Pooflake's story just reminded me
of something I did as a poor student. I and one of my friends found that some fruit machines had cheats built in to them. You would give it some money and play it in a particular way, say refusing to take the features it offered you, holding down a particular sequence of buttons, or something like that. The idea was that the machine would then pay out the jackpot and that the jackpot would repeat until the machine was empty.

Now, we found one of these cheats on an message board somewhere on the tinterweb, it was for a particular type of gambling machine, I can't remember what the machine was called, it was somehow pie themed though if I remember right. Through careful scouting we found that there was only one pub in the vicinity which had this type of machine.

We went into the pub one afternoon, pockets jingling with pound coins, and started to do what the internet promised would pay out big time. At the start I was a bit dubious, I very strongly believed that it was complete rubbish, but I was willing to pay a tenner or so just to find out if it worked. It did! Everything went just as the internet had told us it would, everything except for the big manager bloke standing behind us as we played. We thought he was just another punter in the pub, until right at the end, when we were just about to collect our money (about £200 I think) from the machine, he put a hand on each of our shoulders and asked what the f*ck we thought we were doing in his pub, messing with his machine.

He told us to bugger off, we obliged, with thoughts that he might beat the hell out of us, or report us to the cops (to this day I have no idea how legal what we were doing was.) So we fled, leaving the manager to, no doubt, take all the money we had accrued in the machine for himself.

Apparently I'm too stupid to be a good criminal, weird really as I'm currently back at uni doing my PhD.

Oh, by the way, if your reading this, and you own a pub in Newcastle under Lyme, which used to have a pie based fruit machine in it, a few years ago (about 6 I think), I’m sorry I tried to steal from you, it was more the spirit of scientific enquiry than the theft which motivated me!
(Lord of Marzipan Fact: Clouds are worse than Hitler, Mon 4 Aug 2008, 13:52, 5 replies)

illegal?
Hmm i dunno depends on teh method you used to cheat the game. If there was a specific sequence of key presses whilst playing the game that you could play then I guess not. But if you were jabbing things up its orifices and putting big magnets at the side of it then i guess its a bit cheating :)
(Miggyman, Mon 4 Aug 2008, 14:16, closed)

Which pub?
I can't think of any in NuL that had a pie theme...

In fact, I can't recall any fruit machines at all, come to think of it. The Blackfriar?
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 4 Aug 2008, 14:22, closed)

I've just been on the yellow pages website,
and I can say with about 80% confidence, that it was the Albion Inn, opposite barclay's and quite near to the blackfriar.

Also, the cheat involved playing in a particular way, I think working up the features and then working up the cash bit, and then holding a couple of buttons down. If the cops asked, it would have been difficult to just say that's how we usually play, and that we had no idea the machine could be tricked into paying out. Especially as we had printed instructions off the internet on us!
(Lord of Marzipan Fact: Clouds are worse than Hitler, Mon 4 Aug 2008, 14:36, closed)

Ahhh... The Albion.
I'd forgotten about that.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 4 Aug 2008, 14:38, closed)

If we're honest
the whole of Newcastle under Lyme is best forgotten, the albion is a good start
(Lord of Marzipan Fact: Clouds are worse than Hitler, Mon 4 Aug 2008, 21:41, closed)