You're almost there Nifty.
I use the term 'manipulate' to mean that the player can take action that affects
when it pays out. That part, combined with bonus money, is key.
I'm pretty sure I explained that they cannot be made to pay out more than they otherwise would. It's the finding out
how much, and manipulating
when that made them profitable as a whole.
When you are offered and refuse a win, it is effectively reserved by the fruit machine, to be plucked when you choose. There are also certain signs that effectively tell the player the same thing as if the win was offered. An obvious example is Treasure Island dropping in 40x or 80x wins when it's ready to offer the top feature or more. You could up the stake to prevent it, if you wish to carry on.
...When you're satisfied you know how it's going, you let it pay out. You're loss to the game's percentage cut is minimised due to the play style of making it pay out in one hit. By this, you have tested it's potential, and got out again. Never to play that game at that casino ever again (unless you stuff some bonus money in it if there's no better option). Occasionally they can be shitty, usually you get 80+% of your money back, often they pay 30%-100% profit, and sometimes they fast-track to happy and go nuts for thousands. Either way you play it and you leave it when you're finished, you have no choice as you've effectively emptied it.
The advantage of using bonus money to guarantee profit no matter what should be obvious by this point.
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Years ago, I remember having a similar conversation with Vinyl Weatherman about casino patterns in general. I took the same position as you because I was curious what his reply would be. His Cops and Robbers avatar made it clear he played them, so I knew as a fruity player he must have noticed how to profit from them. Microgaming AWPs remained out of the conversation. Kind of an Elephant in the room. I certainly wasn't going to draw attention to them!
Due to their behaviour, AWPs are a bit of an anomaly for an online casino. At first I assumed they must be some kind of Pseudo-fruities, but no, they were good old influenceable AWPs.
My post was a bit of a confession to be honest. I believe I've explained how they work to the best of my ability. I don't really know what I can add, other than the fact that they've helped bring in money to my family for the last 8 years. They were a safe profit. I'm not an insane roulette pattern analyst. The only monetary risk was in hiding it by 'recreational' gambling.
If the AWPs were costing the casinos a fortune, they would have disappeared years and years ago.
This surprises me too, as I said in the first sentence I wrote in this topic.
My thinking is that perhaps their internal records can easily show a total profit/loss per game, but doesn't so easily differentiate between bonus and real money, so at a glance, it looks like the games are taking the casino profit that they're designed to. Of course, I also have no idea how many other people were doing the same as me. I assumed there must be a lot, but as years went on with the games still available, I wasn't so sure.
As I say, I also took great efforts to hide my play style. Not by merely playing £1 hands of blackjack before and after a big fruit machine win, that obviously wouldn't cut it - when the pattern is repeated thousands of times. I decided the only way was to really gamble, with figures large enough to downplay the importance of the AWP win. This basically meant that for every time I gambled with and quadrupled my AWP winnings, I'd lose the lot (and sometimes more :facepalm: ) three times. Except I didn't always try to quadruple, I'd mix this up too. Another advantage is that I made less withdrawals this way, and the gambling all evens out in the end. That's what I'd try to remind myself, but that's also the difficult bit. One painful memory is when The Geegees quickly decided it was ready to pay out £5,000. I stopped playing it and went for some big bets on table games, knowing that whatever happened I could return later to collect the £5k. I made some large deposits so that the casino wasn't alerted to a £50 deposit - £5,000 withdrawal. I ended up having one of my worst blackjack runs and lost £4,500. How I managed to stop I don't know, I was able to pull myself away, chat to the wife, slept on it, then the next day I "collected" my £5,000 from the fruity, summoned all my restraint, made a few (hundred) bets for good measure, and withdrew. Only about £600 odd profit instead of the £5000+ it should have been, but I suppose at least my history looked just just another degenerate gambler ( again, :facepalm: ). And I was sure to get some decent bonuses I could make use of to pull me back too.
It annoys me that I may have wasted my time being so "careful" to keep the casino happy with stupid gambling, when others perhaps were not, but without it being possible to know what anyone else was up to, I carried on doing it that way.
Don't they know interest is paid only on the first £20,000.
And if that happened, I'm shocked they kept paying out. I wish I'd just done that now, not only would I have a nice fat bank balance but I would have saved myself a lot of trouble.
