APAT and how I got here - or The History of Rodders - Part Two
I lived in Newport, and it must have been around 2002. I had left college and went to work from a small local Internet company which would shortly after turn into ntl: which eventually became Virgin Media. I had started out as a tech support agent, then became a senior tech before moving into a role within the training department. This gave me the chance to travel to lots of locations around the country and at this point in time life was generally good. I did the normal things that people do but still played Magic every now and again.
A mate of mine who I had not seen for a while (Brian) was managing a local Snooker club at this point. One day I was passing and decided I would pop in. As it happened Brian was finishing his shift at 4pm that day and he suggested I come back then and we go for a pint. This sounded like a good idea so I did. It was then that I was introduced to a new type of game. A game different to the ones I had played before. This game was called.. playing fruit machines.
Now to start with I must confess to being sceptical. I had played fruit machine before of course as most people have but there was no skill to it, you just put money in and hoped you won, didn"t you? Apparently not. Fruit machines keep about 20% of the money that goes into them and pay out around 80%. So it is like a very expensive rake. Just remember you are not playing against the machine but against the other players playing it. The more skillful players should be able to win whilst the less skilled players lose. The machine knows when it has to pay out and will shows signs that it has to do so. It has to keep it"s percentage correct. The better players won because they had something that is known in the trade as "an edge".
Now I am guessing there might be a few of you out there reading this who have played the odd machine themselves (hopefully not Deal or No Deal *lol*). This of course was in the days of the big Barcrest Machines. There was Hot Stuff, Hellraiser, The Big Cheese (and it"s many clones) Beaver Las Vegas and Vamp it up. There were other makes as well, RED machines were very common and playable and many other that I won"t name here. The edge came from knowing what you are doing and making correct decisions, it was far from an exact art but it was possible, read the signs correctly and some machines would pay you handsomely, in those day Big Cheese was a classic example as when you got it, it was often pretty sure to go again. This was in fact a great money making trick back then. We would often see somebody win the jackpot on a machine and get off straight away and we could not get to those machines quickly enough. One of the golden rules in those days was always have a look behind (when you get the jackpot don"t walk away check again as it may want to pay another one - streaker machines were pretty common). So you would risk a little with the potential of a nice pay day. You use your supierior knowledge to take the money from the munters (a fruit machine term for fish, it means mug punters). I started to get an understanding of all of these concepts and how to apply them.
We found machine routes in Newport, Cardiff, Swansea and other places further away. We spent weekend after weekend heading to different pubs in different towns to play these (good times), in a little under a year we ran a starting bankroll of £125 (which was way to small btw but we knew no better) up to over £1000. We probably spent most of that in the pubs along the way but we didn"t really care about that. We then started to look for other edges. We found Betfair and tried football betting, which went rather badly, we tried Formula One, Darts and Snooker betting which actually went better. We started to understand the way our "edge" worked better.
So now we were looking around for new places to find our edge, we found casinos and tried to work out systems for blackjack, we couldn"t. We once nailed a great bet on the 2005 US Grand Prix due to understanding that the Michelin tyres just were not going to work at that track (thank you Paddy Power).
But amazingly at this point neither of us gave poker a thought. It seemed a bit intimidating. I thought it was all about knowing what the other person had by looking into their eyes and knowing that they were bluffing. I was vaguely aware of online poker due to adverts on betting sites - Paradise Poker wa the main one in those days. I never thought of playing though. How I wish I could find a time machine and head back there now.
However I was about to find poker see the next exciting installment to see how this happened and how it went initially.
