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Hiroaki Kobayashi earned \12 million last year, appeared
with celebrities on TV and wrote a regular advice column for a specialist magazine.
Although he is only in his early thirties, he makes
as much money as company managers and has bought himself a luxurious Mercedes
Benz. He makes this money by playing pachinko and
calls himself a "pachi-pro". Hiroaki used
to run a cake shop in Osaka Prefecture until one day a customer encouraged him
to try pachinko. He put \200 in a machine and won
\10,000. The 24-year-old Mr. Kobayashi then decided
to learn more about ball-hitting technique and how the machines worked. He
spent around \70,000 developing his skills and, after two years of selling cakes
in the day and playing pachinko in the evening, he decided to sell his shop and
concentrate on pachinko. He says that because of new
computerized machines, the old playing techniques no longer work so he has to
find the machines with the highest probability of paying out. | 
