Woman spends 40,000 yuan on claw machines in one year, winning 7,000 stuffed animals
With the dolls piling up into a mountain, the young woman was forced to move to another, bigger apartment
A 28-year-old woman from Qingyuan, Guangdong province claims that only two years ago she wasn’t really very interested in claw machines. However, that all changed one fateful day in 2016 when she spotted a particularly cute duck doll that she really liked.
Now, the woman, who calls herself Ya Li, has an apartment filled with a veritable mountain of stuffed animals. This “Queen of the Claw Machine” says that she’s spent around 40,000 yuan on her hobby in just over a year, managing to grab some 7,000 prizes along the way.
If our math is correct, that means that she has spent less than 6 yuan per stuffed animal. Additionally, since claw machines usually cost 2 yuan to play, she apparently wins 35% of the time that she plays.
In order to hone her skills, Ya said that she watched others play, looked up tips online, and even bought her own machine to practice. However, she soon discovered that every machine was a bit different, since the machine’s owner could set the strength of the claw.
But, she has discovered at least one tried-and-true method to beat the system, dubbed “claw swinging.” In footage shared by Pear Video, she explains how she moves the controller back and forth quickly to build up momentum, before lowering the claw and knocking a stuffed animal placed near the edge into the shoot.
Ya ended up winning so much that she was forced to move to a larger apartment last year, a process that took a good two weeks of packing up and transporting stuffed animals.
However, it turns out that she does have some serious competition for the title of China’s most obsessive claw machine junkie. Back in 2016, a “claw machine god” in Xiamen made headlines with stories of how the city’s arcade owners were inviting him out to dinner, begging him to stop playing their machines.
But stop he did not. The following year, he revealed that he had managed to win 15,000 stuffed animals in just a single year.
[Images via NetEase]
