Oh yeah I quit playing competitively a little bit more than a year ago. A couple of reasons why which is your spending like $30+ playing 10 hours and you probably won't get your money back. However you just wasted a $1 a game, food, alcohol, gas, hotel stay or wasted your entire Saturday playing pinball. Competitive pinball isn't really that social in a certain way as well. You typically see the same people in these tournaments in your area and those same people win.

For me with my last job it gave me carpal tunnel or something and my right forearm/wrist hurts and I get bored now after 1.5 hours. Luckily I don't have that terrible job now. I used to be IFPA ranked 896 in fact.

Since quitting competitively I have noticed numerous things I never knew existed but were there the entire time. The people that you considered "friends" or your "pinball family" really were never your friends. They never were! They rarely contact me on Facebook and when I do see them it's visiting a friends house at a tournament. Even then they don't acknowledge me like "oh he gave up playing so I don't know him". The ones however that I actually gained as true (probably lifelong) friends were never that good at pinball and never took competition that seriously. They still play though occasionally when we go out for drinks on the weekend.

There are certain people that are well known in the pinball community that setup tournaments for the sole purpose of gaining gas money for the week and to farm WPPR points. You can travel quite far to NY or wherever and to some people that is what they do, they spend their entire weekends devoted to such a thing. Sure the tournament max pay is $60 and the travel is a 1.5 or hour long drive. Sure the tournament was 8 hours. You totally crushed those folks and got gas money for the week and now your rank X however!

For me though that got quite old and I saw what it was doing to me on a social and physical level and I gave it up. Look at the really big IFPA players and you will see like a bajillion events they were a part of this year and they are actually part of the industry whether it's making games or part of a podcast. They live to play pinball, lol.