I knew a "pachi-pro" in Japan who explained the basics. He worked a regular job on weekdays and spent every Saturday and Sunday playing pachinko from 10am to 10pm. He said the key was to find a machine that was paying out well, and to be prepared to lose a lot until then. If you walk past a good pachinko parlor before it opens in the morning, you'll likely see a decent sized line of people waiting to get in. They're lining up to get first shot at whatever machine they think is paying out.
This guy claimed he made the equivalent of $20,000 USD per year on pachinko, on average. But that required sitting in front of the machine for 20+ hours a week, and dealing with the stress of occasionally going really deep into the hole when his luck wasn't playing out. It seemed to be more of an addiction than anything.
Everyone middle aged man I meet in Japan is either a pro or has a best friend who’s a pro and knows how to win nonstop. Those people are always just scraping by.
While I lived in Japan I was really surprised to see tons of crazy buildings out in the countryside, pink castles and stuff like that. All of them were pachinko and were full of the elderly, and even homeless, who used their only yen to play. On another note, many of the older people I knew said Las Vegas was the #1 place they wanted to go to in the US.
My ill-informed view is that much of the skill part of the equation is finding the right machine in the hall, as they have different settings and thus different winning probabilities. It's an exploration-exploitation problem.
Also note that in the early days of Pachinko, the manager would give a few hammer hits on the side of the nails of the machines to change their orientation slightly every night, so a machine that was winning a lot yesterday might not win a lot today.
Nowadays they're electronically controlled and the nail position change automatically to vary the winning probability in a very controlled way.
I knew that already but the article was saying that this particular type of pachinko has another skill element in the playing of it.
edit: The correct answer is that the knob allows you to adjust the shot strength on the machines this article is about. You're referencing something else
Hard to tell. Wish the article was more clear on that.
I then spent 10 minutes on YouTube watching gameplay of modern pachinkos, trying to understand the skill and game play. I failed. I had one of these in the 70s. There was no skill involved back then (well, maybe a little bit). I was hoping the modern generation was skill-based… then I’d buy one as a pinball fan.
My understanding was that you need to hold the dial at a certain angle to get an optimal arc into the center pocket... much like the skill shot on pinball machines with a physical plunger.
I had a pachinko machine at home with an autolauncher, and yeah, if you twist it all the way, it goes over there, and you're adjusting and trying to get it to be more towards the right place.
But also, it's tremendously boring, at least IMHO. A lot of pinball skill shots also let you cheat --- most of the ones where you're trying to get it into a lit lane, you can change the lane with the flippers; you still need to get it to go through the lanes and not elsewhere, but you don't need to be quite so precise. Otoh, there's a lot of them where the target is always the same --- one particular hole in a ramp, etc. But either way, there's lots to do with the flippers, and just shooting more balls I can't control very much just doesn't entertain me for very long.
Well, the castle is a little bit to the left, and the trolls are in closer and only two of them instead of four martians, but yeah fairly similar, but also different. Taxi and Road Kings are a closer pair, but older, I guess.
And then you've got stuff like High Speed and High Speed 2, or Pin-Bot and Jack-Bot. Or Shrek and Family Guy, I think it is?
There are a lot of reused layouts and "sequels" in pinball, e.g. the three Black Knight games all share the upper playfield concept. El Dorado/Cities of Gold is another such example where there is a slight adjustment. They can still play different just because of rules and manufacturing changes.
The AoM/MM layout tends to be called "fan" layout since it resembles a fan outward from the flippers. But then when prompted to define that the forum threads get very long. After all, most shots in pinball are going to be directly off the flippers and therefore will have fan elements - the games that don't respect that tend to be older EMs that emphasize the game-of-chance aspect.
I think the main thing making "fan" games feel like that is just in the extensive use of ramps for controlled returns. When the ball returns freely down the playfield it has many possible trajectories, when it goes onto a wireform it rewards you with a clean return every time(barring the ramp shaking loose). So you end up making more of the same shots and you're tested to accurately hit what you know, vs your ability to recover a bad bounce. Drop target games from the 70's like El Dorado present a much different experience since not only are there open bounce trajectories, they change as the targets go down.
The only time I ever went to Pachinko, it was with a cousin-in-law. The first thing he taught me was how to place a coin at the right place to hold the dial. That leaves you with almost no interaction with the machine, except when it wants you to press buttons in the middle once in a while. Combined with the noise and (at the time) smoke from cigarettes, it was a dreadful experience.
I'm sorry that wasn't more clear-- the automatic launcher is an analog knob, so it can be turned to any position and that determines the strength of the shot.
Well hello pachi-pro here.
I was working(or say, feeding myself) as pachi-pro for around 15 years, and covered my fee for college and most part of my deficit when my own company had bankrupted.
In the reality I have made around 7m JPY/year so wasn`t really a "tough life" for me, but well yea I spent 12 hours a day in the parlor in full of smoke and noise(thanks Japan it is no longer allowed to smoke paper cigarette in the parlor) worked 5 days a week +done a lot of researching tasks, so it might was a tough days.
As already answered, "Skill" in pachinko and pachislot is all about researching and you must be familiar with every single machine(you also need to be good at aiming, but you will be good enough after spending a week there), so is not an easy task.
Good part of this job was, as it`s not covered by tax office, the amount I earned was mostly tax-free, so it literally was a good business to me.
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This guy claimed he made the equivalent of $20,000 USD per year on pachinko, on average. But that required sitting in front of the machine for 20+ hours a week, and dealing with the stress of occasionally going really deep into the hole when his luck wasn't playing out. It seemed to be more of an addiction than anything.