You're kidding right?

I ran many tournaments last year in Dallas area that were free, including a league, and IFPA qualified.

Less than 50% of our local player/collector community bothered to show up.

I'm with you on that one, Vett....problem is I can't even think about running those kinds of tournaments around here because nobody except for me, Marcus, Ken, my wife, and two or three other people will even THINK about showing up...because they know they have substantially close to zero chance. Even if it's a FREE tournament. It's absolutely ludicrous. I've never seen a group of people that say they're into something, then don't participate in it at all, unless they're effectively handed a lottery ticket to winning, or it's tied to free food etc...

Our two biggest tournaments that we ran last year? Labor Day at Nickelrama (Herb), and the Christmas party/potluck at my house (swiss). Go figure that both were potluck. I don't even have that many games, it's not like my collection is a massive draw. Case in point that NOBODY unexpected showed up to a single league night that I ran, even several people that had supposedly committed at the start never showed to a single league night over what....6 or 7 months?

Point is, novices/casuals/non-competes like herb BECAUSE they can have that breakout game and qualify, even if it's in a "B" division. They know that they're most likely going to get blown out in the finals, but that's beyond the point apparently. In match play, they stand almost no chance against highly consistent players. I'm pretty sure I can say that nobody outside of the "core" competitive group in Dallas area has any interest in actually improving their play at this point. They do not care about IFPA, they will never care about IFPA, and it being "free" is only a deterrent to people showing up because there's no prize other than WPPRS.

If I run any events this year, at all....they will not be free if they are IFPA at all.... End of story. =|

Good luck. You know I'll try and get there, ESPECIALLY if it's on a tuesday or wednesday.

At least I learned most of this in a year and a half. If I could find a way to do cheap trophies, I would've done it at least for league, but with no entry fees at all....there's just no way until I get a better paying job I'm going to front 70-100 bucks on awards. I'm happy to donate my time (or Jennifer's time LMAO) running things, but money is money, and I have bills to pay.

It doesn't. Just in DALLAS.

They had THREE people show up at Nickelrama in Garland for one of the charity tournaments, if I'm not mistaken? I was at work.

*Edit* Oursler fundraiser... five people. 2 tourney players, 3 casuals (Though Sam is showing up to more and more..).

Python fundraiser was nearly HALF the people that showed up were from out of area...

Likely Brian Dols. I think he runs most of the stuff at Buffalo Billiards.

It was a lot of fun having most of the Austin guys up here for State last weekend. I'll actually be down there um.....what is it ..not this weekend but the next one. As far as pinball goes, I'd much rather be in Austin...but my job is here, my condo is here, so.....screwed.

All I know is he took me out in 2014 SCS 1st round, lol.

He doesn't ever travel up here for tourneys, and I've only run into him one other time, at the 2013 Garage Gauntlet. Was pretty funny to have a second crack at him after losing to him in the GG, but I blew it bigtime last year at Pinballz. Only game I did even remotely good on was Centaur.

I -probably- wouldn't expect anything like this anytime soon on this one.

Robert and Marcus got me set up on this system, and I've been using it to run a few of our larger local tournaments over the last 8 months. It's been really nice to use, and basically allows me and/or my wife to run a 20-30 person tourney without a whole lot of issues. As stated, it's capable of handling way more than that, though.