Originally Posted by Ex-AP View Post
Originally Posted by DGenBen View Post
Very interesting. Ive heard people discuss this before about how a new game is juicy and later drys up and debate whether the game was changed or it was just due to variance.
We have a guy who travels; he is not a statistician but studied stats in grad school for data analysis skills. If you ask him the number for a game, he will tell you. He is not a Bonus Hustler but plays them and best part is he cracks the game: bonus rounds, RTP’s, meter movements, and when there are ways to exploit game design defects, e.g. game wasn’t designed correctly. He lets us know which machines are new and how to beat them, the level of competition, etc.

He has benchmarked numerous games so he knew when the Harley’s were changed, e.g. increased frequency of the bonus symbol in column 3 thus makes game harder to win (since there are less winning combinations). In Wheel of Fortune 4D, the Scatter symbol appearing in Column 2 frequently kills the game and devalues the banked “$” that turns wild. Really anal-retentive stuff that almost no one pays attention to.

I will share Joe Blow since I did some work independent of what he did. We trade notes from time to time. There were 4 versions of Joe Blow in North Cali market. The loosest one is gone. In this version, any 6 firecrackers (or dynamites) was a play since firecrackers awarded were decidedly non-linear, e.g. your chances at next firecracker was based on existing number of firecrackers. The more firecrackers you saw the better. But this version is gone.

The next version had a visual: if two or more “reels” showed 3 firecrackers spinning by, you had a 95%+ chance of being awarded 3 firecrackers in at least one “reel”.

The worst version had a RTP in the 85% range and was very hard to beat using stand rules.

What is left is the 3rd version in most casinos and is pretty easy to make money on if you know what you are doing.

These bonus machines come in different settings so it’s important to know which version is which.
The harley's are a shared revenue game so a low payback to start with. I spent significant time analyzing the game along some friends. We put the game at 85%. And the mini in the low 30's was never a play unless the maxi was in the 30's and you did an either/or. But the game was beatable with correct numbers.

So the houses were making 15% on the game and then they lowered the payback from there? I've never bought this kind of crap from other AP's.