Yeah I agree with this. Escher only had two points going into the final game. Bowen was beating himself up on game choice but I had no issues with his picks. He put up 9 million plus on Skateball in qualifying. He has seen Escher play it poorly.

I really wanted Bowen to win, he was such a good qualifier. He's also a friend and introduced me to competitive pinball. Escher is the world champ and the tourney winner but I believe Bowen to be a better player and would take Bowen in any bet on a rematch.

There's variance in pinball. Bowen had a bounce on the flipper during a trap attempt that wasn't like the previous feeds/traps, and he fumbled and drained. But Escher barely got a flipper on the ball in Twilight Zone. When you play four days of pinball weird shit happens.

Anyone see the tiebreak between Adam Lefkoff and Escher ? I think 2.1 million won it on X-men?!

It's against the rules and the spirit of the event. Also what are you teaching your son in that moment?

Yeah that's why he picked WPT but he had three very short balls on it to put himself in the hole in the first place.

He crushed Twilight Zone which we all expected. I mean JQ and Skateball are great picks, they're rarer games to see in the wild... if I were Bowen I would have picked Skateball too. We talked about it and the first thing he said after he got some composure was "I think I made a bad choice". I told him I 100% did not agree.

I agree with this. The qualifiers removed a lot of the luck from the equation; but at the end of the day you have 24 people do-or-die on 3 games. You need both skill and a little luck. I put in a LOT of tickets to A and only managed a middle of the road 66th. I had a blast though and my second place in classics 1 numbed the pain a little.

But the fact that so many of the top players keep appearing in the finals means that it's more like 80% skill and 20% luck.