Before I did a lot of scratch-offs, my original place to wast-, er, spend money was to go to Dave & Buster's. It was about a year and half though before I figured out I could game the system and collect enough tickets to redeem for stuff that was actually worth having. They definitely had that coin-style game like they do in the gas stations & mini-arcade/casinos but I never had any luck with it.
Thanks to D&B, I must have a couple thousand dollars worth of equipment I paid nowhere near retail to: A 19" Sharp HD TV, A Sony Handy Cam, A PS3, An IPad 3, an I-touch mini 64GB (I think cant remember cause I gave this to a friend as a B-day gift), and a Jukebox.
Here's how it worked. I focused on games that had a high ticket payout for low cost. For $20, you could get about 120 points worth of play. Every game is going to take a different number of points to play, with those having higher jackpots of 1000 tickets or more (like the Infamous Spin & Win) costing more points than others.
There were 3 games I focused on: Double-Lightening Skeeball, Stop the Clock, and an Arcade game called "Gone Fishin". Skeeball was my absolute favorite. I mastered hitting the 100s slot with the lightening bolt on and could win the jackpot by beating the 600K score about 90%+ of the time. Each jackpot paid off 500 tickets although it reset to 200 and would go up 25 tickets so I'd wait until other people lost before playing again to collect the most tickets. On $20 of play, I could net about 20,000 tickets. And on half-price Wednesdays where game costs are 1/2 off, I think my highest take home for the night was 32,000 tickets.
Gone Fishin' was also another good arcade game to try. This is the one where the Polar Bear is batting fish to get them to travel the farthest distances. If you beat the high score, you win 1,000 tickets. The key on this game was to hit it when the arcade machine had been reset because if you post a really good score to win the jackpot, if it's too high you wont be able to win another one. This was also a low cost game but can't remember the point cost. Even if you didn't win the jackpot, it still produced 30-40 tickets for a good score.
Then there was this game called Stop the Clock. It's sort of like spin and win but a lot smaller. In this game the countdown timer counts upwards to 1000. The goal was to hit the stop button so that the timer stops exactly on 1000. If it does, you win 1000 tickets. I think you get 30 or so if you end up on 999 or 1001 but what I learned the sweet spot was somewhere to hit b/w 993-994-ish to get it to stop on 1000.
I used to play up in Philadelphia at Franklin Mills and would go up there on Friday nights after work (I was up in DE for awhile), or Wednesday nights if I didn't have to work Thursday. Things were great until D&B started "modifying" their games. The Double Lightening skeeball was removed and removed with a total crap skeeball game and the jackpots on Gone Fishin and Stop the Clock were reduced. Apparently I wasn't the only gamer. At my peak, I must have had almost 600,000 tickets. At one point when I tried to redeem, D&B didn't want to give me the prizes b/c they tried to tell me that my ticket balance per dollar amt spent was too high and triggered a fraud alert (apparently they have problems with their employees stealing prizes and thought I was one of their ringers working with someone on the inside). Total BS and it took over 2 years to clear up but I finally got to redeem my points. I think I used them all and havent played at any location in several years.
To put things in perspective, here were the ticket costs:
(Jukebox 94,000), (IPad-3 110,000), (PS3 110,000), (Sharp HDTV 19" 90,000), (Sony HandyCam 58,000). (I-Touch, 64,000?) and I think I gave some large stuffed animals away. I check back here and then to see if they get anything new in worthwhile to play for, but I haven't seen anything different from years ago. The only prize I was never able to get that I wanted was this sit-down Arcade game of Pac-Man & Galaga with the roller ball and joystick like they used to have in Pizza Hut & Pizza Inn locations in the 1980s/1990s. I think they wanted an ungodly amount for it, like 420,000 tickets. But the only place I ever saw this prize displayed was at the D&B location in Ft Lauderdale/Dania. I never saw it again and don't think it was a regular prize item.
Such was the gamer life until I had a co-worker tell me this stuff was for kids and introduced me to a place called "Dover Downs" where I could earn real money. All I'll say about that place is I have a Platinum Players Club Card which God only knows how much I must have los, er played in that place to get that status. But FL doesn't do Roulette (thankfully), so it's pretty much a scratcher strategy now.