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Comment by texasbigdata | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't they technically be casinos and thus regulated?

My experience with pachinko in Japan felt very much like the old strip in Las Vegas emotion and vibe wise.

Yeah, I was picturing them as openly being casinos. You'd think at least Las Vegas would have some, a sort of international slots section. Hijacking culture is already their specialty after all.

The time is ripe for an anime/Japanese-focused casino in Vegas.

There are some posters on here who work in gaming, maybe one of them will illuminate us, but I wonder if the odds are too hard to strictly control (which is needed to satisfy both regulators and casino owners).

Pachinko is a slot machine and is gambling, but they use a loophole to not be considered such - it pays out tickets that you can use to get toys and stuff like an arcade, but they will buy the toys back from you for money.

In Japan. That japanese law has a loophole doesn't really matter for places in the US, where it doesn't exist.

Last time I was over there in 2019, one of the friends who came with me wanted to actually try Pachinko; I had never sat down at a machine in my aggregate ~1.5 years of living/visiting Japan, though I had walked through Pachinko places a few times. The one we sat down in was in Osaka I think. When you're done the machine you're at prints a ticket, the exchange desk in the same room (or building) gave us actually a small piece of gold- had the weight embossed on it- and there was an exchange business in the shop/building next door. We opted to keep the gold slivers because it was an interesting souvenir. Usually the prize desks in the pachinko area will have other small items you can exchange for as well. The external buyback business is suppossed to be independent to get around the gambling law of course.

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