Profiting From Arcade Games: Dave and Buster’s
By Matthew Gianino
Published by GDM Entertainment at Smashwords
Copyright Matthew Gianino 2011
x – Introduction –
xx – Explanation of Risk –
I – The “Confidence Effect” –
II – The “Negative Zone” and how to avoid it –
III – You Have to Spend Money to Win Money…or Do You? –
IV – The New Rewards System & Coupons –
V. - Half-Price Wednesdays and Registering for Rewards –
VI – Prizes -
Section 2: Game Play
Section 3: Coin Games
Closing Statements
Legal Stuff
x. Introduction
Greetings! First I’d like to thank you for purchasing my guide to winning skill-based games at Dave & Buster’s, it took me 5 years to compile this information and I am grateful that you took the opportunity to allow me to share it with you. Just to give you some background information about myself, allow me to share my story about how I started my journey to where I am today. It all started when I was 11 years old when my Dad took me to Dave & Buster’s for the first time in my life. Now, only being 11 years old, the closest thing I had seen to a large arcade-style play area was Chuck-E-Cheese, and when you go from an arcade like that to an arcade aimed primarily at adults, it can be quite overwhelming. Walking into the Midway area for the first time was, for a kid my age, like walking through the gates of Heaven. There were so many games to play and so many people there that were just having a good time, and the atmosphere was so welcoming that you’d never want to leave. I was hooked, and even 10 years later I still go back to Dave & Buster’s every week, although now it’s more or less to just put on a show for the future generation of big-winners like myself! With that being said, I hope you get a wealth of information out of this guide and take it with you to the Midway and start on your own path to winning mountains and mountains of tickets just as I did. It won’t be the easiest thing in the world, but with a little patience you’ll find that beating the “system” is a lot easier than you thought.
xx. Explanation of Risk
I’d like to take the time to explain that while this guide can show you how to win a majority of the time you play, it is not a guide that shows you how to win 100% of the time. There will always be some element of risk involved when you play skill-based games and there is no getting around it. You will find that there are hundreds of elements that go into determining whether or not you will win, I am simply showing you how to alter those elements in your favor. Please do not take this guide as “Cheat Sheet” of some kind because it is nothing of the sort. There is literally no way to win 100% of the time at ANY skill-based game at Dave and Buster’s. You will lose and when you do you have to realize that being a game of chance, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Every single game is based in some way on odds and/or the percentage of people who win and how often they do so. This guide will teach you how to take your win ratio from, for example, 1:22, all the way down to 1:4. When you take that and apply it to how much you are winning each time you win, you will realize that if there were some miracle way of winning 100% of the time, Dave and Buster’s would do something to counter-balance it ASAP.
I – The “Confidence Effect” and How to Avoid it
The Confidence Effect is something I noticed very often over my years of playing these games and I am sure you all have seen it as some point in your lives as well. I gave it this particular name because I feel that it embodies what is going on inside a person’s head so perfectly that I do not know of any other term that could describe it more accurately. Basically, the “Confidence Effect” is the state of mind a person gets into when he/she wins a skill-based game on accident (by random chance). The severity of the effect varies depending on how soon from when the person starts playing that they actually win. The sooner the person wins, the greater the effect, and vice versa. The negative side of this effect is that if a person wins by chance very early from when he/she started playing, they will think they are the “master” of the game and will continue to play even though they basically have no idea what they are doing. It is basically the same idea when playing cards, where if you are winning a lot it is best to stop playing whilst you are ahead. But as we all know this is never what actually happens, no, that person keeps playing because he or she thinks that they can keep winning just as much as they were before. But what people do not realize is that with any game that has an element of chance involved, the odds of a continued long-run winning streak get exponentially smaller the longer you continue to play the game. Dave and Buster’s uses this to their advantage because they realize that 90% of the people do not consider this when they are playing. These games cost money to play which means that the more you play because you think you are the “master” because you won your first time ever playing, the more money you are giving to Dave and Buster’s because I can guarantee you that without the right mindset and attitude, you will quickly go from winning a few times to losing EVERY TIME. Do not fall for the Confidence Effect people, if you notice that you are winning more than usual, stop and take a break. Do not get sucked into thinking that just because you won 5 times in a row means you can win 50 times in a row. Use common sense when using this guide and you will be winning oodles of tickets in no time.
II – The Negative Zone
Dave and Buster’s can basically be called a casino for people who don’t want to lose large sums of money or their dignity. We can use that comparison to help us understand that since Dave and Buster’s runs itself like a Casino, they make their games so that the majority of the players lose rather than win. On top of that, even if there are a select few outliers of individuals who win very often, the amount of people who lose as a whole is more than enough to counter-balance or most of the time overthrow the amount of money that they are through those “gifted” individuals. Lets take Spin and Win for example, which is a game where you pull a lever and a light goes around a large circle and you can win 1000 tickets if you stop the light right when it hits the slot where the 1000 is sitting. The only catch is that there are only 3 places where 1000 is on the board and at each spot, the 1000 is only 1 light in “width” (for a reference, 20 tickets is 3 lights in width, meaning the spot where the 20 sits is a lot larger, allowing enough space for 3 lights to fit and therefore making it easier to hit). What does this mean? Well, it means that while the game is based primarily on skill, there is still a large element of the game left to random chance. In actuality even though there are 3 spots where one could hit 1000 tickets, the actual ratio of people who win 1000 tickets is 1:22. This means that on average, only one person in a group of 22 people will land on 1000 tickets ONCE. This is a horrible average if you want to play this game in an effort to obtain large amounts of winnings, especially seeing that it costs ~10 credits to play each time ($20 is 100 credits). This is where the Negative Zone comes in to play and is something you should try most dearly to avoid. What I mean by the “Negative Zone” is that for the average person, or even someone who is learning and can win with a ratio greater than 1:22, the amount of tickets you win from the game will not be enough to win a prize from the Winners Circle that has the same retail value as the amount of money you spent to win those tickets in the first place. So even though you think you are winning a lot, you need to realize that you could be spending $500 to win an amount of tickets that could only buy you a $300 PS3. This is the reason why you will sometimes hear people say that you would be better off buying whatever you want from the Winners Circle at a store rather than trying to win it here. They are right, unless you can tip the odds in your favor and that’s what I am here for, right?
III – You Have to Spend Money to Win Money…or Do You?
I know that by now you are probably wondering where the actual guide part of this guide is. It’s coming, be patient fellow arcade warriors. I want to wrap up this introduction with a thought on how much money you will need to spend to become a master at these games and to do so requires some fairly simple explanations. The whole idea behind what I am going to teach you is minimizing your losses while maximizing your ticket return. Every game in the store has a different “value” in terms of whether or not it would be wise to try to apply a min/max scenario for such a game. Being one of the best at my local Dave & Busters, I have figured out which games you will need to be playing in order to maximize the amount of tickets you walk out of the store with, while at the same time making sure the amount of money you’re spending stays at an absolute minimum. Since this is a guide after all, I will of course be sharing this information to you in the most streamlined and easy-to-understand way possible.
First, lets start out by discussing how you actually play games at Dave and Busters, because it isn’t like your normal every-day arcade where all you have to do is put in a few quarters and go to town. No, their system is run on “Power Cards,” which are basically just swipe card that you use to play any game in the store (each game has a slot where you swipe your card. For most games, 1 swipe = 1 credit/attempt). You fill this card with “chips” by depositing money onto it. The more money you spend the more chips you get, and it actually is more financially efficient to spend more during your visit than it is to spend less. Let me show you by explaining how many chips you get for certain amounts of money and what the dollar per chip ratio would be for that specific choice.
Amount Deposited, Chips Given, $ Per Chip
$10.00, 48, $0.21
$20.00, 100, $0.20
$25.00, 135, $0.19
$35.00, 200, $0.18
$50.00, 300, $0.17
$75.00, 550, $0.14
$100.00, 750, $0.13
$12.00, 60, $0.20
$23.00, 125, $0.18
$28.00, 170, $0.16
$39.00, 250, $0.16
$55.00, 375, $0.15
As you can see, the more money you deposit on your card (during a single transaction), the better value you end up getting in terms of how much you are spending per single chip. The green area is the supercharged area, and shows you the same value you would receive for purchasing those options as well. Supercharging is basically when you pay $1.00 - $5.00 extra on top of how much you are depositing onto your card. With that, you are given 25% more chips on your card for that single purchase. Note: You cannot supercharge the $75 or the $100 dollar amounts at this time.
Using this chart, we can clearly see that the best value for someone going to the arcade. For those of you who usually go with a group of people, they also offer a special offer called the “4-Player Pack.” This is basically just what it sounds like, except you have 3 different options as to how much money you want to put on each card. With this offer, each card is automatically supercharged for free.
4 – Player Pack
Amount on each card, Chips (total), $ Per Chip
$25.00, 680, $0.15
$35.00, 1000, $0.14
$50.00, 1500, $0.13
So if you are going alone and want to get the most game play for the least amount of money (remember that min/maxing thing I was talking about?) go with the $100 option for your card. If you do not want to spend that much then the fallback would be $75, but if you are trying to turn this into a profitable experience I would not go lower than that unless you supercharge seeing as supercharging will help make up for the loss of value coming from the lower deposited onto the card.