Sat Nov 03, 2018 1:26 pm by L4R3L2
I'm fairly new myself, but maybe I can help a bit.
Changing to a different combination can change EVERYTHING! On my primary practice lock, I can sometimes find two gates in one run. Sometimes I even get a hint at the third. Change the combination, and the wheels are hiding the gates. AWL shows nothing. AWR gets me a hint of a gate I can eventually use to find the others, but only when I park wheels where the low areas are; and those have to be determined deliberately if any time is to be made in the game. Sometimes it's a two graph spin, which could easily be done in 15-20 minutes of free spinning, and other times it's a challenging spin that requires up to ten graphs, trying this and that to find low areas.
I've come to prefer checking gates by running one wheel at a time through the indicating area. If that doesn't show anything, THEN I'll resort to a high/low test. What works all boils down to where you park the other wheel(s). Park on a high area, and you won't see squat. Try parking your high or low wheels wherever you found the lowest areas to be while graphing. It might be ten off the gate number, it might be forty off! Usually, the answers don't come as easily as the textbook examples show.
Just like femurat said, keep in mind that when the gates of two wheels are on the same number, or within a number or two of eachother, a high/low test can appear to give "the gate" the large reading of the three because you are assuming you are only trying to determine one gate's wheel, when actually there are two at that position. It is actually the other two wheels (that have the smaller readings) that have gates. I ran into this two days ago, and it had me confused, too.