Having thought about it, I’ve decided that despite being initially perplexed, this is one of my favorite active threads. Let’s just say for the record that the question is:
What are the artifices used by carnival game operators to make their games difficult or impossible to win, and are there strategies by which a smart player can overcome the schemes and walk out with the big teddy bear for his/her sweetie?
OK with me manny
Hell I had to look up artifices in the dictionary.
I’ll post as a question next time.
You were lucky. The same company runs the North Carolina state fair each year, and I know that they have prominent signs posted explicitly stating that it has to go through your own basket to win. (Of course, your brother’s exploits may be what caused them to put up the sign in the first place…)
Scams. There is even a book out by a descammer that explains what the carneys do.
I’ve got a book that explains several carny scams, but it’s at home and I’m not.
Once, I was at a carnival where they had a cork shooting game. You could shoot at small red targets for a dollar and win a small prize, or you could shoot at a smaller white target for two dollars to win a big prize. Ten smaller prizes could be traded in for a large prize. I saw a guy collecting the smaller prizes, blowing money like crazy. I walked up, paid two frogskins, hit the little white target, and the carny handed me a skateboard without hesitation.
I checked out books on skateboarding from the library. The wheels were good, the truck was good, the board solid and the assembly was tight. It seemed from all I could tell to be a decent quality skateboard that should have cost $50 to $75 dollars. To this day, I’m baffled at how easy it was to win.
There is an excellent book by Darwin Ortiz called “Gambling Scams” and it includes an excellent chapter on carnival games.
It covers the disks on the star game. According to this book, this game is impossible to win because the carny operator can streach the canvas the star is on and make it peek behind the disks.
The one with 3 “milk bottles” in a pyramid is a trick because the bottoms are weighted.
For the hit a seesaw to send a block up to ring a bell, they had a block of wood to change the point of fulcrum.
They had a special on this for 20-20. It ran twice, so it may appear again in the summer. I suppose they may sell the tape? Or is that just PBS.