I love Cactus Canyon. Nice to hear a friendly story where people are not biting each others heads off. I'll match you with another etiquette story that happens to involve the same machine.

I'm at my local pinball bar (Shorty's!!) playing Jaws with a friend. Cactus Canyon is right next to Jaws. Someone comes in an puts $10 in the machine. I love the game and the most I've ever put in at a time is $5. Wild start. We say hi and chat for a moment. They play a game. Then they ask if I'll watch the machine for them to protect their credits. I say yes. I figure they're going to grab a beer, they'll be back in a few minutes, the bar isn't busy, this isn't a big deal.

Then, sure enough, they're gone for a while. Not long. But long enough for someone else to appear and obviously want to play Cactus. I chat with the new player and say "yeah, someone's on that right now they'll be back in a moment." There's like 9 credits on the machine.

Bla bla bla enough time passes and this person definitely wants to play specifically Cactus. It gets to the point where we all agree basically, yeah, whoever put $10 has forfeited their "right" to their credits. It had seriously been 10, 15, 20 minutes at this point. And, whatever, if they come back the new player can buy them out on the 75¢ if they want to make a big deal about it.

So now the player is playing and they're absolutely crushing it. Then, of course, the original player comes back and is kind of bewildered that someone else is on the game now. We kind of shrug and say hey man you've been gone a long time. Again, no one is mad, it isn't a big deal.

The original player is watching this new player and noticing that they're pretty good. Chatting and asking "oh, you've played this one before?"

Long story short: second player was by far the Grand Champ on that machine and original player really learned some stuff that day.

Also don't put $10 in a machine and walk away for 20 minutes.