UK residents - who still plays pub fruities?

Mark_32Red (retired acct)

Dormant account
Joined
May 23, 2008
Location
32Red Marketing Dpt
Hi All,

So this evening I was travelling alone back from London to Heathrow ready for the flight back to Gibraltar tomorrow. Had a very busy but great week, it was great to meet people again in Waxy's - apologies to those I didn't say Hi to, we wasn't there very long.

Anyway, while killing some time I decided to play on a pub fruity, I used to spend a lot of time (and money) years back when living in the UK, thankfully they don't have a similar replacement in Gib.

Since I played them last time, I have never noticed the warnings at the top of the machine:

image.jpg

74%, compensated play etc. It's so far away from what you get online? Does anyone still play? I know VWM used to play these a lot successfully in the past - anyone still playing?

I actually managed to hit the jackpot with just £20 though :)

image.jpg

image.jpg

Would be interested to know any good luck stories.

Mark
 
Would be interested to know any good luck stories.

Mark

Probably buckets from VWM - you may wish you hadn't asked :D

Closest for me was, I had decided to do a 'back-pack and back across Canada' years back. Took me much longer than I'd anticipated and was pretty broke at one point and staying at a shelter before the next leg. Phoned home and sold my computer for extra moo
Had a twenty, was bored and played at the pub next door. Not quite the AWPs like you guys have.
Anyway, put in a twenty, hit the jackpot, pulled out $800. (had the bar owner safe it lol as wasn't going back to the shelter that much in back pocket). Bummmer sold the computer, but enough to make it to my destination and back. :)


ps when I DID vacation in the UK, those suckers ate much of my beer money :D
 
I enjoy a flutter on a good ol' fruity when given the chance. Nice to handle real money for a change instead of numbers on a computer!

Best bit of luck was when I went to a darts competition in Victoria, London. Went out in first round, so had a go on the fruity (£500 jackpot as it was a club machine). Got the feature up on White Knight and won the maximum £500 with free spins still to go. Printed off the ticket, took it to the bar and cleaned them out of most of their available cash. Funnily enough, prize money for the darts comp was £500, so nice to go home with some cash.
 
First of all a HUGE WTG , JP on a BFM machine, easier to get a 5-reel Wild storm :p

Those piles of £1's bring all sorts of memories flooding back, the worst been dropping a £250 JP as my local bingo hall was ready to kick me out as it was past closing and having to limp around town whilst having a few beers after.

I still have the odd punt (usually halves with my mate, we've been playing for years) Our local Quicksilver's do a cash match on a weekend (£10 for £10) if they are feeling tight £5 for £5 so we usually start out with £40 of credit and head for the B3 £500 Jackpot Machines.

We do have the odd decent hits here and there are stick to our cash matches only so rarely lose much, not like back when we were in our teens, oh dear!

The compensated warning have been around for quite a while IIRC, reasonably sure it was when they changed from £35 JP to £70.

I could fill this thread lol, think there maybe another similar thread that me or VWM started a while back with a few gambling/fruity related tales :)
 
Interesting Jon, I didn't think of promotions such as match bonuses as I only ever play in a boozer - I guess the arcades are much better at incentives and with that payout percentage they can be pretty generous.

Nothing worse than lumping pound coins around I agree. Although I won £40 a bit before this and it paid out notes - now that didn't happen years ago. Obviously I put them back in but for some reason the machine decided I didn't deserve them again.

Mark
 
I think the arcade have to be generous now as the online competition is way too fierce for them to cope.

To be fair it is rare there are many more than 5-6 customers in each and every time I visit and these tend to be the same old faces and 'hardened addicts' :eek:

I worked for a very brief spell in an Arcade in the 90's when JP's were £6 tokens and you could smoke your head off and it is rare you'd find an empty machine!
 
Nothing worse than lumping pound coins around I agree.
Mark

Not sure what all the coins are in UK but our pockets get pretty heavy over here what with $1 and $2 being only in coin form, and soon to introduce the fiver.
 
I think the arcade have to be generous now as the online competition is way too fierce for them to cope.

To be fair it is rare there are many more than 5-6 customers in each and every time I visit and these tend to be the same old faces and 'hardened addicts' :eek:

I worked for a very brief spell in an Arcade in the 90's when JP's were £6 tokens and you could smoke your head off and it is rare you'd find an empty machine!

went and visited the mother in law a while back and decided to go for a walk along the sea front at southend, just for old times sake popped into the amusments and played the fruitys there.....made me laugh as it was soooooo rigged.....never seen a fiver swallowed so fast at 10p a spin.....even worse the d.o.a :)
 
Used to play when i was much younger - but never both these days and and have not for years. I think the days of finding a weakness to exploit a fruity are long gone - im sure VWM will auto correct if thats not true )

They either pay or they dont from what I have seen. But not as bad as the FOBTS I would say which are dreadful machines and capped at 500 max win.

Payout % on the pub fruits is shocking :eek:
 
Hi Mark! Pleasure meeting you Tuesday!

It's rare to see them played now. The only reason for an online slots player with an IQ not printed on his shoe-sole to play them is usually because they have an emptier or are aware of a force, or have watched some mug pump them full!

They remain an anomaly; UK is one of very few countries to still permit archaic compensated slots and class them as 'amusements'. The pay-outs are appalling, and each spin is expensive. I would not be sorry to see every last one consigned to the junkyards.

Personally I haven't played one for over a decade IIRC.

They are, and always have been (emptiers aside) the crappiest and worst-value form of gambling ever invented, a reels-version of 2p pushers.
 
I live in a seaside town so will sometimes go play the older 5p/10p ones as all the newer games suck,less and less of them left every year local seaside arcades are more like casinos now, most floorspace dedicated to 18+ £100 jackpot games and random games like rainbow riches (which is minimum £1 a spin :eek:)
 
I live in a seaside town so will sometimes go play the older 5p/10p ones as all the newer games suck,less and less of them left every year local seaside arcades are more like casinos now, most floorspace dedicated to 18+ £100 jackpot games and random games like rainbow riches (which is minimum £1 a spin :eek:)

Last time I was in Blackpool I had a couple of spins in the 18+ area and was offered a cup of tea as a comp lol.
 
The reason you didn't see these warnings before is because they weren't there. Tighter regulation has resulted in these warnings and explanations having to be shown on the front of each machine.

I still play them occasionally, but they are tighter than a gnat's arse. The force is still there, but the streak has gone in favour of the higher jackpot. They usually die once the £100 is won, but this jackpot can still be forced out of most of them, but it often costs almost as much to do this.

The prospect of finding an error or even an emptier is still a lure, but they get spotted and fixed much faster than before. That machine you played is a Deal or no deal clone, it had an emptier for a while in that "cash or bust" was a free win.

I would play the old pub fruities more, but MICROGAMING WON'T LET ME :mad::mad:
 
Hi Mark:)

Grats on the jackpot, always fun, and regarding the huge pile of coins, there's little more satisfying in terms of real live gambling to me! I used to play all those arcades too, and had a few go to slots, although the ones we had in Holland were quite different from the ones you had/have in England, or Germany for instance...

I didn't really mind the paytables, or played the games as i was supposed to, i myself was more of a gamble feature guy, meaning i only made use of that double up feature until i no longer could (either by hitting the max or busting, of course mostly the latter) and i had great success overall. The times i did win big - which was a few 100 Euros or Guldens back then - and cashed it, i always kept the change, to the point where my pants hung down my butt from the sheer weight :D

I really felt "rich" walking around like that, where you could hear me coming from a mile due to all the tinkling, and i always threw around a lot of drinks and stuff for my mates when i did win:)

I don't play them anymore, as online is much more fun to me now, especially considering the low payout percentages the land based slots have. but i do play some of those old slots still, now in online versions - for instance Lucky Streak, Random Runner and Club 2000 - on occasion. I also liked some of the MG Pub Fruities, like Pub Fruity :)p) Track and Field Mouse and a few others, although i only once won something decent on those...

Really bummed i missed the meister meeting again btw :(
 
I live in a seaside town so will sometimes go play the older 5p/10p ones as all the newer games suck,less and less of them left every year local seaside arcades are more like casinos now, most floorspace dedicated to 18+ £100 jackpot games and random games like rainbow riches (which is minimum £1 a spin :eek:)

Something else is taking up the floorspace in this arcade :eek2:

pt.jpg
 
That machine you played is a Deal or no deal clone...
Seems to me that 90% of all pub fruities are DonD clones these days... :mad:
Variety WAS the spice of life 10+ years ago...

Yep I do play them still, but very rarely. And I always expect to lose. Though to be fair you can sometimes get fairly decent play-time and a lot of features for your money - but you know the vast majority will end up with bet x 3, or GAME OVER :(

I also sometimes pop in the big Hastings seafront arcades and play the £500 JP machines. These are a much better bet than the pub machines, with payouts of up to 94% (and maybe higher on some?). My favourite is actually the aptly named "Seaside Slot" - it doesn't have free-spins or any other sort of feature, but has "tumbling reels" (e.g. like Gonzo's Quest) and a short spell of good wins close together has often allowed me to walk out of the arcade richer than when I went in! :thumbsup:
When I go in these places it is literally for just 10-15 minutes: chuck £40 - £60 in, lose and leave or win & leave! ;)

KK
 
I still play the pub fruit machines a couple of times a week when out for a drink with the better half. The golden era is long gone with the aforementioned emptiers and manipulators. Twenty five years ago if you had the right connections and information you could literally fill your boots and live off the outrageously easy money.
As the tech became more sophisticated and the internet prevailed, people started making the mistake of bragging about their fruit machine conquests, some even posting videos of methods of manipulation in action. Every fruit machine company would monitor the boards and quickly see what was amiss and rectify problems in an ever faster time scale.
These days the rare faults are rectified in days, serious ones means the pubs with the offending fruit machines are all sent a warning to turn the machine of immediately until a critical update is installed.
As others have said - being compensated, most savvy players knew when to force a machine (rejecting all wins until such point that the machine would offer a Jackpot). The last couple of years have introduced the latest profiles in machines that don't offer the player much, if any value in forcing a machine. Most forces on the new breed of fruit machines will result in a small loss to a heavy loss depending on the type of machine you are playing.
Many players that made a living off fruit machines in their heyday have now packed it in, because there are precious few 'playable' machines around a sea of unplayable machines, so too many people are running around after an ever decreasing number of 'golden eggs'.
It is still possible to get lucky, but I'm of the firm opinion that a casual punt rather than a serious session is better in pubs. These days, I tend to play every machine a pub has, but I'll only play for one feature and read the signs from that as to whether to continue playing. Most of the time it results in a 50-60% loss - £8-£10 in for £3-£4 out. But as I say you can get lucky, last night for example was a good night across a wide breadth of machines over the night, resulting in 1 machine paying a top feature of £150 (100+50), other individual machines paying £50, £100, £100, £50 and a final £100. However I needed a lot of luck to get some of those results.
The fruit machine companies have tried to eliminate the hard core player from the games with anti-force profile software, theoretically this allows the casual beer change punter a better fighting chance of getting a feature, but they haven't quite got that right, as Joe casual is still going to be annoyed at having to pay the usual cost of £7-£10 for a feature which only yields £3-£4 back. Repeat a few times and Joe casual will start to keep his beer change in his pocket. Hence, why you see rarely played machines for long periods in pubs, unless it's the likes of me or an old school punter playing.
I don't think I'll ever stop playing any time soon, I still enjoy the couple of nights we go out on, the other half is really cool with it, and we have our social chats whilst I'm playing, she hits all the repeat chances and gambles but I'm very realistic on my expectations and never get involved with a machine for serious money, unless I have a reasonable expectation of the outcome.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Meister Ratings

Back
Top