The Beat March 2003

Sometime last year I noticed Pachinko parlors sprouting up around Seomyeon. These weren‘t the game rooms that I had seen around town for years, where people play the video slot games for chintzy crap like H.O.T. belt buckles; this was honest-to-God Japanese Pachinko, sometimes called “Japanese Pinball”, which is a money game. Round about the same time I started noticing people walking into a “book shop” nearby (which didn‘t contain a single book), approaching a counter, and walking away with a small bundle of cash. What was going on here?

I had heard for a long time about Pachinko‘s huge popularity in Japan, and wondered how it was faring here in Busan. It also interested me because it‘s a form of gambling, and I knew that gaming was just as illegal here as it is across the water. So, I walked into a few Seomyeon joints with Pachinko and other variants (like Medal Ch‘igi, in which coins replace the steel balls of Pachinko), and found in each one several dozens of people, glued to machines, playing for Dead Emperors.
Well, they don‘t exactly play for money. They play for “Library Gift Certificates” (Doseo Saenghwalgwuon), which, by a remarkable coincidence, can be redeemed for cash at a lottery shop that is never more than a 30-second walk away. Everybody knows what‘s going on, but the law says nothing about winning a “prize” and later selling it, which is precisely how they skirt the gaming laws in Japan.

The games, reports “Boss Number Two” of one game room I visited, are “not 100% legal,” which is another way of saying that they are “illegal”. “So how do you avoid trouble with the law?” I asked him.

“This place is not as profitable as you might think,” he said, “we don‘t have as many customers as they have in Japan, so the police turn a blind eye.

I did some rough math: His place had about sixty machines, all but a handful were occupied, and the hour was decidedly off-peak (2 p.m. Monday). Each person playing had paid a minimum of 30,000 won to start, and most had paid more – some up to 150,000 won more - as they lost their initial stake. You can easily lose 50,000 in one hour, and the place was open 20 hours a day (many others are open 24-7). A few players were winning - 30,000 here, 40,000 there - but only a few. It was very hard to see how this place was unprofitable – it looked to me like a genuine gold mine, unless of course they had a high overhead: off-the-books expenses, under the general category of “grease”.

I asked another guy, a floor runner at a Pachinko place a few blocks away, and he had a very different explanation as to how they managed to avoid legal headaches; “Bbaek,” he said, which translates into “favor, pull, backing, patronage”. Self-preservation dictated that I not ask him who their “patrons” were.

The consensus of the industry folks I asked around Seomyeon was that the money-game rooms started popping up in Busan about twenty years ago. They are now found in many neighborhoods, with the greatest concentrations in Namp‘odong, followed by Seomyeon. But still they do not nearly approach the popularity of Pachinko-type games in Japan, where the pachinko industry leaves even the auto industry in the dust.

In Japan, the once-sleazy Pachinko parlor has been gradually given a makeover, and has become a more benign and mainstream pursuit enjoyed by men and women, young and old. Large entertainment complexes offer entire floors of such games, along with shopping, movies, bowling alleys, and restaurants.

In Busan however, the industry is a glimpse of pre-facelift Japanese Pachinko; curtains drawn on smoky rooms, full of gruff middle-aged men who stare at noisy machines, wearing spent, passive faces that don‘t suggest “better things to do”. And carnival-style hawkers with microphones, whipping the players up, intoning the same sterile lines they must repeat a few hundred times a day, promising “Double time”, “Bonus time”, and calling out to the crowd up-to-the-second information on which machines are paying out, and how much. 30,000 won on machine number 57! 30,000 won! Home Run on number 12! Home Run!

The hawkers promise many wins to win, but probability of course offers far more ways to lose. Still, the customers pump in as much as 200,000 won. Winners may take that amount too, and the fantastically lucky might win 500,000, but because the single biggest “hit” is not more than 20,000 won, they‘d have to spend an entire day playing to win that amount.

Are the machines rigged? One local Pachinko operator maintained that it was better to play on licensed machines than unlicensed ones, because the unlicensed ones payed out less. He pointed out the certification on his machines, proof that they had been “inspected”.

“Wait a minute, gambling is illegal, there can‘t be some gaming commission inspecting the machines, so who is licensing the machines?”

“I don‘t know,” was the reply. My question remained: still, licensed or not, are they rigged? Or to rephrase it: Is a duck‘s asshole watertight?

To satisfy my curiosity, and because I‘m also a complete sucker and game addict, I wanted to give it a try. In Pachinko, the player repeatedly shoots 11mm steel balls up through a vertical maze of nails (it is the onomatopoeic “pachi pachi” of the clacking steel balls that gives the game its name). The nails are arranged to screw you, so most of the balls find their way innocently into the sewer at the bottom. But every time a ball lands in one special tulip-like hole in the center, it starts a video slot machine rolling. Three of a kind pays 20,000 won, and players receive a “double time” round promising a second win for hitting a match of a certain color (usually red).

The Pachinko machines are imported from Japan, so they feature a lot of Anime girls to keep your interest (and probably to keep your eyes off the credit ticker as your money disappears), and they sport ridiculous Janglish expressions to keep you scratching your head. One machine thus informed me: “We can‘t never forget about you. You are a charismatic hero with mysterious confidence.”

Mysteriously confident indeed: I wanted to play. I quickly began trying to recall everything I‘d ever heard about the tactics and subtleties of the game. Try to find the “sweet spot”, watch for the nail arrangement, find out which machines have paid out when and how much, et cetera. I walked around and scoped a few players for a while, the seasoned vets. They sat impassively. What was going on behind those faraway eyes? I checked out the game machines, but those board faces too were every bit as blank and impenetrable.

I sat down, and like a true charismatic hero, I asked the guy next to me where I should aim the ball. He pointed out a spot he said was best and went back to quietly staring at his machine. He didn‘t seem very charismatic. In fact, no one did. I was in a room with maybe eighty people, and no one talked except to curse their luck or order more coffee.

But now I had the sweet spot. I turned the knob to set the shot power, and fixed it in that position by wedging a piece of rubber in it, which is provided so players don‘t have to physically hold the knob. In fact, after paying their money, turning this knob is the only thing one must physically do to play. After that, you just sit and wait, and smoke, and stare, and continue to wait for as long as you can afford to.

One rapid-fire steel ball after another, my money was draining away -- I couldn‘t have flushed it down the toilet any faster. I asked a few more people, and it turned out that my neighbor here was the only one who thought the shot power made any difference. Everyone else assured me it was 100% luck. Okay, so there‘s no sweet spot, but I asked other people if there was any skill at all, anything I could do to increase my chances. The resounding reply was, “No. Nothing you do will make any difference.”

That should have been discouraging, but I pressed on with my mysterious confidence. After an hour, the charismatic hero was out 50,000 won. But I did learn a few things; I discovered that playing Pachinko is like watching a hailstorm: the first time you see it, it‘s genuinely interesting for about thirty minutes, until you naturally start squirming and longing for sunshine and fresh air. It‘s about as noisy as a hailstorm too: row upon row of machines full of dozens of steel balls clacking around endlessly. And so much for subtlety and skill: it was true - a player has as much control over his Pachinko fortunes as he has, again, over a hailstorm.

But Koreans, like all people, love to throw away caution and good sense for a chance to win cash and prizes. Pachinko is relatively new in Busan, and it probably isn‘t going away anytime soon, but there are dozens of other prize games that have been around for years. Many game rooms (oraksil) have video gambling spin-offs in the same room as the kid‘s video games. And the prizes here are generally kid‘s stuff: pens, hair spray, cheap jewelry, and the like.

I visited one such hybrid game room down the street. Kid‘s games in the front, (Tekken-style fighting games, a singing booth, and shoot-em-ups) and in the back, a troop of scruffy ajossis playing slot machine variants and video poker. There were none of the usual glass prize-booths above the games, and I took this to mean that here again there were some “Library Books” at stake.

Pointing to the “Lucky 7‘s” slot game, I asked the guy at the counter, “What do I win if I play this game?” He answered “cigarettes.”

I thought it strange that middle-aged men would sit and play an obnoxious game for hours to win just cigarettes. This would maybe make sense in New York, where cigarettes now cost upwards of US$7.00 a pack, but it made no sense to me here, where smoking is still cheap, even factoring in triple bypass surgery and ten years on a heart lung machine. I asked him, more to the point, “But can I win money, you know, library gift certificates?”

The answer was a curt “No.”

Something still didn‘t seem right. Could it have been pronoun trouble? Was he saying, “No, you can‘t win”? I strolled over to the video poker, where a couple of younger, sharp-dressed cats were trying their luck. I asked, “Hey guys, do you win, you know, gift certificates on this game?”

“Yes, and you can sell them right around the corner.”

Asa! I fed a 1,000 won note into the game and watched happily as twelve 100 won coins poured into the bin. A prosperous omen -- I was already ahead. I put in the first two hundred and played for fifteen minutes, working it up as high as three thousand at one point, before finally succumbing to the odds and losing my wee stake. I walked out with all the money I came in with, and some wisdom, which can be summed up thus:

Buy your cigarettes at the store. Play games because they‘re fun. And work for your money.