General Coin Pusher Strategy

[Capn Curry]

There are four essential ways you can arrange your coins as you drop them: narrow versus wide, and thin versus thick. Each technique is worth experimenting with and, if you like, practicing.

To go thick, drop the coins so that they stack up on top of each other. When they fall, they’ll tend to fall as a group, cascading the effect all the way down to the prize chute. A thick grouping of coins has more shoving power than a thin group does, so if you’re trying to shift a big tower of coins or a pyramid of gold bricks, thick might be the way to go - but keep an eye on your coin reserve. Also, for all your real-world players out there: there are no spheres in this game, but if you’re playing a machine where your need to drop a ball off the payout ledge to make a win, going deep is critical: a ball can and will roll backward over a single layer of coins far more easily than it will a thicker layer.

Going thin is a lot more economical for your coins, at the cost of speed. When going thin, the idea is to make a thin, single-coin-thick layer. It’s efficient because one coin will displace its full area, rather than needing two or three stacked up coins to get the same distance. One tried and true way to go thin is to go slow; if you drop two or three coins at a time (and mind the timing so that your coins are landing on empty field), you’ll very naturally get the single-layer effect you’re looking for. Another good way to go thin is to enable the auto-drop and select a modest number of coins; so long as they’re not so plentiful they overlap each other when they fall you’ll been the right place. This can be disrupted by very heavy prizes (the coins will buckle and fold up on each other), and can be costly in terms of time, but nothing will stretch your coins further.

Going narrow is just about choosing a small area (half the playfield or less) to drop your coins. Going wide is the opposite. Going narrow focuses your pushing power, while going wide stabilizes the direction and (somewhat) helps prevent things going into the gutters.

When feeling out a new table, going thin & wide is typically my first approach: it maximizes my coin longevity and tries to push everything directly forward. If that doesn’t pan out for me, I usually go thick & narrow in one or both of the corners; if some heavy prize is making it hard for coins to proceed to the prize chute, a thick wave of coins can help clear those out of the way.

One last piece of wisdom: one of the ways you can tell that coin pushers are skill-based, and not luck-based games is that you can pretty obviously make bad decisions. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to identify what those bad decisions are, and then see if you can do the opposite.

Hope that helps some folks, and in any case, happy coin-dropping!