Take off the glass, block off both outlanes.

This feeds the ball to the flippers most of the time, except for center drains.

Ignore points and rule-set completely.

Practice your aimed shots, both from a rolling ball and a trapped ball.

Change it up with post passes, flipper passes, tap passes, etc.

It takes a long time to get better, but it works.

Ignore almost everything except for ball control and making consistent accurate shots.

RM

I play games where my only focus is trying to make one shot or one technique. Usually both together, such as if a shot can only be made from the right flipper any shots to the left get passed to the right.

You can practice on a game that has repeatable ramps like BSD, Tron, AC/DC, IM, etc. I find that when I need more accuracy, I press the flipper buttons harder. I used to play trumpet and on particularly fast or difficult passages it was suggested to me to press the valves harder. It usually worked!

I practice shots, kind of like warming up in any sport, I guess. Hit the left ramp 10x, right ramp 10x, left orbit 10x, right orbit 10x. Make it where that's the ONLY shot you can attempt, and you can't go to the next one until you complete 10 made shots. You have to consciously try to control the ball and practice your post passing, live catch, bounce over, etc. Of course, all that timing goes out the window after 3 beers, so YMMV.

-Wes

wow, you guys are intense. I just play more to improve. Never thought about just playing a game to hit a certain ramp over and over just for practice.

85, you sound a lot like me. My accuracy is the worst part of my game. One thing It took me a while to learn is this. Learn from your misses. If you are missing a particular shot, pay close attention to how you are missing it. If you are a little too late, try earlier. If you are a little too early, try later.

I heard a discussion recently about players with poor accuracy are the best at nudging, because we always have the ball out of control. We are forced to learn good nudging techniques because we suck at aiming. The opposite could also be true. A player who is deadly accurate may also be a poor nudger, unless his name is Keith Elwin!

Don't put urethane flipper rubbers on your machine or take them off if you have them. You will develop much better flipper skills that way.

If your goal is to qualify in A for a pump/dump format major tourney, then just pay to play the same pin over and over until you find the shots.

The problem with that is: you won't be satisfied with just qualifying. You'll want to do well in the finals. And finals can/will require you to find the shots on a pin that you haven't been playing constantly -- in one game, with only three balls at your disposal.

So.... this:

I still play the same way -- to some extent.
I used to go to Pinballz and camp out on one pin, playing it over and over again until I GC'd it. While fun, That really doesn't help you get better at competitive pinball. The latter is much more about learning risk/ reward trade-offs, and exploiting them for consistently GOOD scores, often at the expense of having as many TOP scores.

One thing that can surprisingly help during normal play is to just verbally say to yourself "Too Early" or "Too Late" when you take a shot that doesn't make it. Eventually you'll start to "feel" the reaction of being too early or late on your shots before you even finish pushing in the flipper button. If you can't tell if it was too early or late by the way it bricks out, just guess. Your guesses won't always be right but at least you're telling yourself that you're doing something wrong all the same and making your brain think about it more. Sometimes it can also help to just try the shot from the other flipper. Sometimes a shot is easier to backhand than forehand. : o

If you find yourself bricking the same shot over and over no matter what, just skip it and go for other shots. Usually there's more than one way to score big on a table, especially if it uses a DMD instead of an alpha-numeric display. For instance, on T2, if you have trouble hitting the lock shot, just go for ramps and loops instead. Left loop can award a lot of good stuff and alternating the ramps enough will get you Payback Time where every major shot is worth 5,000,000! If you can find and repeat the right-loop over and over you can not only get it up to the 5,000,000 value itself, but unlimited millions on top of that!

Practice ultimately makes perfect of course and I think Stern's notion of having its employees play at least a little pinball every day is a good one in that regards. If you wanna get better, get at least a few minutes of play in every day! : )

Accuracy is important, but it's not everything. I'm getting older and my accuracy is definitely declining. My eyes and reflexes aren't what they used to be. I compensate by working on my flipper skills. I might miss a shot 3 times before finally making it, but I'll get the ball back under control after each of the misses to line up the shot for another try. Game knowledge is also very important. You see a lot of young hotshots coming up that crush on games they have at home, but don't do well on games they're not familiar with, despite keeping the ball in play and making shots. Knowing which shot to shoot is just as important as making the shot.

The vast majority of the flipper skills and strategies I've learned have come from playing with and against better players. Playing in league improved my consistency, but playing for fun on location with better players has taught me the most. When you play with a really good player for hours and you see them do the same move over and over (that you can't do), you start to try it and eventually learn it. Forget practicing at home. Join a league, play with the local good players as much as you can and compete in tourneys regularly. That's absolutely the best way to improve your game.