Japanese Carnival In Gardena, CA with Pachinko Jun 27 and 28

[jwegger]

It's that time of year again for the Gardena Valley Japanese Cultural Institue Summer Carnival.

Runs Saturday and Sunday Jun 27 and 28 starting at Noon both Days

Good Food, Raffles, PACHINKO etc...

I expect to be helping at the pachinko booth almost all of both days, there are a couple of hours on Sunday morning where I will be at the snow cone booth.

If you are in the area stop by and say hi

Gardena Valley Japanese Cultural Institute
1964 W. 162nd Street
Gardena, California 90247

Here is a link to my post about last years Carnival

Last Years Carnival

[outdoorenth]

Aw, I miss living in the greater Los Angeles area with all the cultural events that occur. I hope you have a great turn out.

[hanabi]

It must be great to be able to attend events like that

Good Luck, hope the weather is good and the turnout too

[MrGneiss]

Wish I could be there, but I think it would be too far a walk to get there..about 2000 miles too far!!

Last years looked cool, I hope you have lots of fun this year!!

[ironworkerdalton]

Who thinks they will be able to go to this? I am planning on going. For us, the members of this websight, why dont we all wear a bright red T-shirt so we can find each other.
Do most big towns that have a little Japanes town, are they having this same type of events? If you know of one close to where you live, this would be the time to post the information.

[jwegger]

Carnival Flyer added to thread

[jwegger]

Reminder - Less than one week left before the Carnival, I'll be there all day Saturday and most all of Sunday. Pictures will be posted in this thread later in the week but if you want to live the dream then stop by and say hello

[jwegger]

Carnival -1 Day Update

I spent about 6 hours at the Carnival site today, cleaned up 5 of the machines so hopefully we won't have many problems with them over the weekend. No pictures today, will try and get some up tomorrow if I don't get home too late.

Shameless plug Follows

Any member that shows up either day can get their picture taken in front of the machines and I'll post it here for all to see.
Remember Carnival starts at noon both days

See ya there

[jwegger]

Saturday Report and Pictures

Picture 1 About 1030 right when we finished setting up, lonely pachinkos waiting for their friends to arrive and play them

Picture 2 Ironworkerdalton

Picture 3 Me and Ironworkerdalton

Picture 4 One of the machines notice the Sideross pockets on each side when opened balls going through here loose, didn't notice this last year just thought I would point it out.

All the machines are the same as we had last year so If you want to see the individual machine pictures please refer to last years thread.

Now the report: Crowd seemed smaller than last year by about 1/3 business was still brisk but we were only about 60% occupied most of the day. A couple of players won over 600 balls on a couple of machines, and banked them for later play. A group of 4 high school students calling themselves "Team Pachinko" played for about 3 hours on $1.00 bag of balls. They were really entertaining, yelling and screaming everytime they hit a jackpot, Other phrases they were heard to yell, "I don't hear the ringing" and "I like my balls silver", "are you sure we can't get paid to play this game?" We had to send them home at 9pm with a voucher to play tomorrow.
IronWorkerDalton showed up and as promised got his picture taken and posted here.
Again the number of kids and teens that played was really amazing, and many of them played for 30 minutes or more some even multiple times during the day. As far as the game booths go we were the busiest.

Guess that's it for today...

More tomorrow from sunny Southern California

[jwegger]

Final Update this years Carnival:

Well... This years carnival is over, the machines are packed away for another year, the kids are sad because they can't sit and play for hours on $1.00 worth of balls. and only Ironworkerdalton got his picture in this post.

Team Pachinko returned Sunday morning and played the rest of their balls only lasted about an hour before they lost them all since the big paying machine was taken by a 6 year old and his 8 year old sister who tag teamed it for a total of 5 1/2 hours. They started about 11am (even though the carnival didn't officially open until noon) until around 1pm, their Mom made them go to lunch and a couple of other activites, they returned at 4pm but the machine was taken so I gave them their banked balls, (about 750 in total) and they waited until another player lost on their favorite machine and then they went to work switching off with each other until all the other machines were packed away and theirs was the last, I finally had to cut them off as the help was ready to pack up our tables about 8pm. Mom was tired and ready to go but they would have stayed until midnight if possible.

I passed out the site address to several people that expressed an intrest in Pachinko so maybe we may see some new members soon.

The crowd still seemed a little lighter than last year and we didn't have all the machines full all the time but more people than yesterday played, alot of the kids played pachinko while the adults played bingo.

The maintenance I did seemed to help as the breakdowns were few and far between this year, last year we had several machines down during the day. Most of the problems this year were because the machines and tables were not level, so next year I'll see if we can level the machines during set up to reduce problems even more.

I was talking to the Carnival director as we were cleaning up last night and he told me that the Pachinko machines are the biggest profit maker at the carnival mainly due to no costs for prizes. Other booths gross more money but the bottom line on pachinko is higher.

For those of you that missed this years Carnival and outdoor pachiko experience there are 362 days left to plan for next year...

Some numbers that may (or may not impress)
17 Vintage Pachinko machines available for 18 hours
or 18360 minutes of available pachinko play time
figuring a 75% (estimated) play rate thats 13770 minutes pachinko-able minutes with an average of 15 balls per minutes going into a machine (some were slower some faster) thats 200000+ pachinko balls winding their way through the insides of 30-35 year old machines now if that doesn't make you want to show up next year I guess I will have to offer free tours behind the tables and a picture next year...or better yet I'll let you stand behind the tables and fill the ball supply trays, talk about a real pachinko experience...

Until next time, thanks for reading

Now it's time to go back to work so I can

[hanabi]

It's amazing to see all those vintages available for the public to enjoy and especially great that the youngsters get so involved in playing

If that Carnival was near to me, then I would be playing for hours and you'd have to forcibly eject me too

Congrats on another super year at the Carnival