You probably can't win games at the CNE. Here's why.

Late summer. The carnival. The lights on the Midway. Excited screams from the rides.

The corn dogs. The candy floss. The...other food.

… The games.

The Canadian National Exhibition (founded 1897) is set to kick off its annual run in Toronto. And all over everywhere, fairs and carnivals are popping up every weekend.

 It’s a perfect time for an expert overview of midway and carnival games – how they work, and which ones to avoid.

Derek Potter is a games expert from South Carolina, who blogs insightfully for Theme Park Insider.com.

Potter doesn’t believe the games are rigged. But he says there are some things you need to know.

“If you want to win these games, you really have to observe," he says.

“These games look very winnable..but everything is not as it seems. If your goal is to win, then watch, observe and look at everything. Because there is a catch somewhere.”

Some contests are just inherently difficult, he warns. The house wins because you can’t.

“The game that you have the lowest chance of winning, I’ve found, is the ring toss."

"That’s really one of the pure luck kind of things. You see people walking around with the giant prizes and wonder how they did that, because you could sit there all day and throw hundreds of rings and not win.”

The other really hard one? Shooting out the red star with the BB gun.

“There are some instances where that game is pretty much impossible to win – especially if the star is bigger than an inch. There are places where there’s just not enough ammo for people to make it happen. Then you factor in that the guns are not straight, and do not shoot straight.”

But if you’re still determined, Potter’s here with an inside hint:

“Shoot around the star,” he advises.

“If you shoot at the middle, you’re only going to poke some holes in it.”

As he says that, I find myself recalling one of the more misguided questions of my youth: how hard could it possibly be to burst a balloon with a dart?

“Are the balloons blown-up, or are the half blown-up?” he asks, with an obvious been-there, done-that kind of wisdom.

“What about your dart? Can you actually stick it in the wall?”

Soft balloons and dull darts. No wonder I never got it done.

The litany continues:

Basketball tosses?

Inflated balls, smaller than regulation hoops – even spring-loaded backboards.

Those milk bottle stacks you knock over with a softball?

Sometimes there’s a weighted bottle. It’s on top and knocks the whole stack down during the demo. It’s on the bottom, holding the whole stack up, when it’s your turn to throw.

 But again, Potter’s there with a reminder that this is all supposed to be spontaneous, madcap fun.

“Even if you win, they win too, because if somebody walks away with a prize, other people want to play. You just spent five bucks to win something that costs 25 or 50 cents.”

And in the end?

“The name of the game is just to have fun,” he says.

“There’s always an angle. You just have to figure out what it is.”