We were in a casino arcade this week that had two-tier coin pushers, the top tier itself being the pusher for the lower tier.
On the top tier was a wad of cash sitting on top of the coins. In theory, if you could advance the wad far enough, it would fall from the first tier, then the second, then into your greedy little hands...
We learned a lesson that day... a $50 in quarters lesson...
The wad, even if you could advance it a centimeter or two with a lucky coin drop... would slowly scoot its way backward until it was maximally backward against the pusher again. Whaaa!
How is this so?
I'm guessing the pusher moves more smoothly inward, and perhaps just a little jerk-start outward... providing just enough inertial backward tendency to scoot that wad backward again against the pusher, but not enough of a jerk to visibly disturb the coins. That... or the tier was at a SLIGHT incline... again... not enough to be perceptible. I looked very close... as close as one can through a window... and could see no string or attachment to the wad of cash of any kind. How that cash would scoot backward I was not able to determine... but it would only loose ground in synch with the pusher movement... so I think my inertial theory is the right one.
Even if you tried to overwhelm that inertial tendency with enough quarters to keep the wad of cash advancing until it fell, at least in our experience... it couldn't be done... you couldn't get quarters in the slot fast enough... every little advance was frustratingly undone in just a few sweeps of the pusher... before you could build up enough quarters to cause the whole mass to slide again. We were "winning" tons of quarters doing this... so we played for over an hour before we ran out of our $50 source of quarters, jamming quarters into the machine at a furious pace hoping to win that wad of cash.
SO, THE QUESTION: Is the behavior of that wad of cash typical of coin pusher machines... or were we a victim of a particular scam?
While we generated quite a crowd watching us thinking we might any minute have a giant wad of cash in our hands... (the pusher was a giant octagonal one, so it had lots of viewing windows in to the action going on inside, which allowed for probably a good twenty people to watch us) all cheering every little advance and groaning every little set-back... ultimately the crowd... and us... were disappointed.
While we never won the wad of cash, Gatinha and I DID have at least more than an hour of exciting fun thinking it was possible... and we won a hat, a shirt , and some trinket toys by collecting various winning tokens that were mixed in with the quarters... so all in all we still enjoyed ourselves... not as much as we would have with a big fat wad of cash in our pocket... but still.
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