Kaiji S02E23 Review: Blockage

Kaiji, Season 2, Episode 23: On Thin Ice

Kaiji gets utterly freaked out, as the Bog's personification get into a huge 'fight' with Kaiji in his imaginary mind. Kaiji realizes that all of the balls that he's sending on that trajectory upwards by tilting the building backwards isn't actually a perfect shot. They stacked the water piles on one room, meaning that the building isn't just tilted south -- it's tilted southwest, and in this high-stakes, high-precision game, it means that the balls that Kaiji are sending from the bottom ends up swerving to the left and falling into a hole.

There is an alternate way, as Kaiji tells Endou, by moving the ball between "holes 2 and 3" instead of "3 and 4", which makes sense only with visuals. But Ichijou's tilt is starting to take hold, and the balls are starting to drain out of the chute and will soon restore the first two plates... and we get a huge "GO GO GO" "STOP STOP STOP" montage which ran for a bit too long...  and apparently, the building leaning forwards sort of retains the goddamn balls anyway. Ah, physics, you truly are a cruel mistress. Interesting, huh, how a Pachinko game ends up being a fight over leaning the building forwards and backwards?

But Kaiji's final plan hinges on having balls hit each other while in the third plate... and everything seems to go Kaiji's way, as the balls are clogging up the third plate's holes due to some insane coincidence (that the narrator lampshades),  and Kaiji has two balls left. Is this the episode where he beats the Bog? I mean, he's gotten such an insane streak of luck, so it might be, right? Unfortunately, as the two balls shoot towards the jackpot hole... they get repelled.

Ah, Ichijou's secret weapon, then, I guess? I've been waiting for it to make an appearance. Repelling magnets, perhaps, lining the final jackpot hole? It is a clever thing to do, honestly, for a rigged machine -- to have the final hole be rigged so that even if by some miracle all of the unfair stuff ends up not panning out, there's a surefire way to prevent the customer from winning. What this is, though, is going to be interesting, and we'll see if Kaiji is actually prepared for it next time.