Claw machines are rigged.

https://www.vox.com/2015/4/3/8...claw-machines-rigged

quote:

For now, there's only one sure-fire way to beat the claw machine: don't play.

In the long term, the house always wins.

I own a bingo pinball machine. At one time, they were popular in bars and diners before they were driven out of existence in many jurisdictions as illegal gambling devices, similar to slot machines or video poker games. Typically, winners at the pinball machine video poker game were paid by the establishment, but the take of coins over time would exceed the paybacks.

I don't know about the intricacies of the video poker games, but the pinball machine I own has a series of jumpers and terminals in the guts of the machine that can adjust the probability of winning over a range from sometimes to seldom. The owner of the machine could select the setting that he viewed as likely to produce the maximum revenue.

My interest in such machines was originally piqued while I was eating lunch as a boy in a small-town diner and watching a patron purchase roll after roll of nickels at the counter, break them open atop the glass of the machine, and plug them into the machine. It was a multiple-coin machine that allowed adding coins to get an extra ball or more favorable configuration of the bingo field. I saw the player collect on wins sometimes, but eventually all the nickles ended up in the cash box of the machine. That was one of my first introductions to the perils of gambling.

To this day, games that have an advantage for the house have little appeal to me.

Big Al