Do you know anyone who can reliably beat those infuriating claw games?

They are supposedly rigged and up to chance, but I have a childhood memory of one dude coming in and cleaning out this one machine, handing the prizes out like a rockstar.

I don't know that they're all low-down "rigged" except in the obvious sense that the claw has zero pinching power beyond its own weight, and it usually seems that everything in the bin is too heavy to be successfully gripped and lifted that way

damn claw never pinched tight enough that's all..

I think for this thread to be truly great one of us needs to claim he is the god of claw machines and tell many excellent stories of his claw machine conquests

I have a similar question, but about greyhound racing.

With any kind of racing, it's very rare that anyone wins reliably, no? dmr to thread.

And if there are people who win reliably, it's a much different type of skill than the claw/crane game.

while he does not possess an undefeated record, my cousin has succeeded enough times to impress me

he will not share his secrets

I read about how they are rigged (or saw it on mythbusters maybe). The claw is rigged in its grip strength that it only works once per x number of attempts. iirc the rate is actually constant so you could stake one out if you really want that stuffed pikachu.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_jwuxVcOFcAo/SKLtxZQjTOI/AAAAAAAAAOU/-TrVaK-phJ4/s400/QOTD+seal+of+approval.jpg

How much does a claw game cost these days? $0.50?

one american dollar

i tried one last week at the movie theater. it cost fifty cents.

didn't win anything though.

Easy as these are to spot a mile a way as a step down from carny booths on the amusement/cheap grift scale, my lone attempt (as an adult) was a success: In a remarkable demonstration of strategic acumen and hand-eye, I was able to score a plush cartoon policeman for my gf. And, yeah, Nabisco called the mechanics of these thing pretty accurately: the trick is to scope the surface of the of the crap pile & try to find an object which is light, angularly comparable to the claw shape & unhindered by nearby bric-a-brac. Then you must use your very best Tetris moves to line the claw up over the object VERY quickly, while instantly adapting to its (presumably intended) herky-jerky automation. Do all of this successfully & you too can win yourself or your significant other a flimsy piece of shit/enduring conversation piece.

i somehow for years managed to keep my son from attempting these, finally one time at a movie theater i caved and he pulled TWO things out on his first claw grab

we've lost like $7 to these machines since then but it's well worth it for the thrill of that first supergrab, best i ever saw

xxpost: *hand-eye coordination

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/7771/clawmachinekid.jpg

my son is now obsessed with the one at safeway by our house. he mainly gets terrible candy from it. he's just as happy with the candy as he would be with the stuffed animals (probably happier actually)

I know someone who gets something from those machines 50 percent of the time. I have no idea how he does it. Every time he goes somewhere that has one (a grocery store, diner, bowling alley), he strolls over and has a toy within a few minutes.

My one attempt last year at a Belgian carnival was succesful.. got Winnie the Pooh w/a blue hoodie..

i saw a girl in an arcade in tokyo who was pretty good at these, she won like 3 prizes in the 6 or so times i saw her play. i tried the same machine right after her and got nothing obv.

clearly a carny plant.

Some nice claw machine action in John Water's film Pecker, including a bar named The Claw Machine and its patron's complaint to the owner, "I'm broke, Jimmy - your damn claw machine got all my money".

Also, iirc the machine in question contains ex-lax pills, bottles of booze etc...

dud, machines that the owners have packed all the toys in too tightly.

i owned one of these at ATP one year: one grab, two Sonic the Hedgehogs.

my friend's girlfriend is really good at these - it seems like every time i see her she gives me another fat-headed ufocatcher teddy bear. (i do not see her very often)

I won a pantbag from one of these at ATP a few years back. (A pantbag being a small bag shaped like a pair of frilly knickers. Yes.)

I'm amazed that anyone can get anything out of these, since I've never seen anyone win anything, but I have several times seen somebody get something clawed and partially lifted just to have time run out or the claw open for no reason. (Me, I can't even get near anything with the claw.)

I am terrible at all those fairground hook-the-duck games and shooting galleries and everything too, but I did once pwn a modern electronified cannon gallery where friends who are good at the real things failed, by realising that the upwards recoil was so fierce that you had to forget about aiming and just push down as hard as you could.

It was about then that I realised I didn't really want a fluffy shocking pink fish and thrust it into the arms of a small child behind me who I thought was looking at the prizes, but the boyfriend insists that the small child was in fact staring horror-struck at their ugliness and probably burst into tears seconds later. Sorry, small child!

I wouldn't say I can win reliably, but I think I have a pretty good track record. Scored a Mickey Mouse and a Homer Simpson in one grab in a Ponderosa steakhouse once. I always look for two toys that are close together, because the claw always does that 'late squeeze' where it starts closing, but only after it starts lifting up. If you can get two toys close together, it clutches them better. I normally come away with something, often two somethings after 3 or 4 goes. I always give them to my girlfriend, but she always somehow finds a way for them to end up at my flat.

At some point when I was a kid, my grandfather worked for a company that I guess distributed these claw machines, or for whatever reason he had about 10-15 of them in his garage for a while. Most of them were empty but a few of them had the toys in them. He gave my sister and I each a roll of quarters and we sat in his garage for an hour playing the claw machines, each ending up with a random selection of shitty stuffed animals.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAaOVbSjBpg

BBC show The Real Hustle did a bit on The Claw - their trick used counting too, so yeah just be patient and watch the machine innit.

Blah Friday morning:

are the ATP ones unusually honest? It's the only place I think we've won anything, and we won TWO! Wario AND Luigi!

my girlfriend has like a 95% success rate with these things (there's one in the local). it's kind of ridiculous.

Since moving to Japan, my brother has gotten really good at UFO catchers (maybe they're easier over there?). He regularly wins stuff so he can sell it on eBay to American otaku dudes who never tire of Neon Genesis Evangelion figurines.

Wal-Mart has a claw machine filled with gingerbread dolls of the presidents.

I wonder if you get too good at these, they blacklist you from all the pizza parlors in town.

And then you have to paste on fake sideburns and put on a black turtleneck and a gold medallion like a card counter in disguise.

"I knew that guy was counting claw jerks when he got that pair of red lips wedged in the corner."