Losing gives roughly half the technique that winning does, so you need double the losses just to max technique in each game.
Shill is pretty good to max skill level, since it gives a decent amount of CS for little nerve, but you'll get to max skill while maxing technique anyway, so there's no real point to it.
(realized how long this post was after I wrote it... whoops) If you repeatedly win, your audience will leave more often, and audience leaving means more nerve spent gathering audience and introducing games.
Think of it this way: Gathering an audience and playing with it properly, you can usually get 10-15 games out of them, including both wins and losses. Say you get 7 wins and 7 losses, and a loss is worth 1 technique EXP (TXP for short) and a win is worth 2 TXP, plus introduced each game once until someone with a heart turned up. That's 40 nerve gone, and you're expecting to gain 21TXP.
Opposite case, gather an audience, demo each game once, and lose 14 games. Same nerve usage, 40N, but now you only gain 14TXP, or 66% what you would've gotten had you played while attempting to win. The upside being you can keep losing until your nerve runs out, instead of being forced to gather another crowd and introducing each game again, so, lets look at that as well shall we?
Same values as before, but let's up nerve usage to 120, three times the original. With the win/lose method, you're looking at 63TXP gained, while with the losing method, since you can just keep losing, you only spend the initial 12 to gather and demo each game, getting 56 losses, or 56TXP gained, roughly 88% of the first method.
And note, that this assumes one win for each loss, when in reality you can get away with 1.5 wins for each loss if playing for hearts, making that method even more effective.
In the long run, only losing and never winning leads to reduced technique gain and costs you a few mil, while losing some and winning some leads to increased technique gain, lower money loss, and faster CS growth as well since CS gain for winning is 50% higher than losing.
So, for best technique gain: - Gather audience once, maybe twice - Demo each game until one with a heart turns up, start from the bottom then move up from there. If you maxed a game you can just skip it, in which case you'll be forced to introduce games 'til someone wants to play, which is less than ideal. - If someone with a heart turns up ? Lose until their attention is maxed, you can ignore everyone else, only the guy with the heart matters. ? Win once or twice, enough to lower attention but not enough to empty it completely, then lose to top it off again. Repeat until suspicion gets to 80-90% of max, then just win until they leave. You can expect roughly 10-15 games with 1.5:1 win/loss ratio this way. - If no hearts turn up ? Lose until someone's attention is maxed or overall attention is over 60% ? Win until attention is around 40%, then lose. Repeat win/lose until people stop gambling and start leaving. Once suspicion gets to 60%, you can just keep winning to force the audience to leave. If you're lucky you're looking at a 1:1 win/loss ratio this way. - Completely ignore shills and pickpockets, they're good for money and for CS gain, but worthless if you only want technique.