What the heck? A high level discussion of pinball technique on Pinside? Cool...

Dont be fooled.... Soon there will be some bitching about something.

How does ghosting affect bounce passing?

It distracts me.

Sometimes I get distracted by my reflection in a really shiny ball while playing. #truestory

Its actually the hairline clear chipping in the center drain that messes with gameplay. if it cant drain in a perfect hole, its not worth playing.

Just spent an hour on argosy drop catching. This shit is easy, fun, and profitable! Lookout bitches!!

I'm surprised a player of your skill level doesn't already have this in his arsenal. I mean this as a compliment. So I do believe it when you say:

video upload PLEASE!

I'm guilty of being able to drop catch most of the time, but never figuring out how to utilize it (aim for the next shot, etc) with it... It's on my list of to dos before the next big tourney. (consistently tap pass and better manage holding during multiball being the other biggies)

As far as the divisions - I'd argue that one thing we need to keep in mind is that the average talent at Pinburgh isn't the average talent level at a local tourney. You have people paying high hundreds if not thousands to fly/stay/eat/etc just to play in this thing, and that takes a dedication that outstrips what would normally be considered lower talent. I had a crap day one and fell to D by one point, felt poorly about it, and wished I was restricted to at least C. That said - Although the first few groups were as expected on Friday, after the dinner break I found other players in my situation and it was about as competitive as I remember C was the prior year. (case in point - 550k on Mars Trek shouldn't be third in a true D division...)

I think this is why the PAPA D was restricted as high as 7500 this year - to give new players a chance to experience tournament style, pressures, experience, etc... I would like to see Pinburgh adopt a similar higher restriction to give some players that same shot. (maybe 1,500 or so... It would be interested to see how many players that even encompasses). I know players who were new to competitive pinball, joined to give it a shot, qualified in D, and continued to get pounded day two into total discouragement.

Two years ago, I had a guy in our bank that didn't plunge off, but specifically stated 'I'm just live flipping because I'd rather have a shot at money in C than qualify in A or B'. Not sure how to better address it, but it does happen. I also didn't tell a TD, but after the fact was told I most definitely should have.

Sorry this is a bit all over the map - written over the course of an hour or two during first day back to work.

any update on who won the Intergalatic? I qualified but was flying back to Colorado during the finals. I knew that was a possibility when I booked my flight so no worries, but the site never updated the finals. Just curious who took that tourny.

on a side note, I felt so bad for the volunteers during that event. Was very chaotic and seemed to be very stressful for them. I made sure to thank them all when they que'd me up or recorded my scores, but if you are on here and volunteered, Thank You!!!

Paul Jongma took first place. There is a matchplay event out there if you want to see all the results.

It was fun to play to play in the finals. They had the finals on the stage so it felt prestigious to participate in it.

Yeah I'm surprised too. And embarrassed. Better late than never.

I'm a visual guy when playing. I can't really read a guide or watch a tutorial on a game, I kinda have to be there. Same with this. Watching Ray Day drop catch his way to victory on Liberty Bell while I bounce passed into slings and beefed my way to 1 point was a bit of a wakeup call.

I've been working on other stuff that I should have had down a while ago like staging and tap passing. Three's always room for improvement.

Thanks,
here it is if anyone cares

https://matchplay.events/live/xzdb/matches?round_id=46306

seeded 620th or so. finished way higher than that. was in the top 10 of B for most of the weekend. half a point out of A after being a D player last year. I was eliminated immediately in the finals -- my first bad round of the entire tournament, and it was REALLY bad. oh well, still psyched overall.

next year's goal is to actually make A.

777-700-500 (resized).png

In this case, it was the superleague nurf that caused the drop. There were a few NYC players ranked much higher than their outside NYC results would suggest.

You could say I had some ups and downs...

Start in a 3 pack in round 6 with a top 20 player was not a good way to be welcomed into A bracket. LOL
He was ever so kind to point out the plaque on the F14 denoting it was what he won PAPA14 on

pinburgh graph 2017 (resized).PNG

I just wanted to draw a smiley face

Squeaked into B, Went 60-60 at my first Pinburgh so at least I've never had a losing record there! 372-700-500 (resized).png

Quite the coaster ride...

playerKmR (resized).png

Did anyone play in the Intergalactic Pinball Championship? I didn't play because most of the queues were at least 10 players deep. And at Allentown Pinfest I was in a queue with 12 players in front of me and I waited 1-1/2 hours to play my game. What were the typical wait times to get on a machine at the IPC?

We added 4 more games to the tournament this year (16) and queuing by request and there was still more demand than the format could handle. I believe the IPC is the 2nd biggest pinball tournament in the world (behind Pinburgh). We will once again look for ways to improve the experience for the players.

At least they call me "Mr."

graph (resized).jpg

I felt bad for the volunteer score keepers. They were out numbered haha

I think if you can get more scorekeepers (I know, asking a lot from volunteers) it would help run a bit faster. Even tho there are a ton of people all queuing up, I noticed that most of the time waiting to record your score took about 5 times longer than your actually game. Speeding up that process would help speed up the whole thing.

Thanks again to all those who helped!!

Too little WAY too late.

Too little WAY too late (resized).png

We brought in a new cradlepoint cellular wifi system just for IPC. We are still investigating why it failed.

This is what 7-7-5-10-8-8-7-8-8 looks like. Not pictured, the 2 in round 10 that plummeted me out of the top 40.

Screen Shot 2017-08-01 at 12.04.05 PM (resized).png

We had 1 scorekeeper for every 4 games at most times. If you have any ideas on how we can get more scorekeepers, I'm all ears.

I dropped to 781 at one point, did anyone here do worse? I came prepared for pinball but performed like it was a limbo tournament.

192-700-500 (resized).png

Wow! Looks like you almost clawed your back.

I survived a 3 on Thursday and a 4 on Friday and still got a bye in A. It can be done but it sucks to use up all your cushion in one round.

The Wurt Dipper.

So here's a random question...

Who owns the games at Replay FX? I mean, the tournament games are all PAPA games, but what about all the pins/arcades/other that was out on the show floor?

Im asking because one game intrigued my wife quite much, and I would love to speak to the owner about it.

Some of the games had For Sale signs on them, but most of them are owned by PAPA I believe. Some are from vendors.

I saw some from the vendors, but they were easily distinguished. I would assume the one Im thinking of is a PAPA game. Is there someone I can contact or how does that all work?

That might have been a problem early on when the network was an issue... but certainly wasn't an issue Saturday night. There were 4 or more scorekeepers, and no one would wait longer than a few seconds until a scorekeeper was heading their way.

I was on the 10-midnight shift and thought we did a pretty decent job turning over players. A bunch of us continued to help out for the next 1.5 hours because we cared a lot about keeping things moving. I am sorry if that was not your experience. Maybe the web app could be sped up a bit, but there was really very little down time (once everyone moved to personal phones on independent data).

The Replay Foundation owns the majority of the games there. Which one were you interested in?

Well it's mainly Replay. All the PAPA stuff was donated to Replay.. and Replay effectively replaces PAPA as the head of the family. PAPA always had a video collection, but as Replay they have been amp'ing it up to build out the arcade for ReplayFX. There was a row of games that were other people's, and of course some of the Pinball Olympics games, etc. But outside the vendor booths... assume it's Replay's to start. I don't think they look to sell, unless they are looking to change up what is in inventory (they sold off a lot of their tournament dups etc in the past)

I volunteered from 830 to 1030 pm and we seemed to have enough help. The biggest problem was that I had to use my cell phone to score and didn't plan for that. My battery had about 6% left when I finished. I foolishly didn't start any of my 10 games until after 1030 so I obviously didn't get them all in. I only got 4. Either way Replay FX is up there with my favorite events, not just pinball, of the year. I made my mother in law change the date of the family vacation cause I told her that I wasn't missing Replay FX. My only disappointment was that I didn't get to play in Pinburgh, which is completely my fault for not signing up in time. I was on the wait list but just missed out. Still met some great people and played a crap ton of pinball. I purchased the whole ticket package, but couldn't go Sunday cause my body had broken down by that point. I stayed home......and played pinball lol.

To all the people that organize this event, I want you to know that all your hard work is appreciated. We had such a great time and can't wait for next year. I'm signing up on time next year! I only wish that we could do it every month! I don't think my wife would be too happy.

I seemed to want to put as much pressure on myself as I could all weekend. Barely made it into A this year in a tiebreaker. Nothing came easy for me it was a real struggle unlike last year where it seemed to all fall into place. Lots of 3's and lots of 0's just could not find that middle ground at all, will work on my consistency for next year.

pasted_image (resized).png

I want to join in sending thanks and kudos to the volunteers working the Intergalatic Tournament. You guys and gals were dealing with various demands from a bunch of different players (amid technology failures) and probably did not hear "thank you" enough. So thank you! I had a blast playing in the tournament.

Thanks so much for score keeping. You guys were awesome and that situation didn't look fun at all. I know playing in it was pretty boring (only could muster using 4 of my entries). Glad that's a charity tournament. I will be paying my entry every year that this stays that way.

Other than when the network was down, entering results went pretty well and I thought there was plenty of help. Thanks to all the volunteers!

My question is why is there a break during the A finals? Eliminating 4 hours of play time made it tough to get all 10 games in.

I understand the desire to highlight the top players, but I have no desire to sit there for 4 hours and watch other people play pinball. If you are interested in watching, you can always sit and watch while in the queue for your next game. Heck, my games went much faster than most single balls played in the finals.

Yeah it might have been better in the night shift. I started playing at 10 am and always queued back up after the game. got my 10th game in when the round of 16 was going on in the finals (cant remember the exact time), but it was right before the break for watching finals. The morning was chaos for a bit But like I said, I thanked each and every volunteer I interacted with, I know it can be a thankless job. Glad to hear to smoothed out in the night shift!

I cant believe the question has not been asked...

WHEN DO I NEED TO SET A REMINDER TO BUY TICKETS FOR NEXT YEAR?

Let's see if your newly acquired skill will be enough to dethrone me at the First State Flip Off.

My guess is it was to again try to build up the finals as an 'event' - and not undercut themselves. But the break made it near but impossible for me to enter. I was playing in finals till the afternoon... then they had the break.. and I was volunteering for scorekeeping from 10 onward. No way to get 10 games played in just 1-2hours.. I knew I just had to forego even trying.

I know what they were trying to do with the break... but the volume of players just didn't workout for the amount of time they had. It would be interesting to look at the rate of entries played and if the early hours were just as heavily utilized. I assume they were, given the big line I saw in the morning.

This really doesn't make sense. Are you criticizing the IFPA's ranking system, or the concept of a ranking system, or are you trying to say that "the skill difference between the 10th and 150th best player is minimal?"

What are you referring to by individual game knowledge? Are you just talking about rulesets? Or are you talking about the knowledge about every single game and part that a top 10 player has when making the decisions and reactions needed to play pinball? A top 10 player knows things about how to bump a ball off a guide rail that a top 150 player doesn't know. A top 10 play can fit the ball onto a different part of a flipper than a top 150 player can. A top 10 player can aim at a more precise part of a pinball machine than a top 150 player can. So if that's what you're referring to, then you've just really talking about the hours of "practice" in between those 2 groups of players.

Also, Colin was ranked 50. Not 150. That's a pretty big difference. A top 150 player might not be taking the initiative to line up every single mode in Aerosmith with a 6-ball multiball to figure out which gave the most points, but Colin was. It was clear to me that Colin had been working on "breaking in" to the elite level of pinball players in the world, and wasn't just going to accept his fate as a top 50 player for the rest of his pinball career, and that's cool, and I doubt he's done trying to improve still.

My friend says ReplayFX needs to rename itself to ReplaytournamentFX.. He said more than half the pins on Friday were not available til after 10:30 at night. Even some vendors had there machines turned off. Again, this is coming from a friend.. I did not go this year. Does anyone else feel this way that went and was not in the tournament?

I was there two years ago. It's true about all the PAPA machines not being available until after the competition. The only day they're all open to the public is Sunday. And yeah...that kinda sucks if you're not competing.

This is a mashup to distort things.

The pinburg bank of games is off-limits through all of qualifying (it's always been this way). The pinburg bank is a large chunk of games, but there are still probably 100+ other pins and countless other video games... and everything else at the expo available.

This year, they actually improved upon this because as soon as qualifying was done, they arranged the games that would be used for playoffs and opened all the other pinburg games for open play. So Friday night probably by 11.. there were an additional nearly 400 games open for free play.

The vendors don't run the full length of the show. The vendors can close their booths... and the complaint stretched out here was that Pinstar which ALWAYS supports the local area by bringing the most 'want to see' pins... turned off their games for a dinner break and overnight. People moaned because a game wasn't available when THEY wanted to play... nevermind the what.. 40+ other hours the games were probably available? This was a petty compliant and not representative of the overall vendor situation.

Even when the pinburg banks are closed.. and vendors are closed... there are more games and vids here than most other places period.