🎵I made it through the wilderness. Somehow I made it through🎵 & finally I’ve come back to this website. Let’s kick things off with one of my favorite slot machines to advantage play: Madonna by Aristocrat/Gimmie Games. Before playing it I had heard others claim that it provides one of the stronger advantage plays available today. I definitely agree. It’s a really good game & if you don’t know how to hustle it, you’re about to.
Like many advantage/accumulator type slots the base game isn’t particularly great. In fact the base pays are straight up terrible. Of course this means the payouts are heavily weighted towards the bonus rounds & many customers who don’t know this dynamic often bail on it quickly to cut their losses. I suppose a Madonna fan could look past the weak base game because the sound is great & it plays several of her classic songs to sing along to.
Back to the bonus games which there are two on Madonna. One is called the “Like a Virgin” bonus, the other is called the “Lucky Star” bonus. The Like a Virgin bonus awards credits, free games or progressives while the Lucky Star is a Mighty Cash style bonus where you hope to fill the screen full of symbols for an additional award. As advantage players we are all about the Lucky Star bonus and here’s why…
How to advantage play Madonna?
Madonna comes in 1,2,5 & 10 cent denominations. Go through all of the bets & look for situations where there is a buildup of multipliers on the reels. Add them up. The higher the total the better. Multipliers go up by one when a boost symbol lands on a reel & go up to a maximum of 8x per reel. So a maxed out Madonna is 40x. The purpose of the multipliers is that they carry into the Lucky Star bonus where these multipliers will increase the values on that reel should they land in the bonus. If you are able to fill the entire screen, you’ll spin the Vogue wheel where your total win can be amplified with a 2x or 3x multiplier, or one of the progressives plus a multiplier.
A playable situation is mid to high teens & above. The teens is where you are likely to find the bulk of your hustling plays as anything higher is likely a situation of being in the right place at the right time because just about all hustlers will snatch anything over 20x. Play the machine through until you get the Lucky Star bonus.
I’m not much of a note taker but I did when I first discovered Madonna & over the course of 122 plays the average cumulative multiplier when I hit the “Lucky Star” bonus was 21x. Of course 122 plays isn’t the biggest sample size but this makes sense as it’s right around the midpoint of the maximum total multiplier of 40x.
I must include this disclaimer & warn new hustlers of this machine that you’ll need a decent sized bankroll, especially at the higher bets. It is rare but on a few occasions I’ve had $3 & $3.75 plays where I’ve had to put in over $1000 before triggering the “Lucky Star” bonus. The worst situation I’ve had in relation to my bet was a 75 cent play where I had to put in around $500. This isn’t meant to dissuade you, it’s just the reality that the machine can sometimes play dead.
Overall, Madonna is a great machine with good potential for large wins. Also, full disclosure it was the game in which I had the most handpays & was by far the most profitable machine for me in 2020. Boosts appear at a decent rate so playable opportunities generate fairly quickly & while the base game is weak, the Lucky Star bonus more often than not makes up for it. Because of the potential, it is a game that is scouted pretty hard by hustlers. For example, last year in two separate visits to San Manuel Casino in Southern California, I saw hustlers camping their three Madonna machines pretty much anytime a customer was playing them. Just have to claim your camping spot early I guess.
