there were on each reel. And he was then able to determine the payback percentage of the game. Anyone who takes it that seriously can study his technique by googling “Deconstructing Jackpot Party.”

But in one segment of the podcast he talked about jackpots on the east coast in the $9,000/$10,000 range. I think he was talking about Mystery Progressive here because I know there are MP’s along the Mississippi River and on the east coast where the range is $9,000 to $10,000. But the meters run awfully slow on those MP’s, some as low as 0.1667%.

#4

Mickey wrote: "But in one segment of the podcast he talked about jackpots on the east coast in the $9,000/$10,000 range. I think he was talking about Mystery
Progressive here because I know there are MP’s along the Mississippi River and on the east coast where the range is $9,000 to $10,000. But the meters run awfully slow on those MP’s, some as low as 0.1667%. "

Seems like with the weak meter rate it would be rare to see a playable number, but maybe they’ve tweaked the algorithm to make them mostly go off at the high end. These are machines you can min-bet and still qualify for the progressive? Do they kick you out if you only min-bet? Min-betting was one of Lund’s “Rob the One Armed Bandits” tricks, he was shocked when his wife got kicked out of MGM for doing it.

#5

Noti, in the old days of the IGT Visions, where they were two and three coin machines, I would min-bet to get in two or three times the spins to even out the variance on the line pays. One can use the same technique on the Mystery Progressives but there are some factors involved. Min-betting on a stand alone MP is ok, it will even out the variance, but the smaller you bet the lower your hourly rate is. If there are other plays around then min-betting MP’s can cost you money on those games.

It is a mistake to min-bet on linked bank MP’s where you have competition. You actually want to max-bet. This is my take on the game that I developed when the MP’s first hit Nevada. At reset an RNG selects a coin number. Whoever bets that coin number gets the money in the meter. Take a penny game where the min-bet is 45 cents and the max bet is $4.50 and the meter range is $100 to $200. Let’s say it’s a 1% meter. I come along and find the meter at $196.

So $400 in action will drive the meter to the top. That’s 40,000 pennies and one of those pennies is going to trigger the Mystery Progressive. There is one person on the bank betting 45 coins at regular speed. They might be getting in ten spins per minute. I sit down and max bet 450 coins on turbo speed (30 spins per minute).

The other person is only betting 450 pennies per minute. I’m betting 13,500 pennies per minute. I’m almost a virtual lock to get the meter. The other person’s chances to get the meter are somewhere between slim and none.

#6

One thing Peter Liston didn’t talk about on GWAE was the meter movement of Mystery Progressives he found in the USA. At Winstar in Oklahoma, for instance, he said he found 60 MP’s. But my guess is he didn’t find any meter movement higher than .5%. And that means those MP’s are not that exploitable.

The thing I came away with from his book was that in the late nineties, in Australia, Liston was presented with MP’s with five figure jackpots with 5% and 6% meter movement. That is super huge. That made those MP’s very highly exploitable. That same golden opportunity never developed here in the USA.

My first encounter with MP’s was at the Mandalay Bay opening. I think it was 1998. That opening was somewhat of a hustler’s convention because so many exploitable games, the IGT Vision Series, the Williams games, and Silicon Gaming’s Odyssey machines, were on the casino floor, along with these new fangled Mystery Progressive banks.

We quickly figured out the MP’s. They were three-reel slots with 1% and 2% meter movement. Ranges from $25 to $50, $50 to $100, $100 to $250, $250 to $500, $500 to $1000. There was controversy as the ploppies complained about the line pays, and got swarmed by hustlers on the bank when a ripe number developed. After two months Mandalay stripped the MP’s out of the place. Bob Dancer even wrote an article about it.

The MP’s later came back in other place but the meter movement was even slower than at Mandalay Bay. With most of them today you are lucky if you find .5% meter movement. Liston’s charge of $8000 to teach MP’s is not a good offer for someone in the USA. But I can see where it would be worth the money in Australia. That is, if they still have five figure jackpots with 5% and 6% meter movement.