It’s a battle to win anything at midway

Simon Brown

There is one series of games for which top athletes need not apply.

To succeed at the midway games at the Orange County Fair, forget

about skill, strategy and experience. The only guaranteed way to walk

away from the fair with a large, plush prize is by luck. That, and a

little inside information.

Carnival employees will readily disclose the tricks of their trade

if asked, but even following their advice does not ensure success.

At the Shoot The Hoop game, for example, carnival employee Amy

Carlson suggests “shooting the ball high in the air and going for a

swish.”

That sounds easy enough, but that advice guarantees little because

this game, like most carnival games, is designed so that the odds of

a player succeeding are small.

Those attempting to sink a basket at Shoot the Hoop are informed

that the basket is neither regulation size nor height. The hoop is in

fact 10 1/2 feet high instead of the usual 10, and the rim is barely

large enough for a regulation basketball to fit through it. As a

result, the simple sinking of a free throw is a major challenge.

Other seemingly easy games are equally challenging.

In Speed Pitch, a player is given two baseballs to throw. The

first is used to give an idea of the pitcher’s speed. With the

second, the contestant must guess the speed of the pitch. A correct

guess wins a prize.

Employee Ricky Quinn says that a player should “guess the second

pitch the same as the first,” but throwing a ball at the exact same

speed consecutively is hard to do.

Then there is the most difficult game of all, Tip ‘Em Over. The

game itself is simple: hurl an oversized ball at three bottles and

knock them down. But the bottles appear to have weights in the

bottom, so even if you knock two of them down, the third just won’t

seem to fall. The employees suggest hitting the bottles dead center,

but it seems almost impossible to make this happen.

Other games, however, do offer some opportunities for a player to

use skill to win. In Break A Dish, $2 gets a player one soft baseball

which they must use to break a plastic dish sitting on a rack. Here,

a smooth, easy throw with a little aim can easily produce a hit.

But even for those with neither luck nor skill, not all games will

relieve you of your money and send you away empty-handed. A few

promise prizes for everyone.