So I walk into a bar one night. Six machines. I punch the game up on all six to see where the icons and the meters are at. The 10-Spot was at $500+ on all six machines. Whoopee!! One of them was 3 to go, the rest were 4 to go. But at $500 it's a huge play even if you have to fill all five icons. I sat down on the 3 to go and spun it off. Guess what happened? The meter reset at $500 instead of $100.
I had to do some thinking about how to handle the situation. It was a Mom & Pop joint. But their machines got lots of action. Did I want to crush it or milk it? Playing straight thru it was a 121.7% play. A $150 an hour play running just $700 an hour in action.
Of the six machines, the highest meter was $512. With a 4% meter that told me that the game was getting hardly any action at all. But I had no idea how long the meter glitch had been there.
I spun another play off that night--feeding $20 bills in as I ran out of credits to keep the cashout as low as possible. I wanted to attract as little attention as possible.
I would go in every 2 or three days and spin a play off. I tracked the meters to insure I was the only one playing the game. After I collected the jackpot I would push the meter up to $500.15. If I left the meter on a flat $500, then I wouldn't know if someone else was playing the game, and leaving the meter on a a flat $500. This went on for several months. I never saw meter movement of more than a few dollars at a time--and no one was putting in free icons for me. I had the game to myself.
A one cycle session was about 3100 games, or a little over two hours a play, with an earn of $337. Then one day the slot techs walked in and installed a new game on the machines. In the process the meters started resetting at $100. Another one bites the dust.
That hurt me in more ways than one. Because they installed that game in every machine in the state. In the process it wiped out all the built up icons. The progressive money remained but the icons were blanked out.
I kept a list of potential plays in my notebook. It looked something like this:
Jackpot Junction....10-Spot....3 to go....$190
Mardi Gras....7-Spot....2 to go....$250
So the next time I was in that area I would go and check to see if someone popped an icon in or ran the meter up to where it was a play. Then those &&$%*((^) blanked the icons out on me. It took several months before I started getting plays again.
NOTE: I benefitted from both short coiners and long coiners. A short coiner was anyone who played less than a fifty cent bet. They didn't fill icons but they ran the meters up. At 50 cents a game I was putting 2 cents per game in the meter. But a long coiner, betting $1 per game put 4 cents per game in the meter, at $2 he was putting 8 cents per game in the meter.
ANOTHER NOTE: Montana Gaming is pretty lax compared to Nevada. In Nevada, wiping those icons out would be "altering the outcome of a game."
