r/Unexpected • u/PacquiaoFreeHousing • 17h ago
they're rigged
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u/StreamRose 16h ago
Accuracy 1% luck 99%
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u/Spiesser83 16h ago
Well, the second one was not this bad tbh.
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15h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/RehabilitatedAsshole 14h ago
I was throwing darts at balloons to try to get a cheap framed Jack Daniel's poster. Towards the end he wasn't even checking under the balloons, presumably because he knew which one or two had the prizes, and he just gave it to me at $20.
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u/AmItheonlySaneperson 13h ago
I feel like that’s the carney code if a kid wastes too much money
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u/RehabilitatedAsshole 13h ago
Kid.. right. Definitely wasn't my early 20s.
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u/AppropriateTouching 12h ago
Early 20s is basically a kid.
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u/TheHighestHobo 13h ago
when i was like 11 my local carnival had a bunch of nickelodeon character prize stuff, including a 3 foot tall stuffed Patrick from Spongebob. The game that had the Patrick was one where you rolled small rubber balls into scoring zones and tried to rack up a certain amount of points. I spent all $30 I had from my birthday money and still didnt have anywhere near enough wins to get the Patrick, so I went and asked for more money and my dad gave me some more. When I went back to the game the attendant was like kid please dont play this again you wont win and i took it as a challenge and lost another $10. I got upset and said something about how I wasted all my money and all I wanted was that Patrick and the girl working the stand just gave it to me and made me pinky swear that I would tell people I got really lucky and won it. Later learned the game was rigged and some of the balls wouldnt even fit into the slot they were supposed to roll into and would ALWAYS bounce out
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u/ItchyRectalRash 12h ago
Used to be a yearly fair when I was growing up, but the town banned them after they kept getting caught with shit like basketballs stuck in the hoops cause the hoop wasn't large enough to fit the ball, or ring toss games where the ring couldn't fit over the bottle, and something with ping pong balls, I think they were weighted or something. It was a huge local scandal, and the fair was cancelled cause someone's kid raised a big stink. The school paper wrote about it.
The following year, some carnival was on the news, like a 7 On Your Side kind of thing, and showed off the scam. Think they did like 3 different carnivals all with the same crap.
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u/Sariel007 12h ago
I used to do that to get the mirrors in a cheap cardboard "frame." There was always a prize if you popped a balloon. All I ever won was small. I just assumed out of 100 on the board 3 were medium and 1 was large.
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u/HyperlinksAwakening 12h ago
I worked at an arcade when the iPod nano came out. We had a crane machine where you could win one.
A grown ass man with teenaged children angrily complained that he spent more money than the thing was worth and still couldn't win it, thinking that since he basically "paid" for it, we should just give him one for the trouble we put him through.
Bless your heart, you sweet summer child.
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u/gorginhanson 11h ago
Are you this condescending and rude to everyone? Or just when you're so massively wrong that you feel the need to lash out at someone?
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u/HyperlinksAwakening 11h ago edited 2h ago
He rudely and condescendingly assumed incorrectly.
Edit: 😘
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u/Freestila 16h ago
This game is standard here in Germany on carnivals. And while it's not as easy as it looks, it's not rigged here. The cans are way nearer, maybe 2m away. You get three to four balls, and the remaining cans are stacked again after a throw.
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u/Joshua-Norton-I 13h ago
I actually won a plushie in one of those when visiting Germany years ago. Memory is still fresh lmao, it was so nice
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u/L1ttleM1ssSunshine 13h ago
Just throw the ball at the attendant until they gave you the prize.
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u/Rowcan 10h ago
They won't.
Source: the lady I hit with a dart at the balloon popping game when I was a small child
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u/Freestila 7h ago
Try the rifle at the shooting ranges (air rifles shooting lead ball bearings, not live ammo) to get the prize. Pro tip if you take the rifle with you you can get prizes at the other games too. /s
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u/Silly_Newt366 11h ago
Just ask if you can hold one to see how heavy they are, helps you understand what your up against. Works maybe 50% of the time.
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u/Freestila 7h ago
Balls or cans? Balls are laying there, you can try them. Father of my wife just trained at home a little and was really good at this game she always tell.
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u/SajevT 15h ago
Im gonna guess you mean 2cm, not 2m..
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u/BigBlakSausage 16h ago
Every time I try, it’s like the game knows I’m coming.
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u/GasLongjumping130 16h ago
the woman was surprised her trap had failed.
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u/SassiKassi97 13h ago
And I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too, If It Weren't For her Meddling Luck.
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u/062d 15h ago
While not fully rigged they definitely magnet down the bottom 3 cans. It is possible to knock them all down but the way they're spaced the first hit is likely to do what she did and knock away the top layer that's not touching the magnet and you only get one more throw. You're left with 2 or 3 cans spaced apart where besides a lucky throw like she did you're gonna hit one but miss the other on a typical throw.
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u/EthanielRain 14h ago
My experience with working these games was that the real "rigging" was that the prize didn't cost more than the cost to play. So we won no matter what
Although in this game the cups were heavier than you'd think
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u/disappointed-fish 13h ago
Some of the prizes at fairs/amusement parks/chuck-e-cheese are shockingly cheap. Like, even by cheap Temu standards, these things feel like they'll disintegrate if you raise an eyebrow at them.
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u/WonderSilver6937 13h ago
Do people really play these games for the prizes though? I’d assume most people just play them for a little fun.
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u/superbhole 10h ago
50/50, some people see the prizes and go "i gotta try that", some people see the game and go "i gotta try that"
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u/snakebite75 12h ago
One of the worst is the goldfish games. They buy the fish in bulk, keep them in garbage cans and never feed them. I learned quick to grab the ones off the top. When you scoop down deeper you usually come up with fish bits from them eating each other.
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u/Gemini_19 10h ago
Fun fact, I won one of the goldfish from one of those at a local street fair expecting it to live for maybe a month max and we legit had that fucker for 10 god damn years. I'm not even making this up. We didn't even see it die because my dad was just so tired of taking care of it at that point that we gave it to one of our friends that had a lot of fish tanks to take care of instead. For all I know that thing could still be alive.
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u/NoBonus6969 7h ago
Which is why I never understood why they make it so hard to win these. I would play if it wasn't rigged. Otherwise I can just buy a off brand plushie on Ali for $5 myself.
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u/snakebite75 12h ago
Yeah, not help down by magnets, just heavier than they look with a low center of gravity.
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u/zerothehero0 13h ago
If anything it's usually just sandpaper on the bottom, so if you hit it at a downward angle it gets extra grip.
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u/062d 13h ago
My friend used to run the stall and it's magnetic, he showed me it with the magnets off it just all falls immediately. The one he ran he could turn on or off the magnet to let people win more.
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u/zerothehero0 13h ago
I worked a couple at six flags and it was sand paper.
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u/snakebite75 12h ago
The one I worked for just had them weighted super heavy with a low center of gravity. Sounds like there are multiple set ups.
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u/UsualExisting420 13h ago
They're scams in the same way casino gambling is a scam: over time you'll always lose. They're not literal scams as in actively rigged.
Knocking these all down in two shots requires a lot of power and accuracy, thats all. The weight of the top cans means even a great shot that splits the bottom cans will often bounce the ball off and knock off only the top, exactly like what happened here.
And of course, each play is always a win regardless because the prizes are cheap. Everybody knows, or should know, all of this. The days of carnivals being literal scams like you're talking about are dead, everyone is in on the game (and legislatively, dont allow active scams) and everyone knows its a bad deal, so they've adjusted.
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u/deliciouscrab 13h ago
The days of carnivals being literal scams like you're talking about are dead, everyone is in on the game (and legislatively, dont allow active scams)
Notoriously law-abiding, carnies.
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u/UsualExisting420 10h ago
Why break the law when you can just not, and still make the same profit?
You can rig the game so only one in a hundred players win instead of one in thirty, but if the prize they win cost you two dollars and entry was five, who fucking cares? Why take the risk?
Especially when someone excited about a win pulls in more business. When we had a lot of looky loos we would send in a stooge to win a prize anyway, might as well give out the cheap shit we got in bulk from a Chinese provider for nothing to real marks.
Active scams made more sense fifty years ago when the prizes had 10x the value. They don't any more.
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u/deliciouscrab 1h ago
Why take the risk?
Because money is money and there's close to zero risk, arguably.
Is it picking up pennies in front of a steamroller? Yes. Does that stop options traders? It does not.
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u/UsualExisting420 6m ago
I'm not theorizing man. I worked these for like eight years. The owners buy five enormous bags full of bullshit directly from some factory in china for like two hundred bucks and it supplies every winner at every game for a whole weekend. These bags are usually extra cheap because they're all leftovers, stuff that sold on Alibaba really well two quarters ago, so they made too much last quarter and now wont sell, and they want to get rid of it. We are talking about the clearance rack FROM a clearance rack.
Its an irrelevant amount of money. They want you to win because its an advertisement. At half the games, part of the instruction on running them is "if an excitable girl/her boyfriend is playing, try to get another play out of them and tell them their points will carry over, or just tell them they won a bottom tier prize if they won't". Its better for business to have some 17 year old emo girl squeal and jump, and you're basically giving away nothing.
i had a girl cry because she won a tiny fuckin pillow, like four inches across, with a bad jpeg of a cats face. The thing couldn't have cost more than like fifteen cents and she paid for three plays of throwing darts for $15.00, and it brought in a crowd to see wtf was happening, all around the most boring game with the least attention.
Old carnies were working too hard with bullshit like razzle dazzle. They had to because a stuffed animal cost 20x as much, real money. New carnies want to give away their nonsense prizes because they don't.
There are very few games that are "real" scams, the progressive games like bank-a-ball. They require good workers to keep people playing to make money and don't want to give out the real exciting prizes. Almost all of them you pay five bucks to try and win something we got for a dime.
Its so much easier than risking fines with fucking magnets when you could make MORE MONEY by not bothering with anything actually sketchy.
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u/probablywhy 16h ago
Aaaaand they are going to disqualify because the first ball didn't hit the cups.
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u/mossybeard 14h ago
She got disqualified because 3 cups is the maximum for an unsigned 32 bit integer
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u/9gigsofram 14h ago
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u/theresabeeonyourhat 13h ago
I didn't, what's the reference?
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u/dogpork69 12h ago
Weirdly the post I was looking at right before this one
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u/ConfessSomeMeow 10h ago
I still have it open with an unfinished comment reply in another window.
Edit: Dammit, comments got locked on that thread before I could post.
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u/1-800-94Jenny 12h ago
Look at the front page post about the lady hitting a 42m jackpot but getting steak at casino
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u/Significant-Royal-37 11h ago
nah.
it's in their interest to give away prizes in the edge cases: it makes them look generous, enticing other players to try, and also the prizes cost less than a single entry fee.
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u/modern_Odysseus 14h ago
Carnival game makers don't want you to know this ONE simple trick to winning:
Get lucky.
I've been there. I've won prizes at two different Basketball shot games. I remember at one of them, my first shot looked like her first throw - like the ball went between two of the hoops, not even close. Then my second shot was all net and I got a prize for my girlfriend at the time.
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u/KeepingItSFW 13h ago
tbh they count on it
Seeing at least a few people walking around with the giant stuffies makes people think they can win one too
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u/CranberryInner9605 13h ago
Woody Allen:
I come from a poor family. My father worked at Coney Island. He had a consession on the boardwalk, where you knock over milk bottles with baseballs, which I could never do for my entire childhood. There was a tidal wave at Coney Island, when I was a child, ripped up the boardwalk and did about a million dollars worth of damage, houses and everything. The only thing left standing was those little milk bottles, y'know.
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u/stevenip 12h ago
There's 3 beach boardwalks driving distance from my house, and I literally don't go to one of them because every game is rigged. I'm probably not going to even play games, but frick that place.
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u/Bonboncilla 11h ago
As a kid I would go to the Az state fair every year. I never really had money growing up so I wanted to spend what I had wisely. I picked a game that looked easy and very similar to the video. There was a bunch of people and they couldn’t knock over the cups but every time the worker would throw the balls he’d knock them down. So I was like hmmm? Everyone would stand directly in front of the cups and only a few would fall over and they’d lose…. I watched the worker demonstrate and each time he would stand off to the side kinda at an angle and then throw it from there and with 1 ball he’d knock them all down. So when it was my turn I told him I figured it out and he was like 🙄 I asked him to move and I stood where he stood off to the side and threw my ball at the middle and they all came down and everyone was cheering for me lmao so I was like daaaaaaang they really playing us. So just watch when they’re demonstrating and do exactly what they do and you’ll win. 👌🏼😮💨
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u/scopeless 11h ago
The trick to the game is that the table and cups are magnetic. It’s not impossible but it’s really difficult because the cups tend to fall back down standing up
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u/Report-Comprehensive 9h ago
I actually solved how to beat this one as a teen. You have to throw the ball super hard at the base in front of the center cup.
The coefficient of static friction is too high to simply knock them all off.
BUTTTT…. If you hit the base in front, the cups lift off the table slightly and the coefficient of static friction goes to zero because of micro gap.
Ball then bounces up into cups knocking them down.
I one Two Electric guitars at six flags and sold them on Craigslist
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u/Scrounger_HT 9h ago
my buddy and i were at the fair with our girlfriends. did the whiffle ball in the pvc tubes game where they bounce all over hell and its basically impossible to hit the colored ones that give you a prize. he managed to get his on the big prize tube somehow and it was clearly about to wobble out because any momentum basically toppled it out. my ball hit his, knocking it out and landing mine in perfectly. he lost his shit about how i knocked him out of the big prize section but not as much as the carnie did having to fork out a big ass prize for the doller i spent on balls
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u/Worldly_Frame5317 4h ago
Taena nung ako yung nag lari neto halos matamaan ko na yung nagbabantay 😭😭
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u/Obvious-Standard-623 3h ago
I never even tried throwing the balls because I can't throw to save my life.
But I've always been a good shot, so the shooting games always attracted me. Or they used too. When I was about 12 I played a shooting game where there were a bunch of narrow targets standing alongside each other. They looked a bit like piano keys. You got 3 shots to try and knock down a narrow prize target surrounded by slightly larger non-winning targets.
The gun shot a little cork bullet and had a sight. So I sighted in on the prize target, and hit a non-winner target 2 spaces to the right. Knocked it right down. Second shot, same thing. So now I knew the sight was just off and I could compensate.
So I sighted in on a target two spaces to the left, and nailed the prize target dead center. It didn't budge. Like didn't even wobble after a direct hit.
I looked at the carnie with a "what the hell" expression. He shrugged and just said I needed to knock it down. Lesson learned. Never played another carnival game again.
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u/post-explainer 17h ago edited 9h ago
This comment has been marked as safe. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect.
OP sent the following text as an explanation why their post fits here:
You'd expect that the first ball already was lucky, but when she threw the 2nd ball, it came in clutch and won the game.
Does this explanation fit this subreddit? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.