Name of this place, please? [EDIT: Found it, the Wild Pitch Sports Bar--i think]

IN!

and.... I'm in! For real, got plane tix, hotel. BTW, the Home2 Suites (Hilton) is a good deal (Embassy is sold out), around $110/nite w/breakfast, right across the street at the mall parking lot, just down from the Wild Pitch sports bar. I missed Chicago Expo this year, and am looking forward to Texas!

TPF is more like the Chicago Expo, and I don't attend that for the tourneys either. Having seminars and pinball luminaries present, lots of games, vendors/swap meet, etc. makes it an all-around pinball event. The tourneys are a bonus!

Maybe it'll be available Sunday afternoon after playoffs end? (Or earlier if it's not a playoff game?) I dunno, just a thought.

*head explodes*

Disagree highly. For example, been screwed in Boston with an Uber driver who didn't know the city so that I missed my train. (Forfeited a free 1st-class upgrade on Acela too, grrr....) A cab would've had me there by a direct route. And they can be 2x or 3x as much as a cab, depending on whether their undisclosed "special" rates kick in. (Drop of rain or flake of snow? Holiday? Rush hour? Event in town? Beware of Uber!) And you may not know it until you're billed later.

Someone noted that their cab ride last year, airport to expo, was $65 with tip. NO WAY will Uber charge 70% less ($20????) for this same ride. Please don't post false info here. At least with a cab, you know what you're getting and it's properly regulated.

TPF was great--HUGE show with something for everyone, lots of variety, games to play, vendors, etc. Nice venue as well--convenient and spacious. (I never even made it out to the swap meet tho.)

I'll add a few concerns to the tourney issues that I witnessed or was involved in. But first, kudos to the organizers and volunteers for all their efforts--this stuff is a lot of work and is appreciated. And the games were all playing great (although BK2K was pretty slow). The following is all meant constructively, as I know how hard it is to organize such a massive effort!

I think the TPF tried for too much with 5 tourneys. 4 tourneys max would have been better: Vintage (EM), Retro (SS), a DMD tourney, and Wizards (mixed) seems good. The Tilt and Shootout tourneys were both DMD and thus redundant IMO.

Tourney format should be selected and adhered to. I'm fine with the top-40 from 2 days, with early-round losers dropping to C and B Divs. But the format changed for each tourney. Dunno about Shootout, but EM was all head-to-head matches. Tilt started with 4-player matches where bottom 2 dropped out. Next round was 3-player, where 3rd place dropped out. Matches were then head-to-head and final 4 played together on a single game to determine 1-2-3-4 place. Wizard was more whack. After first 4 rounds (where losers drop to C or B), ALL B/C players were told to play 1 game on Iron Man to determine the entire results for these 2 divisions. Wha?? (Results have yet to be posted and I had a plane to catch.) I know time was short, but that's what happens when you schedule a 10am start and don't begin until close to 1:30pm (when the entire show closes at 3pm!). [see more below]

The qualifying format was a bit unfair wrt top seeds too. 40 qualifiers per tourney (good), but the top 2 seeds were instantly in the final 4 without having to play a single game! (With cash and trophies for the top 3, this put too much emphasis on qualifying IMO. That may sound reasonable, but there other factors here, such as players could buy unlimited entries to play more games during qualifying so time/money could sway results.) Also, the top 2 seeds had TWO rounds of byes beyond even the #3-6 qualifiers, and THREE more bye rounds than the rest of the top 10. At best, the top qualifiers should have ONE more bye round than the next-highest qualifier(s). Having the top 2 qualifiers automatically in the final 4 of a 40-player bracket takes away much of the head-to-head "beat your opponents to win" aspect. Winners should have to prove themselves to some degree directly against opponents on the spot, and not just get a free ride based on unlimited qualifying opportunities.

Waiting lines were a bit unorganized. A game would be open, but people at the front of the line were either waiting for a different machine or afraid to walk up and hand a ticket. A few volunteers would ask people in line if anyone was waiting for the open game(s), but that was the exception. A MUCH better setup would be like they do at PAPA Classics. Set up a row of chairs (sideways) behind EACH machine as the line for that machine. (Adjacent rows of chairs will be back-to-back, people will wait for the specific game they want to play, etc.) Much more organized and less hassle than the semi-random lines which were not clearly marked. (A few taped signs on chairs that most people did not see.) Yes, the chair rows can't be done with the banks along 2 right-angled walls---best to set up all tourney banks along a single long wall, and clearly divide the banks (some kind of divider).

Software was good and bad. The single-player game scores (and current points for each best score) worked and were useful (although better to divide them by tourney bank rather than one mixed master list of all games). The machine scores (and points) pages also worked and were useful. But, for both of these, Friday data was not accessible on Saturday. This is necessary if you have 2-day combined qualifying.

Worse was the live qualifying list for each tourney. It simply didn't work. Rankings were reshuffled every time the page was refreshed, with impossible (or blank) point totals, etc. This info is really important for this format, where a player can try to replay individual games to improve their standing. (And where top 5 each day automatically qualify in the top 10 for the playoff bracket.)

Worst of all, apparently a lot of scores DISAPPEARED! This is UNACCEPTABLE. Scores are entered by a scorekeeper (on tablet/smartphone) and verified/submitted before a player walks away from the game. I was around 4th-7th most of the day in one tourney. Around 9pm I checked standings and saw I was around 25th-30th. Wha??? Checked more details and one game on my player scoresheet was BLANK. This for a good score that was submitted much earlier in the day and showing up all day until night. How does a game score disappear once submitted and in the system? I found out many players' scores (different machines, different tourneys) had disappeared. Did somebody delete these? I dunno. I was told I could show Marcus a pic of my score. Except I didn't take pictures of all my scores, figuring they were safe once submitted/accepted and visible on my player webpage. Was offered to write down the score I remembered (didn't remember it exactly) or 1 ticket for a replay. Took more like 4 tickets to get back a solid score and not bring down my standings. Seriously, there is no excuse for having scores in the system simply disappear at random.

Broken games need to be dealt with better. One game (Mystery castle) broke down before Friday eve. The organizers said those scores would still count, even though many people hadn't played it yet. Having these people base qualifying on only 5 games (where some players had 6 scores) is not acceptable. A while later it was said that people could submit a ticket and get a 1000-point score for the dead game, and the next available tourney points based on order of entry. (Qualifying point scoring from top overall game score down was 100-90-85-84-83-82-81... etc.) So this 'compromise' was available to those who happened to be in line at the time, depended on where you were in line, and put all such players below everyone who played that machine earlier. After a little while, the organizers changed their mind and (properly)decided to base all qualifiers on a 5-game bank. (Not sure if those who played Mystery Castle got tickets returned for the games they played on it that didn't count. At $2.50/pop, it adds up, and a return would be fair.)

Scheduling was HORRIBLE and frankly took away from the whole expo experience. Qualifying timeframes were fine. But the playoff bracket start times were NOT adhered to. 5 tourneys, 5 banks in the same area, no problem having 2 brackets overlap at the same time AS SCHEDULED. Each tourney could be run on its 5-6 games at the same time, no prob. Apart from the major seeding issues for the Wizards on Sunday (leading to a 3-hr+ delay on Sunday), seems organizers were reluctant to ave 2 brackets overlap. Why not? At most, there would be a small wait for a particular player if he was actively playing a game in the other tourney. Vintage tourney scheduled for a 6:30pm start, actual start was around 9pm. I think Vintage ended after 1am (closing time that nite) and Shootout went on until close to 2am before they decided to continue the next morning. And yes, another tourney had an 8am scheduled start time.

With the scheduling uncertainty, players were inhibited from going off too far to see/play other things, because you never knew when things would start. And the provided start times kept changing. Again, it's important to pick a schedule and stick to it!! Also it would be MUCH better to give players an idea of when they would actually start playing, as there were many multi-round byes in the format. I missed a lot of stuff because I qualified for more than one tourney and was hampered by the uncertain/changing scheduling. The PA system was weak as well, and couldn't be heard even 50 feet away above the general noise.

All brackets were on paper and a bit disorganized from my observations. In one tourney there was a mistake about 3 rounds before the finals that was caught just before the finals. A person that should have stayed in A Div (with a win) was mistakenly put in B Div, and vice-versa. Organizers decided to replay the matches in A Div from the erroneous round, which was fair. But the player who should have been put in B Div was not allowed to replay any matches, and the results in B were allowed to stand (NOT fair). This combo of scoring errors and bad decisions should be corrected in the future.

I also thought it was unfair to 'expand' some tourney brackets to include games from other banks. In this format, a tourney bracket can be run on the same qualifying bank with no scheduling problem or conflict. Example: I had to play AMH for the first and second times in my life in a tourney bracket, as the game was in a bank I didn't even try to qualify for. I think this was done for only 3 out of the 5 tourneys, btw. Should have not been done on any.

I agree that on the EM games, a "Tilt Ends Game" should be clearly marked on those games where this is true. I suggested this on day 1 but it never happened. It's not just a matter of "game knowledge"--who knows all the details of the old EM games?? Also agree that qualifying details should be clearer and posted at the tourney location. There were a ton of rules, and they were only on the TPF website (which is completely separate from the live scores/standings website).

tl;dnr - great, big expo. Tourney issues: software needs to be fixed to provide proper live updates and prevent disappearing entries; better lines for games; ADHERE to start times; better decisions; no format changes mid-tourney; needs online bracket scoring.

Did I mention the TPF was a ton of fun?

Here's a little local news coverage of TPF that you may have missed, with no comment

http://cw33.com/2015/03/29/pin-ballin-pinball-wizards-take-over-frisco/