Techno Stuff
How They Work - Spin Cycle - Score/Odds Step-up
surf club |
| score disc diagram - click for big version |
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OK, start drinking. If you've already plowed through the extra balls section, then you're limited to one drink only (36 oz glass max), as part of this circuit is the same. If you haven't peeked at the extra balls description, keep drinking until this makes sense. If you find comprehension sneaking up on you despite my best efforts, please send in a comment and let me know what the recipe is for your gnosh (I have a pile of software enhancement requests from marketing departments that I need some kind of altered state to have a chance of making sense of them).
surf club |
| score step-up |
|---|
Let's dispense with the easy bit - we want 50V pulses to make their way to the score unit step-up coil (or coils, on games with independent odds for different colors/sections). The 50V can come from one of two places. The blue circuit is the easy one...it goes up and just connects to the 50V supply.
The Blue Circuit
It's job is to initially power the guaranteed score advance. Referring to the score disc diagram, we see that wire #71 connects to wire #45-6 (the purple guy) when the score unit is reset and on the first step (it's the short wiper pointing up). The reset is necessary to advance the unit off reset, so on the first coin/credit you are guaranteed the scores/odds will light to the minimal level. Since the circuit is also active at this point, you are guaranteed the scores will advance again on the next spin cycle if they are still at minimum. Beyond the second step, you are at the mercy of the green circuit.The blue circuit also feeds down into the score extra step path. Score extra step is what makes the odds advance more than one level in a single spin cycle. Exactly how score extra step works is convoluted, so we'll wait and deal with that as a completely separate topic.
The Green Circuit
OK, now we are going to start calculating odds while working backwards through the circuitry. At this point, we will assume we have the 50V feed on the green wire #65-3. We see a direct line into the score disc which is accurately drawn. If the score disc is at the second step, and we have the 50V, then it will step to the third step regardless of what the spotting disc is doing. However, wires #93-3, #91-3 and #90-5 also do single steps at position 2 and 3. This position 2 step is redundant with the wire #65-3 circuit, but is there to allow an operator to clip wire #65-3 from the score disc to make the score advance harder to get!Here's a table of what each wire does at each step of the score disc, and by counting the number of contacts on the spotting disc for each wire, the odds of the 50V getting through are shown.
| Active at Step | Wire # | Odds Through Spotting Disc (out of 50) | Loose | Tight |
| 0 | #71 | n/a (bypass) | 100% | 100% |
| 1 | #71 | n/a (bypass) | 100% | 100% |
| 2 | #65-3, #91-3, #93-3, #90-5 | n/a (bypass), 2(3), 19(23,30,32), 3(4) | 100 or 78% | 100 or 48% |
| 3 | #91-3, #93-3, #90-5 | 2(3), 19(23,30,32), 3(4) | 78% | 48% |
| 4 | #43-4, #90-5 | 4(5), 3(4) | 18% | 14% |
| 5 | #91-3, #90-5 | 2(3), 3(4) | 14% | 10% |
| 6 | #91-3, #90-5 | 2(3), 3(4) | 14% | 10% |
| 7 | #90-5 | 3(4) | 8% | 6% |
Right, so what the heck does that mean. Well, it turns out that on many bingos, especially the early ones, there is a lot of tweaking to the odds that can be done by the operator. For each wire listed in the table, the initial number is the number of contacts on the spotting disc connected to that wire. By connecting adjacent solder lugs around the edge of the spotting disc, the operator can add more contacts into the circuit. The numbers in parenthases is the accumulated count of connected contacts as more of these solder lugs are tied together.
For example, at step 3, wire #91-3 contributes two contacts minimum, or three if the adjacent solder lug is connected. The spotting disc has 50 contacts, so in the loose and tight columns is calculated the minimal/maximal odds of advancing the scores off that step. The odds for any Surf Club machine must fall in this range assuming no other cutting/adding wires took place.
So we see from the score disc alone, your chances of getting from the 7th (3-in-line pays 48) to the 8th (3-in-line pays 64) score level is between 6-8%. You may be thinking this is a good deal, as you'd expect to insert about 13 coins/credits to get the step-up, and the payout increases 16, which is about even money. The payout for 4 and 5-in-line jumps up much more than that, however, so it's looking like you are going to take the operator to the cleaners.
Unfortunately for you, we are just getting started. The 50V on the green wire has traversed a long and tortuous path to get here, and it can get squelched at a number of places along the way. All these must be factored into the odds calculations.
overview
cam/wiper release
drag arms and cam timing
score unit step-up
score unit step-up and feature proportioning
score unit step-up and mixer #1/reflex
feature unit step-up
trip relay activation
