All parts are being sold as-is. The hard drive has 7 games on them.The hard drive consist of: Banana-Rama Buccaneer Gold Fort Knox Keno (Bonus) Phantom Belle Poker Star Spangle Keno Top Hat 11580. The Odyssey Slot Machine Magnificence Brought to Life. The Odyssey by Homer is one of the most classic stories in existence. One video poker variant which should be avoided is the game of Phantom Belle Joker Video Poker, which has a very low RTP of 94.87%. Highest RTP Slots. So let us now take a look at the slot machines you should be playing if you want the best chance to win.
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IGT Vision series had the well known Diamond Mine slot.
Not so well known, was a rare Super diamond mine shaft at Luxor (the only place I played or seen it)
It was a very cool concept entertainmentwise. Cool sounds and the works, especially for a 3 reel non video reel slot game with bonus rounds.
It was set up like the regular Diamond Mine slot, but this one was linked like a progressive . Every time someone completed their own diamond shaft or added diamonds to their shafts It added a small various amount of diamond dust to a linked super shaft. I can't remember what seeded the super shaft amount or even if it was progressive. Hell I don't remember if it was .25 or $1 denominations.
I just remember it was fairly high.
When the super dimon shaft feature was almost full (it took at least day or more) you would jump on 2 machines and fire away. Whoever added the last diamond dust to fill the shaft got the money (anyone could get lucky). It was similar to a linked must hit by slot machine.
I liked plays like this because they were valuable, fun, competitive(I'd hear other AP's/hustlers say, 'omg not them guys, they hit it again), It was fairly fast and furious(30 to 60 minutes). So this wasn't a 100% lock you'd make money. Get snapped off and it's doubtful you'd be ahead.
It was tricky figuring out when to jump on, because it was almost impossible to coordinate and lock up all the machines. Also the more people you had, the less you made. You had a better chance to hit it, however paying people or splitting with more partners cut into profits.
If you started to low others might jump in and steal some value, jump in to late and you lose machines and get cut down to one seat. If you didn't leave any seats available you could pisse off ploppies and hustlers, and risked complaints. Friday night was a bitch. 4am monday morning and you were probably fine, 2 guys was enough.
This was all going on at the same time that hey had the good countable Blackjack Blitz, so it was easy to keep an eye on the SDDM while playing the BJB.
The Super Diamond shaft didn't last long, but that's probably a good thing, because that probably helped not getting spotted on the BJB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aciYrBIAKS4
This is another link that I can't get to work. If you google 'lady of fortune on odyssey slot machine- you tube' you can get a look at the game. The video runs 1 minute 18 seconds. If you stop the video at 2 seconds you can see the green circle in the middle where it says 'BONUS ROUND.' There are actually 12 icons in this circle. The icons start out blank. When you are playing the game a green light moves around this circle and stops randomly on an icon. It will then turn that icon green. Collect all 12 icons and you go into a bonus round where the average bonus is about 60 coins.
My standard play on this game was to spin it off when I found 7 or more icons already filled in. If you stop the video at 1 minute 15 seconds you can see that the green circle came back blank after the bonus round was over.
The Odyssey machines are a rare collector's item now. Silicon Gaming, the manufacturer, failed maybe 4 or five years after these machines first appeared. I don't know the exact reason why but from what I read the general reason was they tried to get to big to fast. IGT bought out Silicon Gaming and the machines quickly disappeared from the casinos. Googling around I discovered that IGT bought these machines back from the casinos and had them destroyed.
The very last one I seen anywhere was in Hooter's.
http://www.californiaslots.com/models.php?model=Odyssey
Okay, the link works. In the picture you can actually see several exploitable games, Fort Knox, Buccaneer Gold, Vacation, Riddle of the Sphinx, and Phantom Belle (This game is better known as Bonus Playoff).
In this post I'm going to explain the Phantom Belle (bonus playoff) game. This is an example of an accumulator video poker game. You can click on the image to blow it up and get a better view.
The payscale for this game is 8/5 Jacks where Two Pair pays even money, 84.45%. And you can see on the left just above the dealt hand it says '5th Coin Bonus' and the number 95. That means there is 95 coins in the bank. That meter starts at 75 coins. With every 80 coin in, 16 hands, 5 more coins are added to the bank. This is equivalent to a 6.25% progressive meter.
Occasionally, when you hit the deal button a 'Bonus Playoff Card' will appear in the hand. It will then remove itself to above where it says '5th Coin Bonus.' Then you are dealt one more card and you complete your hand. At that point you go to a different screen where one of three characters, the riverboat captain, the dance hall girl, or the riverboat gambler will appear. Whichever one appears will challenge you to one hand of five-card draw poker winner take all for the coins in the meter. If you lose the hand the coins remain and you have to keep playing until you catch the Bonus Playoff Card again to get another chance to win the coins.
When I first started playing this game I had two problems.
First problem, I had no idea how often the Bonus Playoff Card appeared. So I started playing high numbers of coins in the bank, 300 or higher....and did an empirical. I used my slot card to document how many games I played and how many times I caught the Bonus Playoff Card. With a big enough sample space I put the number at 142 games.
Second problem, in the bonus round, I had no idea how to play optimum strategy for five-card draw, one hand winner take all. But I figured the character I was playing did so I mimicked how they played. They never drew more than 3 cards. The pair and higher hands were no brainers. The crux of the matter was how to play the no pair hands. Half the hands you are dealt will be no pair. When the character would draw cards, like say they draw three cards; if the first, third and fifth cards disappeared from their hands and were replaced, when they rolled their hand over I could see what the second and fourth cards were that they held. With their no pair hands they were holding the two highest cards. So I mimicked that strategy. By mimicking them I got my batting average in the bonus round up to 50%.
So now the math of the game. And this is just my math, not the math of the manufacturer. More on that later.
The base game was 84.45%.
Catching the bonus playoff card every 142 games , and only winning the the bonus game 50% of the time, meant I had to play an average of 284 games to win the coins in the bank. The 75 coins that are in the bank at reset represents 15 bets.
15/288 = 5.2%
So with the 84.45% base game, plus 5.2%, plus the 6.25% meter build, the overall payback was 95.9%. A 4.1% deficit.
288 X 4.1% =11.88 so I needed 12 extra bets in the meter to be at breakeven. That would be 135 coins. But that number includes the meter. To get a 6% edge I needed 220 coins in the bank. And that became my playable number.
Odyssey Slot Machine Phantom Belle Poker Machine
One of the drawbacks to the game was it played super slow. It was all you could do to get out 500 games an hour. That's why I wanted such a big edge. At 220 coins in the bank it was an average $40 earn for about 40 minutes work.This game also came in 9/6 Jacks where Two Pair payed even money. But the only places I ever seen them was at Slots a' Fun and NYNY. At the time the Odyssey machines were all over Nevada, Vegas, Laughlin, Reno, Tahoe. A guy got a lot of plays.
If you google 'odyssey slot machine phantom belle poker bonus round' you can watch a short video of the bonus round being played against a riverboat character.
In Charles Lund's Robbing the One Armed Bandits he said the frequency on the bonus playoff card was 133 and the riverboat charcter played perfect strategy but I have no idea how or where he got that information. If that is true I was playing the game stronger than I thought.
I promised someone I would write about Times Pay but first I'm gonna write about Mystery Bonus as the two games work similarly. I would like to say I figured these two games out all on my own....but I actually had a little help. There was a Sycuan poker dealer that spent him off days playing the Visiions in Laughlin. He was trying to convince the Sycuan casino manager to put Visions in Sycuan.
One day he handed me some paperwork and asked me to pick out some games to be installed at Sycuan. I didn't know exactly what they were because I had never seen anything like it before. I think they may have been par sheets. They had a range of chips that ran from the high eighties to about 97%. They gave the odds on certain hits and some general math on the games. It was from this paperwork that I learned exactly how Mystery Bonus and Times Pay worked.
I advised the guy to have a lot of Mystery Bonus and Times Pay installed as not only would the tourist/ploppies not know how they worked but a lot of hustlers wouldn't be able to fully figure them out either.
With some of the Vision Series IGT didn't invent a totally new game but instead took some of their standard games and installed a bonus feature. I couldn't fine a Mystery Bonus picture online. They came in several different games and configurations of bonuses. The particular dollar denom machine I'm going to write about was in the Ramada Express/Laughlin (now Tropicana Express). It was a Five Times Pay machine:
http://www.ohiogaming.com/fivetimespayslotmachine.htm
Basically, IGT took the payscale at the top of the machine and put it on the bottom. Then they installed an LED screen on the top that said MYSTERY BONUS. This is how the Ramada Express machine worked.
What is being banked in this game is coin in. Once the bonus is collected the LED screen flashes 'WATCH FOR' in big green letters. It will do this for exactly 450 coin in every time. From that point the LED screen will flash 'COMING SOON' in big red letters. The bonus of anywhere from 50 to 100 coins can be awarded anywhere from the first coin in to the 200th coin in. The average was 100 coin in. So the standard play on this machine was to spin it off if you found it flashing 'COMING SOON.'
I assigned an overall payback to the game of 90%. This was literally true for Ramada as they had the worst payback for dollar slots of any place on the river. It was why a dollar slot player easily got their room and meals comped at the Ramada.
It was an average 550 coin in to get an average 75 coin bonus. So the bonus represented 13.6% of the payback. So the line pays represented 76.4% of the payback. If you found the machine flashing 'COMING SOON' the average coin in you were gonna do is 100 coin in to get an average 75 coin bonus.
76.4% + 75% meant you had a play worth at least 151.4%.
But there was another thing I did on this machine. Whenever I finished a play I would look past the third reel at the coin in meter and write it down. The other hustlers wouldn't play the game unless it was flashing 'COMING SOON.' I picked up a lot of plays where the LED screen was still flashing 'WATCH FOR' but there had been over 400 coin in since the last time the bonus was paid.
The Odyssey machines are a rare collector's item now. Silicon Gaming, the manufacturer, failed maybe 4 or five years after these machines first appeared. I don't know the exact reason why but from what I read the general reason was they tried to get to big to fast. IGT bought out Silicon Gaming and the machines quickly disappeared from the casinos. Googling around I discovered that IGT bought these machines back from the casinos and had them destroyed.
The very last one I seen anywhere was in Hooter's.
I had an Odyssey mutli-game machine in my office but when I moved it was too big and heavy to take so I gave it to one of the movers. I wish I had it now.
I had done some work for Silicon Gaming when they were implementing their wide area progressive. They didn't have anyone at the time that new how to design them so they contracted me. They were pretty much bankrupt so IGT just bought them and made them disappear.
http://www.robertwinter.com/slot/odyssey/games_main.html
Here is a great site with information on the Odyssey slots. Looks like this guy has done a lot of work with them and it helps show how some worked.
Notice the 4 play Joker Poker :) Full pay 100.6 version. They had that for months at Arizona Charlies with all kinds of promotions. I Believe I played odyssey 4 play before triple play. But I won't swear to that.
I can't remember what year it was. They had a December promotion at Fiesta where you could get cashback for your points. If you played on the multiplier days it worked out to .6%. They had the quarter Odyssey's with Four Play FPDW. There were two machines next to the Panda food place that racked double points. They weren't supposed to be doing that and I was the only one who knew about it so I was getting 1.2% cashback.
There was a drawing promotion going on at Arizona Charlie's. I went over to check it out. They had a bank of 8 Odysseys with the Four Play FPJW. All 8 machiness were taken up by just 4 players. I went back to Fiesta.
The phrase 'Times Pay' was never used in the casino. It was what IGT called these games in the paperwork that the Sycuan poker dealer gave me. It was a case where they took some of their standard games and added a multiplier. The same as Mystery Bonus what was being banked - accumulated - was coin in.
The game I'm going to write about was located in the Flamingo/Laughlin, now Aquarious. It was a Double Diamond machine.
http://ohiogaming.com/doublediamondslotmachine.htm
When the game came out of double pay mode the LED screen flashed 'WATCH FOR' in big green letters. It did this for 70 coin in. From that point the LED screen flashed 'COMING SOON' in big red letters. The game could trigger into double pay mode from the first coin in to the 80th coin in. The average was 40. When it triggered into double pay mode you got 20 games at 2X pay.
So the standard play on this game was to spin it off if you found it flashing 'COMING SOON.'
Here is a great site with information on the Odyssey slots. Looks like this guy has done a lot of work with them and it helps show how some worked.
' target='_blank'>http://www.robertwinter.com/slot/odyssey/games_main.htmlThanks for the link, Boz. If you click on Buccaneer Gold then click on Bonus Game you can scroll down and see how this game worked. It was a small win if you found 3 daggers banked and a big win in you found 4 daggers banked. At the bottom of the page you can see the bonus range from 45 coins to 165 coins.