Be careful you could get hooked! (Fruit Machines)

Member Name: SusanLesley

Product:	Fruit Machines
Date:	03/06/01 (145 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good fun, Adrenaline rush

Disadvantages: Addiction, Loss of money

I will begin by sharing two pieces of advice my dad gave me years ago about gambling in all forms and they are still true and will always remain so.

First – never bet more than you can afford to loose. Regard your stake money as ‘lost money’ and anything you do win as a bonus.

Secondly – never bet to recoup your losses. This is a mug’s game and you only just end up loosing more and more in the never-ending quest for the big win, which will put you straight again.

The only real winner is the book maker, owner of the arcade, pools company, lottery organiser etc.

Anyway on to my love affair with slot machines.

When I was a youngster, many moons ago in the sixties, the slot machines were mainly the one-armed bandit types. You inserted an old penny, pulled a handle and watched three wheels turn. The wheels had pictures of various fruits on them and, if you got three the same, you won. Three bells usually got you the jackpot of a shilling, which was the equivalent of twelve old pence for those of you too young to remember. The lowest return was usually two old pence for getting a bunch of cherries on your first wheel and anything else on the other two.

The readers of this opinion have now just divided into two factions. Half of you are just saying nostalgically, oh yes I remember those days, and the other half are saying what on earth is this woman going on about? Shillings? Old pennies?

The machines now are generally far too complicated for me. A lot of them have a complete game for you to play. First you have to spin the reels and then there are nudges, free spins and all sorts of other weird instructions and a game board to work your way around all of which leave me completely baffled I’m afraid. I can cope with the very simple ones but I have to leave anything complicated to Dave!

What I do love these days are those machines that have a pile of coins on a flat s
urface with a bar of some kind that moves back and forth to the back edge of the coins. You then drop your coin between the bar and the edge of the pile of coins and, when the bar moves across it pushes your coin into the pile and, hopefully, pushes some of them over the edge into the winnings tray.

These machines are so addictive though, because it is so easy to put all your winnings back in just to get that last pile to drop off the edge! The edge where the coins actually drop is slightly raised by the way to make it even more difficult to win.

There are various levels of initial stake in all the machines these days from 1p per time, although they’re few and far between, to 50p or £1 a time for the real gamblers! Some of the machines also pay out in tokens, especially for the bigger wins. These can then be exchanged for prizes at the outlet in the arcade where the machines are. I tend to avoid these, as the prizes aren’t really up to much – I prefer to win hard cash!

A lot of the arcades today also have a section for over eighteen’s only where the machines are more expensive to play and pay out higher amounts too.

There are also signs around the ones at the seaside saying that, if it’s a school day, unaccompanied children aren’t allowed in. I don’t know how well they bother to monitor this though!

All in all I love slot machines and play them a lot when I go on holiday. It’s a thing I never, ever do at home, as I know that, if I started I would be popping into the arcade all the time, and the only real winner is the owner of the machine every time! So, for me, this is a great bit of holiday fun, but it can never be anything more than that – I can’t afford it!

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