| Pachinko is a Japanese phenomena that is difficult to explain, but surprisingly easy to pick up and become addicted to after trying it. It is a game, and also a form of gambling. I came back from Japan about $100 richer than I would have because of it, and while I was in Japan, I did spend a fair amount of time playing this popular game. For those of you who don't know what it is, pachinko is generally described as "Japanese pinball". I'm not terribly fond of that description, because the similarities between the two are minimal at best. Other than the fact that both utilize metal balls, the games have little in common. I would describe pachinko as being closer to the "fruit machines" in Britain than to anything we have here. Maybe that's why I like it so much.. I play fruit machines incessantly when I'm in the UK.... Basically, a pachinko machine is an upright contraption. The flat vertical playing field is covered with a series of tiny steel pins, and arranged here and there are small openings that are called "slots". The idea is that you fire the ball up through the proper gap between the pins, and it bounces around and hopefully goes into a scoring slot. When this happens, you are not rewarded with a score, as in pinball, but rather, you are awarded more pachinko balls. The more balls you collect, the more money you've won. Originally, pachinko machines had something like a pinball machine's flippers, called a replay lever. These don't exist anymore on modern machines, making it more a game of chance than of skill. Likewise, the balls are no longer fired by hand one at a time, but are automatically spat out of the machine in rapid succession. The speed of how fast the balls shoot out is controlled by a large knob. Once you've established the optimal aiming point for the stream of balls, you have to sit there and keep that knob from moving. That's about the only skill required to play and win at pachinko... In theory. In reality, the gameplay (as in pinball) is affected by magnetic means, and also by the placement of individual key pins on each machine. Therefore, some machines will win more than others and give higher payouts. In modern machines, there is usually a secondary game. This is something like a video slot machine set in the center of the playing field. When a ball goes into a special scoring slot, this is activated. As in any slot machine, the more you spin the slot reels, the more likely you are to win something. If you get a winning spin, you enter a special bonus round. Usually, the scoring slot becomes larger, or a special door opens up so that many more chances to score open up. Also, when a ball goes into a slot the payout of balls is much higher. This is really where you make money, as bonus rounds go for longer periods of time if you get balls in the correct slots during the bonus round. As you get more and more balls, they pile up in a special little tray, with a small door in the bottom. When this gets very full, you open that door (with another large tray beneath it) and fill these plastic trays with balls. If you're very good, or very lucky, you can pile up several of these trays of balls. If your large tray gets full, you push a special button and the young attractive attendant will come running and slide out your old tray, and place a new tray in its place. the old tray is then stacked behind your seat, out of the way. I often saw players who had obviously been there all day with full stacks of trays five or six trays high! So much for my overview of pachinko. I first played the game in Kyoto. I had seen some pachinko parlors in Tokyo when I was there, but usually didn't have a chance to stop. To start the game going, you have to insert money. Older machines take 100 or 500 yen coins, but most of them nowdays either require 1000 yen bills or a special magnetic card that you buy at a special vending machine. So yes, you're committing to about $5-$10 a game most of the time. Predictably, my first evening, I lost money. About $30 worth, just trying to figure out how at all worked, and figuring out which games I liked most. (there are usually 3-4 different pachinko games represented in a typical parlor, with 50 or more of each type arranged in long rows.) I reasoned that since I saw so many people winning, that I should watch to see how they played, and get an idea of any strategy they used. I tried to be discreet about this, but sometimes people would notice me watching and give me dirty looks.... at that point, it was time to move on. Eventually, I would see enough people playing a particular game that I would know which pin or pins that they would target to make balls fall into the scoring slots. Once you know the "optimal" velocity to fire the balls, and which pin to aim at, it was up to the magnetic setting or the fates to determine whether that machine won or not. If it wasn't winning, moving to another machine was often effective. I saw that some players definitely have favorite or "lucky" machines. By the time I left Kyoto, I had had both big wins and losses, and stopped when I had broken even. (As in any gambling, it's best to quit while you're ahead... I was $90 ahead at one point) My next big win came in Kagoshima City. I walked into a parlor at 10:AM (when they first opened), and found that early in the day machines win more often! I walked out of there $80 richer. I frittered most of those winnings away in individual visits to various venues until I was about even again. By this point, I had set aside a separate area in my wallet which was specifically for pachinko money, so that I wouldn't accidentally spend budgeted funds. That system worked pretty well.. If the pachinko fund was empty, I just wouldn't play. It never really did empty out, as I would get low and then have a win to fill it back up. Finally, I had my biggest win yet. Towards the end of my trip, I stopped at a sleazy little pachinko parlor in Ise, while I was visiting the shrine there... My first 2000 yen was unproductive, but after I changed machines, I found a winning one, and ended up filling up 3 and a half large trays of balls before the machine stopped paying out.. (I attribute that win to all the bowing and clapping I did at Ise shine). Total amount of that win was almost exactly 10,000 yen ($100). I quit while I was ahead, and didn't pachinko again while I was in Japan. To cash out in pachinko, you summon the cute attendant, who will gather up all of your heavy trays (sometimes they put them on a teensy little wheeled cart), and then roll them over to a ball-counting machine. At that point, they pour all of the balls into the machine, which makes a huge racket, and the machine very quickly counts each ball. Your total winnings are figured by the total number of balls you win. Once counted, you are offered a choice of either a credit ticket to the parlor, or a cash credit slip. Sometimes these are slips of paper, sometimes they're colorful plastic cards about the size of a credit card, but about 3 times as thick. (each color is worth a different amount of balls) You also usually get a box of candy, or a roll of mints, or some other sort of junk food (one time I got a can of squid-flavored potato sticks)...This is done to cover legal technicalities. Gambling for prizes is legal. Since gambling for cash isn't *technically* a legal activity in Japan, you can't get your cash in the pachinko place. Therefore, you win these plastic cards. It just so happens that there are places that will give you money for them at a predetermined rate. -- How convenient! Usually the payout window is out back in an alleyway, sometimes even a block or so away from the parlor, depending on where you are. The first time I won, I had to get one of the attractive attendants to show me where it was. There, you slide your ticket or cards through a tiny little window (you never see more than the hand of the attendant, and they don't see you.), they count up the total, and then give you your cash. It all sounds fairly sordid and dodgy, but pachinko is hardly an underground activity. There are thousands of these places all over Japan, and everyone plays pachinko at least sometimes. Some people play pachinko for a living, and make hundreds of dollars a day. (I would get too bored if I had to sit there holding that knob for more than an hour!) In the past, there were even pachinko comics, (though the genre is probably dead with the automated gameplay of modern times) ...Obviously this game is fairly well ingrained in the Japanese culture, and I found it to be a pleasant after-dinner diversion, and a way to experience something that is uniquely Japanese. Not to mention, make some money!! |
| -- Pachinko Adventures -- |
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