Hi Everyone,

First off, I want to thank every single Pinsider who voted. If it wasn't for you guys, this would have flopped.

Now for the million dollar question, should we do this next year? Feel free to vote in the poll or leave a comment below. I'm also open to feedback. No promises, as I'd like to avoid reinventing the wheel, but there could be some ideas where we can tweak the formula.

With that aside, congrats to all Attack from Mars owners. You own the great pin of all-time... well, according to Pinside. Oh, and we all know Pinside is always right. Kidding aside, I think we can come to the conclusion from the voting that there are a lot of great pins out there that have great flow, fun themes, awesome bash toys, easy rules for newbs - there is really something for everyone.

Again, thank you to all who participated and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. Stay safe everyone.

Final Bracket, including Final 16 bracket for better visibility.

BracketTop.JPG

BracketBottom.JPG

Sweet Sixteen Bracket.JPG

Results for Rounds 1-6:

Round 1 Results.JPG

Round 2 Results.JPG

Round 3 Results.JPG

Round 4 Results.JPG

Round 5 Results.JPG

Round 6 Results.JPG

Statistics
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1. A total of 21,424 votes were recorded, with a peak of 637 Pinsiders voting in Round 5. (See attachment #1 below)

2. 52nd ranked Fish Tales provided the biggest upset of the tournament, edging out 13th ranked Elvira's House of Horrors - 54% to 46%.

3. Largest margin of victory was by 2nd ranked Medieval Madness over 63rd ranked Indianapolis 500 in the 1st Round by a whopping margin - 90% to 10%.

4. Bally takes home the title of "Best Record by Pinball Company," winning 57.1% of their matches. JJP takes 2nd winning 54.4% of hteir matches, followed by Williams in 3rd at 54.2%, and Stern in 4th place winning 53.1%. (See attachment #2)

5. Continuing with "Best Record by Pinball Company," if we throw out matches where pinball manufacturers face themselves (eliminate cannibalism), the ranking order does not change, only their winning percentage. A total of 14 matches were thrown out in this scenario. (See attachment #3)

6. From a winning percentage (and let's be honest, Lord of the Rings carried this category), "Record by Era" title goes to 2000-2009, winning 63.6% of their matchups. 1990-1999 took 2nd winning 50.8% of their matches, and 2010-2019 took 3rd at 47.3%. (See attachment #4)

7. We had four main pinball companies that took up most of the Top 64. How did they fare against each other? By best overall winning percentage, Williams was the best at 54.2%, Bally in second at 50.0%, Stern in third at 46.2%, and JJP in fourth at 44.4%. You can see how each manufacturer did against each other by looking below. (See attachment #5)

8. Last but not least, new rankings. How this was determined was from three variables. First, #1-#4 was done by your voting. Next, I went backwards through each round, starting with the Round 4, then Round 3, and so on. In these rounds, I ranked them based on who had the highest percent of vote in their losing matchup. For example, in Round 3, Iron Maiden is at the top of Tier 3 because it had 48% of its vote in its losing matchup. Next was Metallica because it had 45% of the vote in their losing matching. Following Metallica, it was Star Trek (Williams) who had 42%, Deadpool 35%, and so on. Then I took the same logic, starting at #33-#64 by using the consolation bracket. It wasn't a perfect science using the highest percentage of votes in a losing matchup; however, the strong games typically hold up better in any matchup, even if it loses. You can see the results below using my formula. (See attachment #6)

Vote Stats.JPG
Record by Company.JPGNonCannibalism Record by Manufacturer.JPGRecord by Era.JPG
Pinball Records vs. Manufacturer.JPG
Re-Rankings by Voting.JPG

Index - All Links
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"Greatest Pinball Game of All-Time - Tournament Edition - 2020"

Round 1 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-tournament-edition

Round 2 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/round-2-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-tournament-edition

Round 3 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/round-3-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-tournament-edition

Round 4 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/round-4-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-tournament-edition

Round 5 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/final-four-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-tournament-edition

Round 6 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-finals-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-tournament-edition

3rd Place Voting - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/3rd-place-voting-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-te
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"Consolation Bracket - Greatest Pinball Game of All-Time - Tournament Edition - 2020"

Round 1 - Non-existent - Round 1 above had to be completed to determine the consolation bracket.

Round 2 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/consolation-bracket-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-te

Round 3 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/consolation-bracket-round-3-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-te

Round 4 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/consolation-bracket-round-4-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-te

Round 5 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/consolation-bracket-final-4-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-te

Round 6 - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/consolation-bracket-final-greatest-pinball-game-of-all-time-te

Thank you for the feedback TheLaw . I have also updated all topic threads as you requested with "2020" in them for easy reference (although the Index Links above should suffice).

Wrapping a few more stats guys, then the recap will be completely. I appreciate your patience.

All right - this thread recap is officially complete.

Again, I appreciate everyone's support and kind words.

Please take a minute to review the final bracket, results, and stats.

From the looks of it, most people would like to see this done again. My thoughts would be sometime in February, since it's cold, not much is going on, and people are still typically hanging out at home.

Until then, take care everyone!

Thanks Dr-pin!

I'm wondering who the two people who voted "no, we shouldn't do this again next year." If I had to guess, o-din must be one of them.

You make a good point. It rewards good teams (in our instance - rewards top rated pins) an easy path to victory. Although we had some random upsets, there weren't many.

I like your idea. Playing devil's advocate though, I think randomizing matchups, although exciting, completely changes the dynamic of the tournament. What if the "randomizer" matched up MM versus AFM in the first round? I'm assuming a good chunk of Pinsiders would dislike that. Also, by not having heavyweights in the later rounds because of a poor draw, typically your audience will lose general interest later in the tournament. From the number of Pinsiders who voted per round, more and more joined the vote as the top pins started facing each other.

I wonder if we could do a matchup randomizer, but allow the Top 16 pins to retain their "seed," while the other 48 get randomly assigned. That would avoid a MM versus AFM, but MM or AFM could face a tougher matchup against Star Trek, Dialed In, Spider-Man, for example in the 1st Round.

I'm giving you an upvote for honesty.

I think where I see the value of the Top 100, it gives newbs a chance to get familiar with the most popular games.

But to your point, and I think I posted this in Round 1's thread, I consider NBA Fastbreak as a Top 20 game personality. Most people would laugh at that. But again, as you said (and I agree), you should be buying on personal preference and what you like to play.

Haha! Someone did PM me about that. They said I was potentially sending subliminal messages to vote for AFM. They were saying it in jest of course.

Do you want to be president of that committee? Or should we be formal about it and hire a law firm?

Thanks @titanpenguin. I agree, it has been fun.

To your point, maybe anything that is released in the last six months is excluded to avoid "the new hot pin" popularity.

If you have any ideas, or out of the box suggestions, feel free to share.

I don't think we need to break the bracket down by era (if we're talking the last 30 years), because the data shows that the 90's and 10's (weird to say), were fairly equal when matching up against each other. Same goes for manufacturer - not one was significantly better than the other.

However, I could see eliminating any new game (not remakes) from the contest that has been produced in the last six months to a year. This way, we can avoid popular games that haven't been vetted out yet. I do see some value here.

As other Pinsiders have mentioned, the Top 10 gets littered with the "latest and greatest" pins that get released, only to see those games slink down quite a few spots after a few months of game play in the wild.

You're right. A lot of the games, especially new ones are hard to find on location. It really depends where you live from an access standpoint. We're lucky to have SS Billiards & Tilt (along with a few others) in Minneapolis - usually you can find the newest releases there.

Going back to the bracket, most probably haven't played all 64 pins. It's hard to do. On top of that, even playing it on location 10x doesn't give you a good feel of how good the game really is.

At the end of the day, there is no exact science as we could slice and dice a bracket 100 different ways. However, it doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement.

First off, you have a fantastic username.

Thank you for the kind words. It will be interesting to see how people feel about JP2 a year from now.

I don't want to speak on Titanpenguin's behalf, but what I think he means is that AFM, MM, and MB have all been remade recently, which reinvigorates excitement to those games.

To your point, which I agree with, they have been classics well before their remakes, and should be top games in the future. I don't believe the remakes of these classic games swung the vote one way or another.

Because it takes a lot of time behind the scenes to track, manually produce, record, and publish the data.

I also feel the law of diminishing returns comes into play here if we fired up a new bracket right away.