I have similar results, but I am not all that great a player. Most of the time, if the ball is already in the vicinity of the outlane nudges are less effective....I try to use nudging to keep the ball out of that area to begin with, such as vertical nudges when the ball is hitting the slings. On some games you can see when that side to side sling action is about to push the ball into the outlane drain, and push to send the ball up to hit some other benign area away from there. On RFM, I'll try to nudge that not only to keep it away from the outlanes, but to use that sling action to send the ball up to hit the martian targets on the sides.