Playland not at the Beach has always supported my pinball tournaments. I ran into Frank (who runs Playland) at Pin a Go Go as I was setting up the tourney area and he said a woman was going to hold a fundraiser event for the Chrohn's and Colitis Foundation in a few weeks and she wanted to do a small pinball tournament. Sure, no problem.

So, if you want to run a pinball tournament for total noobs, here are some thoughts:

Total tournament time should be around 1 - 2 hours max. They will get bored/tired otherwise.

Don't be a rules-nazi. They'll make mistakes and games will need to be restarted and so on. Focus on fun.

Noob players do not understand how multiplayer games work. They don't understand you push the start button 4 times. They don't understand the turn-based nature of multiplayer. They REALLY don't understand the concept of the ball saver. I seriously had to explain things several times.

(Disgruntled house-balled player) "So I played my ball. Is that it? I'm done right?" Meanwhile, Scared Stiff had launched his ball back into play...

I went with a "player's choice" format for this one, based on an idea from 2011 World Champ Andrei Massenkoff. Playland has around 30 pinball games so this worked fine. In Player's Choice, players are divided into equal groups (2 groups of 4 or 5, 3 groups of 4, 4 groups of 4, etc.). If I get an odd number so the groups aren't even, I would play, but one-handed.

Group play is always good for noobs. It's social.

Each player in each group gets to pick a game to play, but on the game they pick they have to play first. Scoring was (for four-player groups) 4-3-2-1 (Four points for first place, 3 points for 2nd, and so on). Don't use zero with noobs. It sucks to get a zero. 1 point is the E for Effort.

Consider having players only play their first ball, or first two balls. This works because it keeps things moving very fast, and on Williams games score keeping is a LOT easier. Remember, total noobs often think pinball is a luck-fest, so they are not going to complain about limited balls.

Give players tips where possible. I pointed out to one kid who was around 12 years old that he didn't have to full plunge on Creature, he could plunge for the PAID lanes. It's like I showed this kid the secret to light speed travel - he was blown away, then asked me "does that work for other games too?!"

A cool outcome of this tourney was one of the attendees was celebrating a birthday and he ended up winning the tournament. His colossal winning score on Demolition Man was about 150M.