Stan - Playing Pachinko in Shinjuku, Tokyo

12/2/2008 - Pachinko is a kind of Japanese slot machine. I was wandering around in Shinjuku near the hotel and noticed an interesting looking Pachinko hall - they had ads for Star Wars pachinko =) I walked in, and the first thing that I noticed was that it was VERY loud (my ears were ringing after I left) - it's also very bright - like Vegas. It's similar to banks of slot machines in the US in that there are many people sitting there glued to the screen. However, there are some differences. The machines seem to be doing more things - LCD screens, singing, tons of flashing lights, balls bouncing around and shooting out of the machine, and some statistics displays which I couldn't make heads or tails of (but maybe would give you some idea how you were doing?)
From my perspective, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at first (and still don't have a great idea - none of the instructions are in english). The machines take bills (I put the smallest possible one in 1000 Yen / about $10) and then it starts spitting out small metal bars - like large bb's. There are a ton of attendents going around from machine to machine making sure that every one is ok. There is also a button which will bring one over quickly to help you. Turns out that the little buckets can fill up with balls fairly quickly when you are in "bonus mode" and then you need to call someone over to give you a new bucket and place your full one on the floor (this is good - the balls eventually translate into money).
I played a machine "Avant Garde" with some cute girls flying around the screen (and singing to you, etc). I think there are some kind of jackpots you can win, the LCD sometimes looks like a slot machine with numbers lining up.
Most of the time though, you are just holding a dial which controls the speed that the new balls pop out at. If you are lucky, the balls then bounce around and go into a small "IN" hole in the middle of the screen (at least I think that was the main goal for the balls) - and sometimes more balls come out than you put in - which means you are winning.
After I'd spent about an hour and filled up 5 or 6 buckets of balls, I decided to leave. There was a multi-stage process to check out and I really had no idea how much I'd won until I had the cash in hand. For the 1000 Yen I put in, I got back 27000 Yen - or a profit of over $250. Not bad at all - maybe that's how everyone affords all the expensive stuff around here ;-)

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Stan Kurdziel
• Shinjuku
• Tokyo
• Pachinko

[theacsupercats]

Thanks for posting. Advant Garde looks like a very nice machine.

Join our pachinko community if you're interested at PachiUniverse (dotcom)

Thanks!