I voted for the former answer but honestly, I think both work together. Memorizing the rules of a deep game is great and all, but if you forget or don't study up on flipper skills, you've basically lost all hopes of getting anywhere.

I have to agree that it's not really an either or situation. On modern games you can get away with knowing the rules more and having worse ball control skills due to the general safety of the games' layouts and gameplay, but on older games you can generally get away with knowing the rules less as long as you have good ball control skills. Ultimately what it comes down to is that if you want to win tournaments you need to both know *how* to score the big points safely (and quickly) AND have great ball control skills that allow you to keep the ball alive long enough to employ your scoring strategies. Both are necessary at even remotely high-level tournaments, so it's critical to work on both if you want to win events.

Lots of points.

Being in the tournament

Oh and skilled nudging and bumping.

both