I’m putting the pitchman/barker first, because the real “game” of a carnival is the one where the owner tries to separate marks from their money, and the game operator plays it all day, every day.

While most carnival and amusement park game operators are bored teenagers who actually don’t care what you do, occasionally, a low key conman is working these games. If your game operator starts offering special deals if you just play one more game, changing prices, and otherwise fast-talking you, walk the other way. Some of these people are skilled manipulators who can separate people from money without them even knowing it. For example, this guy in the U.K. who lost his life savings playing a carnival game. (He he did win a giant stuffed banana with dreadlocks, though.)

If you feel you’ve been swindled by a carnival game operator, you don’t have to accept defeat. If it’s at an amusement park, track down the park offices and tell them what happened. If it’s on a boardwalk, there’s no doubt a government body that keeps vendors honest. If it happens at a fly-by-night carnival, you might be out of luck, but you could complain to the carnival owner or even the local police. “The authorities” are probably going to side with you over a carnie.

When some people see a basketball game at the carnival they think “I was known for my three-pointer in high school! I got this.” But they don’t got this. The line for a three-point shot in high school is around 20 feet from the basket and the basket is 10 feet high. A carnival game is likely to make you stand around 24 feet from a basket that’s a foot higher than regulation. The hoop is smaller and could even be an oval instead of round. The backboard might be angled, and the ball over-inflated, making it bouncier and less likely to go in. Because of these subtle changes, the muscle memory you developed in school will probably work against you.

To have any shot at making this, go for that swish: throw harder with a higher arc than you think you need to so you miss the backboard and get that “nothing but net” shot.

This game looks so easy. Just toss a softball into a basket that’s right in front of you. But it’s actually really difficult because the basket is angled so anything but a perfectly placed ball will roll out, and the back of the basket is springy, so if your throw lands there, it will bounce out every time.

The trick to winning is to throw the ball so the momentum is largely spent on the side of the basket—you want the softball to roll up the side instead of hitting the back of the basket, and backspin it too. But it’s still a hard throw.

Maybe you play a mean game of darts, so popping the right color balloon should be simple enough. But not if the darts are dull and the balloons under-inflated, which is often the case at these games. The only advice is to throw hard.

The milk bottle game is a carnival classic for its simplicity: Just knock over all three milk bottles and win a stuffed panda. But the milk bottles are probably heavier and more stable than you think. So you have to throw hard. And your accuracy suffers.

Unscrupulous game operators have been known to weight the bottom of one of the bottles to make an already difficult game harder. If they put the heavy bottle on top, it’s an easy game. This lets them give out the occasional victory to keep suckers on the line.

If you see a beer pong style game, and think “I can do this when I’m blind drunk! No problem!” Think again. Like the basketball game, slight differences, like a subtly slanted table, can make your muscle memory useless.

The Ladder Crawl game is fascinating: You should be able to easily crawl across a rope ladder, but every time you try you fall off, and so does everyone else.

The trick is that the ladder is attached on each end by a single point, so even though it looks wide, in terms of physics, it’s the same width as a tightrope or slack-line. If your center of gravity wobbles to either side of the exact center of the ladder for an instant, you’ll fall. Even if you can walk a slack-line, you don’t have your arms free to help you balance.

It can be done though, if you practice. Once you “get it,” they say, it’s really easy, but you’re not going to get it on your first, second, or 50th try.

Those ring toss games are way harder than they look. The rings barely fit over the top of the bottles, and they’re really bouncy, so even if you manage to place one exactly right (and you likely won’t) it will probably still bounce off.

There is a trick to this one: Throw two rings at once, one on top of the other, in a high arc. In a perfect world, the one ring will dampen the kinetic energy enough that only the top will bounce off—but it’s still a tough throw.

Usually played by kids, the Duck Pond is all random, and works on a simple principle: The “lower tier” prizes are worth way less than it costs to play the game, and there are so few ducks with high-tier prizes that the ride operators have paid for them many times over by the time someone wins one.

As you can see in the video above, it’s possible to win the game where you shoot the red star out of paper with a bb gun, but it’s not likely. The gun’s sights probably aren’t accurate, and even if they are, it’s still an uphill battle due to simple physics: As you shoot out pieces of paper, it becomes harder to puncture the paper (imagine shooting a bb at a single “hanging chad” to visualize this) and you need to remove every trace of red to win the frosted mirror or whatever.

The trick is to aim around the star instead of straight at it, essentially cutting it out of the paper instead of shooting the red parts. But this is still very difficult.

The classic strong man game of swinging a hammer to ring a bell has lured in countless strapping lads trying to impress their dates, and made fools of almost all of them. While carnies can adjust this so it’s impossible, even if they don’t, it’s still not something you’re likely to succeed at, no matter how strong you are, unless you know what you’re doing.

When swinging a heavy hammer for maximum force, technique is more important than brute strength, and our untrained instinct is to swing the hammer from over our shoulders and rely on arm strength. But success comes from swinging the hammer over your head, making yourself as large a fulcrum as possible, and using your legs to bring down as much weight as possible.

In the same way playing poker against your friends is a better bet than playing blackjack against a casino, gravitate toward competitive carnival games. Someone is going to win, after all, and it might be you. These games are a good deal for the carnival because five people paying $2 each to win a prize that cost them $1.50 is still a huge profit, and it’s good for you because there’s a one in five chance you’ll win.

If you want to be sneaky, here’s a tip for any game where the winner is the first one to inflate and pop a balloon: Watch who won the last game and use their place. There’s a brand new balloon there, where the other ones are stretched out from previous games and less likely to pop.