Answer
In order to win, they will need patience and skill. You have to be able to recognize when a prize is in a winning position or near it and then swoop in for the win.
Cheating Online UFO Crane Games
The short answer to the question is no. We are not a rigging site and do our best to ensure that there are no unfair advantages for players on Toreba. Here’s a detailed answer:
Toshiba advertises itself as an ‘international online bridge community’. There are several things we need to clarify when answering this question:
Players should play at their highest level of expertise because this will determine if the quality of gameplay is fair or not – while some players might want to see whether they can win against better opponents than themselves, others may also be looking for opportunities to improve their own game by playing more challenging hands. If you want the latter then it makes sense that you would be unhappy with rigged hands.
We strongly believe that online bridge is a social game, and it’s best enjoyed when both players are in the same room playing together for real – on Toreba, you can either play with friends or make new ones from around the world. This means that we also promote friendly gameplay on Toreba – even if two players have equal ratings, the higher-rated player will be assigned as declarer so that they can still win some points from a successful defense (but not more than they would have won had both hands been played with normal distribution). This way players who want to challenge themselves against other strong players can do so while keeping the quality of gameplay fair and fun.
On Torba, there are two ways to win games – by making more tricks than your opponent or by winning a matchmaking tournament. We have made an additional effort to ensure that even players who perform well in tournaments do not get too many extra points from the uneven distribution of hands. For example, if a player beats all opponents in a tournament but only wins half of the hands, they will still gain fewer points than they would if both halves had been played with a normal distribution (see diagram below).
In addition, while there is some luck involved when predicting which cards your partner has, it should never be enough for you to lose the game even though you actually had every right to win. If this does happen then please let us know and we’ll investigate immediately.
We realize that it’s impossible to avoid all human errors, and we work with the best bridge software in order to minimize errors related to cheating. For example, each hand is checked by two of our most experienced players before being released – if something doesn’t look right then one of them will investigate further. As you can see from the above diagram about tournament points, people who aspire to play well and win tournaments should not be too concerned about additional problems caused by uneven distributions – the more skill a player has, the more they are rewarded on Toreba for their ability. Finally, we always have an eye out for any irregularities in gameplay or unusual activity so please let us know if you notice anything suspicious! If you have any other questions about the game then please don’t hesitate to ask ;-)!
It’s not you. Claw machines are rigged.
All the best, Torba team.
To those asking about how we are going to resolve issues for people who have played rigged hands. The most important thing is that your ratings will not be affected as a result of this issue. Unlike some of the other online sites where our services were used, we do not use rigged hands in our rating system (not even on player levels). We hope that this will alleviate a lot of concerns from everybody regardless of whether your actual gameplay was affected by these bad distributions. It’s also worth noting that during the period where our services were used on badbridge.com those players were never assigned rigged hands after we stopped providing them, so nobody will ever be stuck with a loss because of this issue.
With regards to what is going to happen in regards to future games played between your Toreba accounts and anyone who had their account on badbridge.com during that time, if you play against someone who was using some bad distribution then you will receive an automatic win even if the actual play indicates that they could have won (if there are any rigged cards in your hand or they actually could have made more tricks). The same applies for anyone else playing against someone benefiting from this issue – if you win then it is an auto-win regardless of whether you actually could have won with normal distribution.
If you do lose against someone who was using bad distribution then this will not be tracked as a loss on your Toreba account, but we are planning to give out free points based on the number of hand distributions that player received between us and badbridge.com (so everyone should ultimately end up ahead). We’re still working out exactly how many points this will translate into though so watch this space :-). Note that if any issues arise about rigged cards or unfairly distributed hands in the future, we always encourage people to let us know first before taking action themselves. That’s not only good for people who are falsely accused, but also good for our site because we can verify everything that happened in a game and get to the bottom of what actually took place.
We’ll still be sending out compensation on our own terms, but we will take into account how many hands you’d have played against people using bad distributions if you had been playing normally. If it’s very few or even just one hand then please don’t worry about contacting us – we can easily determine your situation just by looking at any other matches where those accounts were involved (we know who most of them are). However, if there are quite a lot of distributions that affected players received then whoever reported this issue is going to have an advantage because they know exactly how many points they would receive for each distribution that was ranked (the more distributions, the better your rating will look). We’ve taken a sample of the distribution and are letting people know what they would have got from here if those players hadn’t been taking advantage of this situation (so far it doesn’t take many distributions for your rating to get a noticeable boost.) I think that’s everything, but feel free to ask any questions if anything isn’t clear.
Respectfully yours,
Torba team. Dear all, You may or may not be aware that badbridge.com was using some ‘statistical’ models with regards to hand selections in their tournament games which resulted in a number of rigged hands being distributed across Toreba worldwide over the past few months; well over 100,000 games were affected by this. We’re obviously quite disappointed that a popular website (and former valued partner) would seek to undermine the integrity and fun of what we all love about Toreba, but at least the issue has been identified early and we hope this will allow us to address it more quickly than might otherwise have been possible. As some of you are aware we’ve made some efforts in recent months to improve our own systems with regards to hand selection accuracy and suppression; these steps were intended not only for internal testing (which is still ongoing) but also as part of our preparations for updating our game engine as well as improving many other features across all platforms. While I am not yet in a position to share full details about any upcoming changes here, there should be some good news for those of you who have been waiting patiently for a few months. Unfortunately, we can’t yet give any concrete dates, but hopefully, the wait shouldn’t be too much longer now. As many of you are aware badbridge.com had been using their own system to ‘optimize’ hand distributions and were also manipulating accessibility settings on certain accounts in order to try and achieve an advantage over others (see below for details). We’re still actively looking into the full extent of this issue as well as how far back it goes, but at least we’ve managed to confirm that playing against all hands used by them will automatically result in your highest possible rating on our site being reduced and potentially lead to long term negative effects if there are enough games involved. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns so that we can continue to update everyone as necessary. Thanks, Torba team. [ARTICLE ENDS]
In order to win, they will need patience and skill. You have to be able to recognize when a prize is in a winning position or near it and then swoop in for the win.
When you find a prize that you would like to claim, grab the claw control and carefully maneuver it over the prize. Be sure not to let go of this grip! If it’s beyond your reach, simply press a button on either side of the machine and hold onto it until the claw has selected your prize.
It’s not just your imagination: those claw machines do seem uncharacteristically tricky at times.
The Bureau of Gambling Control has declared that such machines as claw machines, are “common types of illegal devices” under Penal Code sections 330a, 330b, and 330.1.
Some might think that the skill you have as to whether or not they can bag a cuddly toy at a vending machine comes down to luck, but according to this video, it’s not the case – and most machines are rigged.
Claw machines are notoriously difficult to play with, but $1,000 worth of prizes is bound to make the challenge more worthwhile. … Sadly, there was no iPhone inside the machine when it was pried open. The box contained what looked like eight chocolates in a different shape and color than those inside the machine, which only increased anticipation for a reward that never came.