Where are the strategies in the guides derived from?

Good question. I tried to address that a bit here in the FAQ (last question).

Often, it is a lot of trial and error and bouncing off as many results as possible with trusted pros. But I do not often track every single play/result as some folks might do on certain games.

On Village Wolf said

Seems like I can always find some play on Grand Buddha Link.  Because it’s such a short run I think it would be fun to gather data on how much it’s worth. A picture of before and after would likely be all that’s needed. The hard part would be to set up the statistics.

I agree that that would be the hard part. In other games, where you play for a bonus of some kind, then statistics on the bonus win are going to be meaningful.

But with Grand Buddha Link, suppose you find a board where the whole thing is loaded up with multpliers, let’s say all of them, and for the next 8 spins. Then you whiff on all line pays, but on the 8th spin you hit a bonus which lands on one of the progressive meters. Let’s say you win $500 for the Major (or whatever it’s called).

How on earth are you supposed to figure that? Here you have bonus come down, completely unrelated to why you were playing, and then the multipliers that made you sit down in the first place netted you zilch, or more accurately, -8 spins, and still you wound up with a really nice win. This is a bit of an extreme example, but this sort of thing will happen to some degree often enough if you try to handicap this game.

In Grand Buddha Link bonus wins are noise, while in some other game you might try to pull data on, the bonus wins will be key/integral data