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Chuck E. Cheese Redemption

Ponder this. You must be 21 to gamble on the floor of a Las Vegas casino. Yet you don’t even need to be house-trained to gamble on the floor of a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant.

The Chuck E. Cheese business model has always fascinated me. As a child, there was something almost magical about it: the lights and sounds, the fun games, the unyielding drive to collect tickets, getting prizes, begging your parents for “just one more quarter”. This drive was undeniably a gambling-complex — one that was directly aimed and marketed toward children. Now in truth my uncle taught me Blackjack when I was 5, so those feelings weren’t new to me. But I still bought in.

Growing up, the similarities between Chuck and the MGM were slowly brought into focus. The environments were nearly identical. The games were comparable. And most frustratingly, both houses always won.

In Blackjack, the house has an advantage over the player. Card-counting systems may put the player at a slight advantage over the house, but that advantage is slim and difficult to exploit over a long period of time. The house can also decide to remove you from any table for any reason at any time.

At Chuck’s, the house advantage is immense. And the intermediary currency, tickets, masks this advantage.

For example, consider a “good” prize, a Guitar Hero Bundle for the XBox360 that costs 50,000 tickets. According to Chuck himself, additional tickets can be added to your stash “for that real special prize” at 1 cent per ticket. With the assumption that Guitar Hero retails around $100 (a conservative assumption), this has two important implications: 1) Chuck makes at least 5:1 over the player. 2) You need to make over 125 tickets per quarter to beat the house. So how do you do this?

As a child, my best redemption game was “The Cyclone”. A ring of lights surrounded a game table, with a single bulb illuminated at a time. The light would circle the table as players attempted to “catch” the light within a single “Jackpot” bulb. The Jackpot incremented with each failed attempt, and would default back to 200 tickets on a successful catch. I have a good sense of rhythm (“You notice how I’m always on time“) so I was quite frequently able to hit the jackpot. But more often than not, I’d lose.

In college, I began to think back to my Chuck E. Cheese days and how much of my (parent’s) money they still had. I devise a plan to beat the house – a “Cyclone Hack”. The device would attach to the game structure, with a movable light sensor positioned a few bulbs before the Jackpot bulb. An adjustable delay timer, triggered by the sensor, would deploy a plunger to hit the “stop” button at the perfect time. After a few calibration quarters, I’d be grabbing the Jackpot every single time. And at 200 tickets per quarter, I’d also have a considerable advantage over the house. It was simple, yet elegant. Something Andy Dufresne would do.

After a few weeks of scheming, the plan was unfortunately scrapped for two reasons: 1) To reach any worthy prize, I’d have to hit +200 Jackpots and spent almost 20 hours at the machine, and 2) “The Cyclone” is rigged!

In my research, I was able to obtain the official manual for “The Cyclone”.

The Cyclone has multiple game modes with adjustable settings. These settings include the ability to set the Jackpot bulb’s difficulty, coupled with the all-around soul-crushing “win every X games” mode. I haven’t researched other games, but I’d bet all my tokens that they all have similar options.

Slot-machines by comparison have heavy restrictions and must operate on a completely random roll. Children’s redemption games apparently have a free pass.

In 2008, the South Carolina House killed the “Chuck E. Cheese” bill, which would make it officially legal for games such as Skee Ball and other games to offer tickets or tokens used for prizes. They remain a gray area, however I can only expect to see more of these bills in the future.

So in conclusion, Chuck E. Cheese is a horrible but enjoyable kid-casino. Their games, while fun for your kids, will certainly dip into their college fund. But come on. A child’s laughter is worth at least a year at ASU.

Personally, I think I’ll stick to the slightly less-corrupt Crane Game.