# Episode 61 - Tournament Pinball

**Source:** Wedgehead Pinball Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2024-12-16  
**Duration:** 59m 47s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** Buzzsprout-16234687

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## Analysis

Wedgehead Pinball Podcast hosts Alan and Alex interview Isaac Ruiz, a legendary Portland tournament director who discusses the history of the Portland pinball tournament scene, the creation of Brackalope tournament software, and how Portland's organized tournament culture grew. The conversation covers the evolution from paper-bracket tournaments to digital systems, how Portland inadvertently broke the IFPA's scoring system through strategic tournament attendance, and practical advice for aspiring tournament directors.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Isaac Ruiz created Brackalope, the first iOS tournament management app for pinball, which revolutionized how tournaments were run by eliminating manual paper brackets and poker-chip randomization. — _Isaac describes developing Brackalope with Kevin Wilson and Pat Castaldo as a solution to manual bracket and game randomization issues._
- [HIGH] Portland's Taxi Tuesdays, the precursor to Flip City weekly tournaments, started in 2008 as a $5 double-elimination event in someone's garage on a single machine. — _Isaac states 'Taxi Tuesdays' began around 2008 with a guy who owned a taxi cab in his garage, later moved to Old Gilbert Tavern._
- [HIGH] Isaac and the Portland tournament community effectively broke the IFPA's scoring system by min-maxing location-based point allocation, playing at 13 different locations four times a year to accumulate quarterly-level points weekly. — _Isaac explains IFPA had to nerf Portland events because players exploited the location-frequency point system, changing rules so each event is now calculated individually._
- [HIGH] The Pinball Map iOS app was created in Portland by Ryan and Scott for the local scene before being expanded nationally. — _Isaac collaborated with Pinball Map creators on API development; now maintained by Beth and Scott._
- [HIGH] Tournament management software transition from paper brackets to digital eliminated human bias in game randomization and match scheduling. — _Isaac describes how manual bracket systems with poker chips for randomization introduced subtle and overt human bias that digital systems eliminated._
- [MEDIUM] Portland has the most machines on location of any city known to the hosts, supporting a large weekly tournament infrastructure. — _Alan clarifies Portland has 'the most machines on location' but acknowledges other scenes may have comparable or larger tournament volumes; other cities like Seattle and Tampa Bay are also developing robust tournament scenes._
- [HIGH] Being a tournament director requires volunteering time, emotional labor, salesmanship, problem-solving, and liaison work between venues, players, and organizers. — _Alan describes TD role as involving salesmanship, showmanship, point-of-contact responsibilities, planning, setup, and can feel like 'a thankless job' if executed well._

### Notable Quotes

> "I'd go sneak into ground control. I'd get like five out, whatever. And then to not raise suspicion, I'd like go play pirates... They used to paint the quarters blue so people wouldn't do that. So sorry, ground control, if you're listening."
> — **Isaac Ruiz**, ~15:00
> _Humorous origin story showing how Isaac discovered Pirates of the Caribbean pinball and ground control venue; establishes his connection to Portland's pinball infrastructure._

> "I was like well this is dumb i can like write a tool to like keep like randomized things... a little tool to like use as a companion app to the bracket app."
> — **Isaac Ruiz**, ~35:00
> _Demonstrates the pragmatic problem-solving that led to Brackalope's creation; shows how software solutions emerged from real tournament management pain points._

> "We were effectively playing quarterly tournaments every Tuesday... I was ranked like top 200 in the world for a while."
> — **Isaac Ruiz**, ~70:00
> _Illustrates the magnitude of the IFPA scoring system exploit—even casual players like Isaac achieved elite global rankings through strategic tournament attendance._

> "You just felt like you had to step up because... we can let the scene die something like that."
> — **Alex (Alan's co-host)**, ~45:00
> _Captures the volunteer ethos driving Portland's tournament scene—Isaac stepped up to maintain community infrastructure when previous organizers moved away._

> "The growth of competitive pinball is from a lot of different places. And Portland was just a major hub. But everyone volunteers their time."
> — **Alan**, ~85:00
> _Highlights the community-driven nature of competitive pinball growth; Portland's success attributed to volunteer labor, not commercial structure._

> "If it's not happening in your town... sometimes that's got to be you."
> — **Alan**, ~95:00
> _Direct call-to-action encouraging listeners to build tournament scenes in their own communities; frames TD role as accessible to motivated individuals._

> "I think Josh at the IFPA, they have an unenviable position to be in... trying to do something that's almost impossible."
> — **Alan**, ~78:00
> _Acknowledges IFPA's challenge of maintaining competitive integrity across global pinball tournaments with diverse formats, locations, and rule exploits._

> "You're volunteering your time you're volunteering some of your social battery... it can feel like a thankless job because if you do it and you do it well it becomes just sort o[f automatic]"
> — **Alan**, ~105:00
> _Captures the emotional cost of excellent tournament direction; success is invisible when systems run smoothly, creating perception of effortlessness._

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Isaac Ruiz | person | Portland tournament director legend who created Brackalope software, helped grow Portland's tournament scene from infancy, runs Flip City weekly events, and was instrumental in developing Pinball Map iOS app. |
| Alan | person | Co-host and co-owner of Wedgehead Pinball Bar in Portland, Oregon; podcast host exploring pinball culture and community. |
| Alex | person | Co-host of Wedgehead Pinball Podcast, referred to as 'the water boy,' participates in tournament discussions from player perspective. |
| Wedgehead | organization | Pinball bar in Portland, Oregon co-owned by Alan; serves as studio location for podcast; hosts or participates in local tournament scene. |
| Brackalope | product | iOS tournament management app created by Isaac Ruiz with Kevin Wilson and Pat Castaldo; revolutionized pinball tournament direction by automating bracket management, game randomization, and match scheduling. |
| Pinball Map | product | iOS app developed in Portland by Ryan and Scott; helps players locate pinball machines at venues; expanded from local Portland tool to national resource; currently maintained by Beth and Scott. |
| Flip City | event | Weekly pinball tournament series in Portland, rebranded by Isaac from 'Road City Pinball'; originated as 'Taxi Tuesdays' in 2008 in someone's garage. |
| Zoe Vrabel | person | Portland tournament organizer and competitive pinball player; instrumental in growing Portland's tournament scene alongside Isaac and Greg Dunlap; previously guest on Wedgehead podcast. |
| Greg Dunlap | person | Portland tournament organizer and competitive pinball player; contributed to growth of Portland's tournament scene; previously guest on Wedgehead podcast. |
| IFPA (International Flipper Pinball Association) | organization | Global pinball tournament sanctioning body; maintains scoring/ranking system, tournament formats, and rules; manages player WPPR ratings; led by Josh Sharp who manages rule updates to prevent scoring exploits. |
| Josh Sharp | person | IFPA leadership figure responsible for rules, scoring algorithm updates, and managing competitive pinball scoring system; regularly updates rules to prevent min-maxing exploits. |
| Pentastic | event | East Coast pinball tournament event in April; Wedgehead hosts are fundraising (via Ko-fi) to attend; Zoe Vrabel is a strong competitor there. |
| Ground Control | organization | Portland pinball venue near downtown where Isaac discovered pinball and Pirates of the Caribbean machine; early connection point for Isaac's involvement in Portland scene. |
| Old Gilbert Tavern | organization | Portland venue that now hosts the original 'Taxi' pinball machine from the precursor tournament series. |
| Kevin Wilson | person | Collaborator with Isaac Ruiz in developing Brackalope tournament software into production-ready iOS app. |
| Pat Castaldo | person | Collaborator with Isaac Ruiz and Kevin Wilson in developing Brackalope tournament software; helped turn initial concept into real app. |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Tournament software and infrastructure, Portland pinball tournament scene history and growth, IFPA scoring system exploits and meta-gaming, Community-driven pinball growth and volunteer labor, Tournament direction and operational challenges
- **Secondary:** Pinball location ecosystem and venue operators, Competitive pinball formats and rule frameworks, Building local tournament scenes in new markets

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.82) — Discussion is celebratory of Portland's tournament growth and Isaac's contributions. Hosts express admiration for volunteer community work and acknowledge the challenge of managing competitive systems at scale. Some light humor about being 'min-maxed' and beat by Zoe Vrabel, but tone remains respectful and appreciative. No significant criticism or controversy; primarily instructional and historical.

### Signals

- **[community_signal]** IFPA maintains ongoing dynamic relationship with competitive community, updating rules annually to prevent new exploits and min-maxing strategies; positions Josh Sharp as reactive rule-maker managing cat-and-mouse dynamics. (confidence: high) — Alan notes 'they update their rules every year or so... they change the meta of the algorithm.' Isaac confirms IFPA 'had to like change the rules so like okay... now fast forwarding today they mean they change this every year because every year somebody is trying to min max.'
- **[sentiment_shift]** Strong validation of community-driven tournament growth model; hosts emphasize that successful pinball scenes depend entirely on volunteer organizers and local infrastructure. (confidence: high) — Alan states: 'For it to grow, it's community driven in the tournament scene... if you don't have a scene in your town and you want there to be one, you have to put in the work.' Repeated emphasis on Isaac's volunteer contributions.
- **[competitive_signal]** Portland players successfully exploited IFPA's location-frequency scoring model by playing at 13 different venues 4x yearly, achieving weekly quarterly-equivalent points; forced IFPA to restructure entire point calculation system. (confidence: high) — Isaac describes min-maxing: 'We were effectively playing quarterly tournaments every Tuesday.' Alan confirms 'they had to like nerf your events.' IFPA changed rules so each event calculates independently rather than by location frequency.
- **[event_signal]** Wedgehead hosts are actively fundraising via Ko-fi to attend Pentastic pinball tournament on East Coast in April; fundraiser targets $2000+ range based on context clues about 'limited vacation funds.' (confidence: medium) — Alex pitches Ko-fi fundraiser: 'go to ko-fi.com slash Wedgehead Podcast... you can throw us a one-time donation or you can do a monthly donation. Anything's appreciated. We have a pretty reasonable goal here.'
- **[market_signal]** Pinball scene growth is geographically distributed with multiple major hubs (Portland, Seattle, Tampa/Florida); larger cities developing daily tournament infrastructure comparable to or exceeding Portland's output. (confidence: medium) — Alan acknowledges: 'other scenes are developing and having tournaments every day like we have in Portland... And they're having big quarterly tournaments where their weeklies are growing big and kind of unwieldy.' Hosts expect listener pushback from Toledo and Tampa Bay.
- **[community_signal]** Isaac Ruiz exemplifies grassroots volunteer infrastructure builder: identified operational pain points (tournament management), learned to code, created reusable solution that became adopted industry-wide standard. (confidence: high) — Isaac states: 'i was like well this is dumb i can like write a tool.' Alan emphasizes 'You create the software, you make it easier to run tournaments. More people are coming out.' This demonstrates how individual initiative scales community infrastructure.
- **[technology_signal]** Brackalope represents paradigm shift from manual paper-bracket tournament management to automated digital systems, eliminating human bias and dramatically increasing operational efficiency. (confidence: high) — Isaac describes transition from paper brackets and poker chips to integrated software that randomizes game selection, removes TD bias, and tracks all match data automatically. Alex notes 'I can't imagine' running tournaments on paper today.

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## Transcript

 Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. My name is Alan, host of the podcast and one of the owners of Wedgehead, a pinball bar in Portland, Oregon. And I'm joined in the basement studio of Alex, the water boy, my co-host. How are you doing, Alex? I'm doing great. I'm doing especially good because I get a plug, our cool copy fundraiser before we start the episode, right? So if you've missed on the last couple episodes, we're trying to raise money. We're trying to see these people that I'm told exist on the East Coast, but I've never met them. They want us to come to Pentastic. We don't want to spend all of our money. You know, the limited vacation funds that we have just playing nerd pinball stuff. So if you're a listener of the show, you want to support us because you like the show or you just want to see us go to the East Coast and get our asses handed to us once again by Zoe Vrabel, go to ko-fi.com slash Wedgehead Podcast, something like that. There's an actual URL linked on hopefully the Instagram by the time you hear this. There'll be a link in the show notes if you want a clue there, but it's ko-fi.com slash Wedgehead Podcast. Yeah, and you can throw us a one-time donation or you can do a monthly donation. Anything's appreciated. We have a pretty reasonable goal here of just making it to the East Coast because we'd like to see those guys. Seriously. Pentastic is in April, and all of our listeners out there, you're trying to get us to come out? Throw some bones there, and we'll make it out there and see you all at Pentastic. Yep, that's our ad. We're not taking money from anybody else, so it's just you, the listener. Yeah, we're just going to pester you, our loyal listeners, with our own ads Win Schilling for money. but that being said on to more important things we're joined by not only uh alan but also by our buddy isaac i don't know if i should say his last name i don't know how anybody feels comfortable it's on the internet okay they'll be able to find isaac ruiz he's a tournament director legend in the portland scene he's been a big part of this forever and he's here specifically to talk about tournaments something that alan and i don't know that much about isaac how are you doing today i'm Great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, very happy to have you here. Isaac is a man who is instrumental, whether or not he wants to admit it. He's a little bit shy in growing the local Portland pinball scene from a young sapling into the mighty oak tree that it is today. It is an insane scene for anybody not in Portland. He's run hundreds, maybe even thousands of pinball tournaments as a TD here in Portland. And he even wrote the very first pinball tournament app, Brackalope, in his spare time as an Apple app developer. shook months of the tedium of running tournaments on paper brackets and made it slick and easy for anyone to run their own tourneys a lot of you don't realize this and you're going to realize this after talking this not that long ago there was not software to run your pinball tournaments there was not and it was significantly more annoying to run tournaments dude tournaments are already annoying i cannot if you told me i had to do this shit on paper i'd be like no oh dude No, that's like out. I can't imagine. Isaac's a very kind and handsome man. He just wants people to enjoy others playing pinball on location. And he helped me a ton with the first app version of Howdy because I, like everyone else, even though I started it much later, I was using paper brackets because I couldn't find software that would support it. And I was doing a lot of hard work, making it really hard on myself. And Isaac came in and was like, oh, my God, let me help you. Please let me help you. And made my life a lot easier. And for all the people that come into Howdy, and it's run much faster and much slicker, you have Isaac to thank. It is so much work just streamlining it. And I appreciate you very much. And I'm very excited to have you. Thank you so much. I'm so excited. How are you doing today, buddy? I'm doing great. All right. So take us back to when you first got involved in the Portland tournament scene. What was it like in those days? How were the tournaments organized? And how were they run? Can you tell us about how you got into pinball in Portland and how you became like one of like a small group of people that ran all these tournaments? Because very shortly you became like the guy. I mean, I met you when I first started playing pinball. So I started, I lived downtown across from Ground Control soon after I moved to Portland. And I was, my friends played pinball. My friend worked at Ground Control. And I'd like kind of go in and just like check it out, whatever. But I mostly just went in there to steal the quarters because my laundry machine had a statue of limitations here on this crime. I'd even, of course, my laundry machine. So I'd go sneak into ground control. I'd get like five out, whatever. And then to not raise suspicion, I'd like go play pirates. And I just only played pirates, but like a dollar or two on pirates. And I'd walk out with my pocket full of quarters. And they used to paint the quarters blue so people wouldn't do that. So sorry, ground control, if you're listening. So I got hooked on pirates and stern pirates. Stern pirates. Yeah, Pirates of the Caribbean. in the good one it's a good one i love that game yeah pirates the kids call it styrets my friend introduced me to the portland pimple map and so i had a bike and i live downtown and i just hop on the pimple map and i'm like oh i've never been to this bar and i go check it out whatever that so i was working in uh web development making web apps for like educational games stuff at the time and i wanted to break into ios and i needed like a project kind of something to work forward to so i reached out the pimple map guys and i said hey can you write me an api and we can like do an app and they said sure whatever and they just let me do it and with their help and stuff like that so we kind of collaborated maybe an api uh yeah let's have a meeting are you going to be at the weekly on tuesday and that was like the kind of first introduction and i said what weekly and they said oh and they met said come to slap town at seven o'clock on tuesday or whatever so i went there and there was a tournament being run there by a group of like local players and i didn't play that first week because i didn't know what i was doing but i just kept coming back and i started bringing like my laptop and like just distributing like the pinball map builds there to people just like as a thing and like it as like testers or whatever like that i finally got the courage to start playing and then i started playing more often and then as the td would like take breaks and stuff i started volunteering so you got involved with the ios development of the pinball map app prior to ever playing in a tournament yes oh that's funny i was just saying like that is not the timeline i would have expected for that that's the other thing we need to mention here the pinball map that everyone if you don't already use i don't know how you'd be listening to this podcast and are not adept enough to discover the pinball map and use it as a way to find pinball machines on location in the wild but maybe a lot of people don't know but that was created and developed here in Portland for the local Portland scene. Ryan and Scott, legends here. They're unknown legends, which is why we're going to give them a little bit of shine on this episode. It is the most important... The pinball map is the most important thing to me enjoying pinball. Otherwise, I would only know of the arcades in towns. Yeah. It'd be hard to find just the random games in different bars or what they are or even kind of what their general condition is or all that kind of stuff. So I would love to have them on the show at some point and talk about the development of that and the history of it because I think it's very interesting. But Isaac was involved early on and you got involved in the scene and eventually you start running tournaments. Then you end up creating your own software, which you called Brackelope. And it kind of revolutionized the way pinball tournaments were run here in Portland and elsewhere. Like it expanded to different cities and people were able to host and run their own pinball tournaments. Can you tell us about BRAC and how that started? So when we were running the tournaments, it was split between either a paper bracket. You'd print out a 16-player bracket or a 32-player bracket, depending on how many people would show up. And you would just write the name and stuff like that. And then to keep track of the games, the director had a bag of poker chips with all the games on them. And so when a match came up, you'd pull a poker tournament or a poker chip out. That's like the randomizer. yeah it's like a random randomizer yeah interesting so just like and then you set the ship aside and then when the match was finished you put it back in the bag and now you have a kind of a random game like that and so amazing it's like hearing about how like cavemen hunted woolly mammoths totally dude oh they did so much with so little and we also had a little laptop a little like i think they're called like the 11 inch like notebooks or whatever and that had some like bracket software on there and but it didn't have anything to like keep track of the game so we had to still use the poker chips i was like well this is dumb i can like write a tool to like keep like randomized things and whatever so a little tool to like use as a companion app to the bracket app uh to like you know keep track of games and draw stuff randomly and stuff like that and then it got to the point where i was like kind of getting like more into like ios and kind of development stuff like that i was like well bracket stuff isn't that hard it's just pretty it's once you have it drawn you just kind of fill in the blanks or whatever like that so i can do an app like that and then we could keep track of the games that way and now that all of it's in one kind of system we can kind of keep track of who's playing who's been playing what game so far and then you could balance the game so you wouldn't be playing the same game over and over again because if you if you're just drawing chips you might just keep drawing the same game yeah and then the best you can do is like you know ask the td to move or whatever and like so that was like one aspect and the other aspect was just like the natural human bias of just having a person like pick which match to start so especially if you're playing in the event you could like if your match is up on a game you like and it's like you could like you know quote unquote draw your match first and like get your game and stuff like that so like it just kind of added some kind of just fuzziness to all the stuff and it just didn't need to be there so i just i wrote a little bracket thing called the brack lope my friend kevin wilson um and pat castaldo kind of turned it into a real thing and we added the kind of machine uh called them arenas because it wasn't really a pinball app well it was a pinball app but uh to put on the app store i kind of just like this is like a thing for everyone like dartboard like kind of like a bar sports kind of game so when i published it on the app store we just called them arenas and we just had the thing so like in most bar sports you still have the concept of like you know this pool table is being taken at the same like taking you don't want to like overdraw the matches or whatever because you can only so many dart boards or whatever so it worked kind of another layer on for pinball machines because what machine you get is kind of integral to like how your match is going to go whether you know it or not and kind of trying to balance that out helps the kind of integrity of the tournament i suppose yeah and just removing the human factor from that is huge because it's like there's a lot of ways you can draw games or try to decide games and then you can appeal or whatever but like you mentioned it's always going to have someone's bias yeah it's either overtly biased or it's subtly biased but or it's subconsciously subconscious yeah it's like there's always going to be that human factor to something and when you're doing this stuff you're like you want it if you want it random you need a computer to do it yeah and it takes time like it's like that 25 seconds to like decide which match you're gonna draw like that adds up over hundreds of matches an event so after running the howdy's manually all that shit takes time oh man i really anything you can get the computer to do like faster is a win because it's just like it starts adding up so fast and then you like it cascades like you have one little thing and then it's like that prevents you from doing this which prevents a group from getting on a game which is preventing another group from doing something and then someone goes and takes a fucking smoke break because their game is no it the faster you can keep all of it moving it's like uh it's like how i justify speeding like going over the speed limit it's not the speeding that actually matters but it might catch a green light instead of a red light and those add up yeah so it's like you gotta speed all the time to catch the green lights and that's how why would you buy a skyline if you weren't gonna speed i mean you speeded anything Alan. I'm just saying like you bought your skyline to speed. No, no. When did you take over? I want to talk about the weekly events. We call them Flip City. They've been running since the late 2000s. Yeah. 2008, I think was the first one. So it was started by a guy who owned a taxi in his garage and he called it Taxi Tuesdays and he'd invite some friends over and they'd play a $5 double elimination tournament in his garage that's pretty cool on on just taxi on just taxi that's good that's good lore yeah and that taxi actually is at uh old gilbert tavern in portland oh no doubt that's cool you should do a taxi tuesday on that sometime that's fun let's do it on paper uh yeah go old school actually so on his last when he moved away on his last event as a throwback after we've been running like the digital back tournaments for years or whatever i did a paper throwback tournament for him and i won the whole thing so the bias is the bias is real yeah you're like i chose uh i chose taxi yeah surprise because i was biased it wasn't a random draw on taxi me drawing myself on taxi so that went on for a few years as like kind of just a small kind of friend group thing and then it people started kind of trickling in from whatever like you know people seeing playing whatever i don't know the kind of whole history of that but i started playing with them around 2010 2009 2010 and then like i said volunteering to like run it and then we changed hands like so someone moved away the director moved away and uh i it was like such an important part of my like kind of when i moved i probably didn't have a lot of friends and like it was such a cool like social scene and stuff like that so it was your bad hygiene right yeah kept people away i think yes and you cleaned up and then everyone's like oh man he's he's so handsome and he smells so nice and he's such a nice guy we just couldn't get over it couldn't get over it so you just felt like you had to step up because you like we can let the scene die something like that yeah and so we changed a couple hands and then uh it was called road city pinball for a while and then the those rectifier stepped away and then i took it over and i uh rebranded as flip city and i got the flip dot city domain which i was pretty pretty stoked on so such like a such a fucking software everything's all about the domains oh yeah ball map you didn't you mentioned it before we started recording you're like oh yeah then we got the pinball map domain and now you're like and now i got the flip city domain you're stacking domains up. Oh, yeah. I'm such not a web guy. And I do want to mention the pinball iOS thing. I, like, transferred that back to them, and it's run by Beth now and Scott. They do that stuff. So I'm not involved with that as much anymore, but it's still happy to help when Eric Burry could. And then so you end up kind of taking over, and the people that I associate with in really growing the Portland tournament scene from like its infancy to like kind of where it is now is you, Zoe Vrabel, who we've had on the show, guest of the show. Absolutely. And Greg Dunlap, who we've also had on the show. Absolutely. You guys ended up running events all the time. You create the software, you make it easier to run tournaments. More people are coming out. This is something I get asked about on the show a lot. And I was like, I can't really speak to this because i got into pinball you know 17 18 whatever years ago when i first moved here in the late 2000s and there was already pinball around and there was already tournaments happening so like when these new places around the country and around the world are always like why is pinball so big in portland like why there's so many machines why is it such a big culture and i was like it's been just around for so long oh yeah you know like and even before these organized tournaments were happening, there were just machines on location still in Portland in the early 2000s and in the late 90s. So it's always been available where it died in other places. It was always still around here due to a handful of great operators that just kind of kept machines out and playable. And then you have the next wave of people coming in and organizing tournaments. You create the software, the thing grows and it swells. And at some point, you essentially broke the ifpa's scoring system single-handedly with the tournaments you guys were doing yeah can you tell us more about that can you tell the audience like what happened and what you meant by that because they eventually had to counter and they kind of nerfed your events right not involved the ifpa at all but i've worked closely with them and so the way i understood it is when the they were doing the weeklies or whatever the way ifpa worked at the time where you could only play in like one location and each location was allocated so many tournament points and the more points you the more tournaments you played at that one location you would get diminishing returns on those so like for example like the chicago expo whatever you get 100 points with actually playing it once a year but if you had you had like a quarterly at you know ground control or whatever or at papa or one yeah like then you get 25 points and whatever so if you're During a weekly, you get, you know, a fraction, 50th of those points, whatever. And that was their way to kind of, like, not let, like, weekly or common events kind of take over. Problem with that was Portland had so many places to play pinball. That you could change it every single time. They cheated it, yeah. So we were effectively, we played 13 locations four times a year. And we, like, min-maxed it. So we were effectively playing quarterly tournaments every Tuesday. and you had like schlubs like me like i'm i'm an okay player or whatever i'm not a term like high like sweaty guy i was ranked like top 200 in the world for a while like oh yeah like it was just so like completely bonkers and so they had to like nerf it's like okay well i guess tournament pinball is the thing and then brack kind of helped with that a little bit because it kind of made weeklies kind of more accessible uh for other places too so it kind of just yeah so they had to like change the rules so like okay and then they kind of recalculate this stuff so every event is its own event now and then these calculate the points yeah and so instead of it being like hey it's the frequency at this location determines how many points this is worth it's now fast forwarding today they mean they change this every year because every year somebody is trying to min max and kind of game the system to get as many points as you can right like yeah yeah i mean like smoky eunuch in nascar back in the day you know he's just always i got a car analogy for everything today but i was like smoky eunuch man he advanced the sport he's just interpreting the rules differently than other people and then they would have to change those rules you just i misinterpreted the rules yeah be like no i understood differently i'm i'm guilty of that too i uh one of the first like um non-bracket events i added to breck lip was called the knockout format which was an event i played in vancouver and we can get into the formats and stuff later but effectively uh it has a non-deterministic number of matches and that's kind of how ifpa calculates how many like points you're gonna get so because it would be kind of you know a bell curve of like averages or whatever they would just take the max like that's how that worked with like best of three like no matter how many games you play they always calculate that as a three-game match and uh so everyone was running like knockout tournaments on brat globe and so those events kind of blew up the dive he at the time yeah so this is a thing it's a tale as old as time basically in tournament pinball where it's like different formats kind of rise to prominence different ways of doing it you're rewarded more by the way the ifpa is calculating your elo ranking essentially as players and so the tournaments meet that and then they decide how do we tweak this to make it seemingly more fair or so that more people will play different styles of tournaments and all that kind of stuff right it's interesting to see like how the ifpa's rulings on stuff impacts like the way people play competitive pinball we talk about it constantly like the what affects like pinball design and stuff and how like customers buying like customers like in this game will lead to more of that or whatever but it's just kind of funny to see it on like this side i think it's always happened that way and it always will and you know the ifpa you know like you know Josh Sharpe uh because you've interacted with him for you know almost 20 years he has the same last name as a former guest on our show roger josh is great puts a blow with my shenanigans yeah but it's like i always think about yeah he probably fucking loves you he's like god damn it these fucking portland kids fucked up all of my point balancing again But I think it's important for any players that are listening and the people that compete in tournaments. The growth of competitive pinball is from a lot of different places. And Portland was just a major hub. But everyone volunteers their time. Everyone creates apps like Brackalope to make it easier to run. And then you create your local scene. But inevitably, as the things grow, they have to change. And I always think that, like, you know, Josh at the IFPA, they have an unenviable position to be in, I would imagine. That's the way I look at it is, like, they're trying to do something that's almost impossible. Which is basically, like, anywhere at any time, any player in the entire world can play in any format that's approved of a pinball tournament. and we're going to determine how compared to other players playing in different tournaments on different machines in different locations in different formats and we're going to give them as accurate of a player skill ranking number as we possibly can yeah it's fun and so it's awesome what they do allows competitive pinball to exist in this way but it's kind of like being the ultimate tournament director i would think it's like oh yeah everything kind of like funnels up to you and everyone every time they find an exploit or whatever somebody thinks something's not fair you know i just imagine you're like everyone's sending Josh Sharpe lots of emails and he has to just smile and you know be like they they they update their rules every year or so yeah they change the meta of the algorithm or whatever like how they calculate scores and they introduce new formats and you know nerf some and whatever so it's it's a commendable job Yeah, it's an impressive just feat. I mean, I think that's important. We're talking about tournament pinball today, and we'll stay on topic, but a common theme of pinball in general is that a lot of it is run through community leaders, organizers, volunteers. and that's definitely true of tournament directors and people running tournaments it's definitely true of like the ifpa it's definitely true of you making brack it was definitely true of the pinball map right it's definitely true of forums like pin side and all that kind of stuff like everyone just does this because we want to see it in the world yeah that's what a recurring theme with pinball since it kind of died in the 90s since it's no longer a huge easily commercially viable thing is that for it to grow, it's community driven in the tournament scene is very much that where it's like, if you don't have a scene in your town and you want there to be one, you have to put in the work. Someone, I mean, someone else might come along. You might have an Isaac in your town that pops up and takes over and starts running it. He's sitting before me, just a mere man, you know, he is a mortal and like, this is what happens. Like, Like Portland has the biggest tournament scene of anywhere I know. There's so many tournaments here. It's an absurd amount of tournaments. It's a lot. Or Seattle. Yeah. Seattle has a lot too. All of these places are just a reflection of the work put in by the local community, which I think is just always very important to highlight. And that's how all pinball goes. Yeah. And anyone that's listening, your local scene, it's even bigger. So don't write your emails, whatever you are, Toledo, Ohio. I know your scene's bigger than this. Don't write me that email. I understand that you have a big tournament scene. Alex is speaking like we have the biggest scene in the whole world. What is actually factually true is we have the most machines on location. I just assume we have more. I can just say with – Yeah, I know. You're like – I'm like, oh, God, we're going to get all these like, oh, man, you got to come to Tampa, Florida, man. You wouldn't believe how many tournaments we got. And so – I don't have a hard time imagining more than Portland. Portland's a very small city. I think that what's happening is that just other scenes are developing and having tournaments every day like we have in Portland. That's true. And they're having big quarterly tournaments where their weeklies are growing big and kind of unwieldy. Because as you know, as a tournament director, and I want to talk to you a little bit about being a TD. Because you were a tournament director for so long. And we're talking about the growth of tournament pinball. We're talking about the growth of a pinball scene. And sometimes it's just got to be you. And even though this is happening all over the country, all over the world, I'm sure that we have listeners that are like, yeah, it's not happening in my town. It's not happening in my city. And sometimes that's got to be you. So if you're listening to this, you go, well, if it's got to be me, like, what should I know about being a TD? What should I know about being a tournament director? What kind of advice do you have for someone to get started running tournaments? I would ask you that. Your arc with Howdy is exactly what you do. Like you kind of see what's out there. Like there's stuff out there, not for me. And you just go do it how you want to do it. So the best way to do it. So like the IFP is a great resource. They have like all the rules and all the formats and stuff like that. It's very easy to go like register as a TD and, you know, submit your tournament. You got to do like a month. There's some month in advance. There's some like monetary stuff we can go over at some point. But you could just go do it and say like, hey, I'm going to be here at this bar at seven o'clock on Saturday and we're running this format. And so long as you have, you know, Facebook posts or whatever, and it's all public, whatever, people will show up to it. There's an IFPA app and they will just go around the country like so many. I've met so many people just like stumble into a weekly or, you know, a tournament, whatever. That's like, oh, yeah, I saw this on the IFPA and I just want to go check it out. Like, I'm here from Memphis, and we don't play pinball that much, and, like, you guys have a thing. I was like, okay, cool. Here, come. There's this tonight, and then there's four more. While you're in town. Yeah, while you're in town, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Apparently not as many as Toledo. Just pulling nothing against Toledo. We love you, Toledo. Stay gold. But, yeah, I just wanted to talk about, like, what do you – yeah, I guess for both of you, you both run quite a bit of tournaments. I've run a howdy or two. but what's your kind of experience with like like what's it like being that is it just like lots of fun uh it's definitely work i think the thing about it is like you're volunteering you're volunteering your time you're volunteering some of your social battery you know you got to be you got to be the salesman you got to be the showman you got to be the person that everyone the point of contact you got to be the problem solver uh you got to be the liaison between the location and you know your event and your players and and you just got to be planning and kind of selling and setting up and sometimes it can feel like a thankless job because if you do it and you do it well it becomes just sort of taken for granted like isaac will always run one it isaac doesn't even want to play he just wants to run one i've long retired you know what i mean but it's one of those things where it's like i wish more people would run their own because i I think there was a period of time in the 2010s especially where it was basically you, Greg, and Zoe running almost every tournament. And I think it led to burnout talking to all three of you on all your parts because as the scene grows, it just feels – it starts to feel a little bit like, well, these won't happen without us. Then nobody will do it, but then we won't have anywhere to play. So then you feel like this burden to always do it. And then you're like, no, but you as the community, as you grow and play, you should start running your own. And I think it's so important for anyone that's ever played in a pinball tournament to eventually run your own. Because being a TD, like I said, it's work, it's dedication, it's sacrifice of your own time. Maybe even you're sacrificing, hey, I'd be playing in this, but I'm running it. So I just I not really going to play in it just to make sure that I could you know rule on things and all that kind of stuff and keep the thing moving along well And at a certain point if you run them you understand what the TD is going through It's just walking a mile in somebody else's shoes. And I think it's very good. And not to mention that everyone will run things a little bit differently. Everyone has different preferences of formats or whatever and that stuff. So just adding more variety to your local scene is always good. and the TDs that are already in your scene, as long as you're not trying to step on their toes and run events on the same days and kind of split the herd, if you are part of the community and you're like, hey, you have one on Mondays, let's do one on Thursdays or let's do it in a different part of town at a different location, that's good for the scene and it helps grow and it'll help you be a better player in tournaments. I mean, you don't even have to go that far. Like if you're interested in helping out, just go help at a tournament. Like talk to the bullet TV side a couple days before and it's like, hey, I'm interested in running a tournament. I don't know how this works. Like what's – how does this – what am I supposed to do, whatever, and just shadow them and like don't play. Just kind of stand behind them as they like work through all the matches and stuff like that and make rulings and things. And you kind of get a feel for like the cadence of it and then you eventually can just do it yourself. It's not that hard. Like the software out there now, they just – they run themselves. So you just have to be competent and just like you have to love it. It's a lot of work, especially doing it every week. So maybe don't start there, but you need you need a good support group. I love getting new people into running them. We have a, you know, a lovely regular who now hosts her own women's format called Gator Queens, Ashley. And she's a lovely player in our local scene. And, you know, she was just like, you know, I want to see more women's pinball events in Portland. And I was like, you know what you got to do? I mean, you got to do it. Yeah. Like, that's all it is to it. You just got to do it. And she's like, well, I don't know. Like, she's shy, too, just like yourself. And I was like, you could absolutely do it. Everyone loves you. You're a great person. And like, you love pinball. And that's really the only requirements that you need. The rest of it you can figure out. The only hard part, I say, is like, when you are the TD, you're kind of, you're going to get feedback and criticism on kind of every decision you make now some of it's constructive and some of it's very friendly and some of it's you know in the heat of battle somebody's gonna come at you with something that they want to see you rule on in a certain way and when you don't they might be upset yeah and so you gotta you gotta learn to deal with i always felt like when i started howdy's and my experience is different because i don't run the serious competitive tournaments like howdy is a different format specifically because i didn't want people coming up to me with this ball was hung up but they kept playing it in a multiball for three seconds like what should we do and i was like i don't care the book like i don't care the book or even my case is called zoe and like make her rule on it and it's like you have to have you do have to show kind of like a a sense of like backbone when you're when you're making your rulings be fair yeah listen but don't let people sit in gotta be consistent and don't let but don't let people tell you how to rule no don't let them talk to each other either they pull them aside it's like a crime scene you gotta pull them aside you gotta get separate quick i get the story whatever because they will the better player will tend to let that know that knows the rules and the ruling might be correct but the td has the ultimate say like the td is allowed to kind of just a little bit of break the rule like whatever they say good good or bad like wrong or correct or whatever as a td you're the you're the judge i'll say yeah yeah you're the god yeah you are god that's why you should lord your power over that your players as such you get to abuse people you don't like right and the ip is very clear about that too it's like you are like the last like stop like the buck stops with you like you can't just like text josh and like say like hey is cool. I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine. But I want to pick your brain on some of this because we don't cover a lot of tournament pinball here. Alex and I are not really tournament players. I love playing organized pinball, but I like more like I like golf events or I like, and I know you can do competitive IFPA rolling slip golf and golf. Obviously I do howdy and stuff like that. I like playing dollar games with my friends. Like that's more of like my speed, but I want to get you an expert on here and sort of describe to maybe some of the listeners that haven't made the leap they they're curious about joining tournament pinball I see this happen on the pinball subreddit all the time everyone's like I'm thinking about going to a tournament what like everyone's so like nervous to go to a tournament intimidated yeah because I mean even when I like I've played in a handful of tournaments and I show up and every time I'm like I don't know what to do and people are like you'll figure it out and then you like a lot of the time they just take things people are like well you know what match play is right and i'm like i have no fucking idea what this is man yeah like the first time i saw that and everyone's like what like in like i'm like what game am i playing on you have an ipa number yeah like you're like i don't know exactly and you're like even when you've been playing pinball for a long time you can be confused by the formats and shit and i think there's a lot of jargon here like and sometimes when isaac's talking to me my eyes will glaze over like when he was helping me streamline howdy as it was growing, he'd be like, oh, you know, this and, you know, Swiss match and something like you would just like throw Swiss seating. And so we're going to go. We're going to run. Is this like a rapid fire thing? No, not rapid fire. I want I want Isaac to explain each one of these as clearly as possible. So if someone sees it on like a local posting, they can decide, you know, like, what does this mean? And does that format sound fun to me? I'd like to speak to like the kind of the new player experience and stuff, because it is very daunting at first um i when i finally got the courage to play i would have to get blackout drunk just to like interact with anyone like it just completely smashed uh because i was just so nervous and like i'm just socially anxious anyway and actually the part of the reason i started running the tournament is because like then i had something to do like now i have like now i have a purpose where i'm like not just standing around you have a task i have a task now and i'm like you know directing and like you know moving stuff around and like changing smashes like that but like the new players like that you have to learn to love to like lose which is like i don't want this to like turn like oh yeah get good or whatever like that like that's kind of true but like you have to be humble and you have to accept that like you're gonna lose a lot of matches but the more you play you're gonna get the kind of cadence of the event and you're gonna like stop being so nervous yeah and then you're gonna win your first game and you're never gonna forget it Like, it's going to be, like, the coolest thing ever. Like, your first, like, tournament, competitive rules enforcement, and, like, match win, and, like, you're, like, over the moon. And it's like, now I'm hooked, and you're going to keep coming back. Just keep at it and find the right events that kind of, like, cater towards. What do you think is the best, like, IFPA? We're going to talk about all these formats that I have up on the screen here. But what do you think is like in a perfect world? Obviously, like what's being held in your local scene at any given time that you could make is going to differ. But like in a perfect world, what do you think is like the best beginner entry format? I would probably say anything that doesn't have an elimination aspect where you're not punished by losing by like. Yeah. Like if you lose, then you get knocked out. So like some sort of match play then? any kind of like swiss grid what does swiss mean swiss swiss means it's a kind of seating so everyone plays every round and then they're kind of paired by wins and losses losses or like score or whatever so those could be like two two game two game two to four game matches so at a certain point like the the players that win their matches play other winners and losers play other losers so they're not stuck playing with just, like, people that have lost a bunch of matches. They're stuck playing the best players. Yes. There's, like, different seeding algorithms you can pick, like, when you set the event up, to, like, decide, like, if you want to, like, have balanced players where it's, like, pseudo-random. There's another thing I added to Brackle-o pretty early on, which, like, it's more or less random, but it kind of prevents you from playing the same person over and over again. Right. So you're going to play with people of all skill levels, for good or for bad, but then the Swiss, like chess Swiss tournament, whatever, is like top players, top players, top players. And there's the match play algorithm that was developed out of Pinberg, which is like an advanced kind of Swiss thing where it's effectively random in the first rounds. And then as more rounds get played, the groups kind of get tighter and tighter until the final match is 1, 2, 3, 4 seeds versus 5A down and stuff like that. Okay, so I want to talk about some of these formats. Because the ones that – the first one I went to, the weekly, was a knockout or strikes tournament. It was a three-strike tournament. And so can you describe that briefly, like how a strikes tournament works? so strikes tournament is everyone plays every round until you lose x many games and then you don't get seated in the next round and you're knocked out so so the pool gets smaller and smaller as the rounds go on because people are eliminated and so people accumulate strikes until there's one person left standing right i do not like this tournament format because you go somewhere and you might be thinking i'm playing really good i'm going to be here for six hours and you get three strikes and you're like i'm done an hour and a half or whatever i can't imagine a three strikes everlasting six hours though depends how many people are there i guess but like the beauty of a strikes tournament is that they play faster right because you're eliminating people as the games go on yes so we we do those at the tuesday weeklies in portland because we start at seven o'clock most bars close around like midnight or so sometimes you can get to whatever but we got to get everybody out of there within like three hours so that was a format that i kind of pushed early on as soon as it was kind of viable to do so because i like the aspect of just like just getting people kind of shuffled away he wants you to show up and then be quickly discarded when you prove that you're not good at pinball i want that was my experience in retrospect i actually i do like this format because it's very easy to understand it's it's extremely easy to understand And that's why we started with it. That was the first tournament I ever played was strikes. And I just was like, this is how pinball tournaments work. And that's why the next tournament I went to was like some kind of match play stuff going on with far more many people. And I was like, what the hell is this? The knockout is a variation on the double elimination bracket, which is what we used to do in Portland. So it was actually more fair because you actually got to play at least three games instead of two in the double elimination bracket, whatever. it was a really competitive scene we just kind of wanted people to like show up get in get out like i liked it at first because like i thought it's like oh if i did bad and i'll wait around or anything like that because you're eliminated then you can go home early right and this is one aspect number one goal when you're playing pinball is to leave so that's why we're all happy about i just want to stop doing this stupid thing as soon as possible but there is something really though like i'm joking but there is kind of it's like i think that's a natural thing you're like ah shit well if i'm playing shitty at least i get to go home quick but like going back to what isaac said earlier you have to learn to like the whole thing because if you don't what are you doing because you're going to lose a lot you are going to lose a lot as new yeah it's pretty brutal i mean as a director like you want this thing to finish later so like we towards like 2019 right around me like went hiatus um we were getting like 50 people a week like we were like having internal conversations of like hey what is our cap like is it yeah is it is it can we support 65 people at wedgehead on a tuesday at seven o'clock and the answer is probably not like we never actually got that far but we had to get people out the door if you let everyone play you know 10 rounds that's that's 30 matches to get through yeah and it's insane it's not appropriate for like a late night kind of just like yeah a weekly yeah like event that's got to be like a special quarterly tournament or at least a monthly on a weekend where you have all day or something and somebody can choose to but i want to talk about like so match play is pretty simple right like you get put into a round you're playing a match with other players and then you're ranked based on how you you don't get a strike which goes against you and you collect enough and you're knocked out you get scored based on how you did like how you placed in that match right so there's different like seeding algorithms there's like point structures of like how well not making this sound simple and easy you see what i'm saying absolutely not this is i think the biggest deterrent for most players is like it's just jargon heavy like everything's a jargon and it's intimidating to people like it's intimidating to get just people to play pinball you know like and that's if you're concerned on like the seeding algorithm of like this tournament you're on like you're not a new player like you're not like min maxing like oh if i you know do well in this match but then i might play this person like that's not what new players do like it's easy in the sense like you just show up you ask the td like hey am i playing a game and they say yes because you want a game and you play the game and then the other people in your group record the score for you. Like, it is, like, super simple. Like, and the more you play, the more, like, there's, like, kind of a layer of strategy to it because you just always want to play your best. So, like, you win the game or you don't. But in terms of, like, kind of tracking your path and, like, with those kind of, like, Swiss-style group play things, every round is different. It's, like, non-deterministic, like, who you're going to play because you don't know if, like, if this match, like, loses, is this person's going to be in a different kind of part of the seating arrangement, whatever like that, versus like a bracket where everything's kind of deterministic and spelled out. You know if you win this game, the match next to you, this person won. You're guaranteed to play them next. So it kind of at that point you kind of you still want to play your best I want to talk about a couple other a little more esoteric tournament types because i think match play is what you going to see almost all the time like i think it's the new kind of normal you will also see strikes tournaments because they play fast and they're good for weeklies but i think you start getting into like maybe just more different unique kind of styles that you don't see all the time like pin golf like i mentioned where pin golf is basically like you can set a machine on, you set a group of machines, however many you want. It can be like golf. It can be, you know, nine or 18 holes. It could just be five or six or whatever you want. But the game has a either target score or a target objective that you need to hit when you're playing the machine. And you get scored like golf on how many strokes or how many balls it took you to get there, right? And so if you can do the objective or hit the target score on the machine on ball one, you get a one. Right. And at the end, you count up all your tallies and lowest score is better, just like golf scoring. And I think those are super fun because it makes you play less against like a head to head matchup with a player. And it's more like I'm just playing this machine and, you know, I'm trying. You're always trying, but you don't have that immediate feedback of like, I won that match or I lost that match that you have in the other formats. And it's just a fun way to do interesting things. Like, you know, you got to start the multiball in Theater of Magic. You know, that's your objective, right? And so it makes you play something differently than you would maybe necessarily play it in a tournament or in a match. So I think it's fun and it's dynamic in a different way. It's a little bit taxing on the TDs. Like it takes a little more. You got to have like scorekeepers and stuff. You usually play that kind of event with, uh, not on a team, but with like a buddy. And so you kind of like, kind of keep tabs on each other's, uh, strokes and stuff. I like pin golfs a lot and they, they are, there is a version of pin golf where it's IPA certified, you know? So it's like you can run them and still get, uh, IPA rating points. So the other one I hear a lot about is best game or herb format. Pump and dump. Yeah. Or pump and dump. Okay. So can you explain this? Because like when I first got into pinball, I would hear about this on forums or people would go to big events. Yeah. And they'd be like, oh, we went to Papa or whatever. And they would just be like this thing or they would go to Pinberg or whatever it is. And it was like, can you explain that and what that means? So it's a format that's really popular at like conventions and stuff where you don't want to have that kind of like full organized tournament experience where like you're tracking like each individual matches and you're calling rounds and stuff like that so what that is is it's effectively a high score tournament so you you show up and you buy cards or tickets or whatever and this ticket you can put three scores on and there's a bank of like you know nine to 25 games or whatever and then there's a scorekeeper kind of standing behind you or like kind of monitoring like three or four games or whatever and you just play one game on that ball and you record your score and then you go play another game whatever and then you submit that whole kind of card it's kind of how papa worked for a while i believe to the td and they would input it in a high score table and you would get those cards and then you would be compared against all scores on that game including your own like you could you know knock yourself down a notch because this card at a 25th place on Sea Witch, but your next card at a 6th or something. And we call it Pump and Dump because you pay for the card so the good players can just play an entry or two and put up all the high scores or whatever, and then the less skilled players, myself included, we'd have to be competitive. We'd have to put more money into the system. Right, because it's a multi... It's a multi... I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think the format's super fun. I've run into this, but someone tried to explain it to me, and I was like, I don't fucking get it. How many, like, is there a limit on how many times you can try? I mean, how much money do you have? Is there a limit to how many games you can put a high score on? Well, you're limited by time. You're limited by, there's a certain amount of time that you can do this in. Qualifying is like, I mean, there's so many, like, different knobs you can twist on this. Yeah. Like, the one when we went to Chicago, that was, you get one card, you paid one entry fee, it was like $125, whatever, for one card. you could put 24 scores on it and then among those 24 scores you would pick like the 16 games you want to compete in okay so you only 16 you felt good about yeah so like you pretty much play like 16 games like one ball each and then you kind of have eight more entries to kind of either go back on a game and try to improve your score on that game or you can say like okay well i totally tanked on that one i want to play this one instead so but that one was only one entry the herb i forget exactly what it is but the herb format is like you play the cards are a lot smaller you just kind of keep paying money to get more and more entries on so instead of it being like a limited entry like in a normal tournament where like you're in you're going to play your set amount of rounds or you're going to get your set amount of strikes and then you're out this you can be like oh i'm going to submit this card uh i don't like that card i can submit another one i could do another one i could do another one yeah which uh you know some players hate because they call it a pump and dump usually younger players are lesser players less skilled players are mad that the good players can do it effortlessly and spend less money into the prize pool to then qualify for the finals or whatever sure i like i like that i like the format as isaac knows from knowing me i love kind of best game formats like that to me is like what gets me excited i I don't really like matches. Like, match play and strikes is not what gets me high. That's good news. So, like, a match is a mini best game tournament. Think about it that way. It's like, if you love best game tournaments that much, you could just play, like, ten in a row. I don't know. There's no – they got too small of a sample size. Yeah, it's like, for me, a best game, what makes it fun is that you have all these people competing, and then we're looking at who scored the best on any of these games. That's what makes it fun. Yeah. The problem that I have personally, not to get on my own bias here, but is my podcast, so I will indulge myself. Please, please. I have a rebuttal to this. But it's like I don't get excited playing a three – like if we play matches against each other and we're both playing Adam's Family and I win with $16 million and you score $13 million, I don't feel good about that. That doesn't feel like a win to me. That feels like a loss. Yeah. Or conversely, I'm just like I didn't feel like I lose because I scored $3 million less. neither one of us had a good or acceptable game in my opinion sure yeah so like like a lot of like the matches like match play tournaments or even strikes tournaments just feel like there's a lot of all of us putting up very mid scores and we're comparing mid scores and that's not satisfying to me like i like chasing a good a good score sure yeah and that's valid like there's events for doing that i like the the kind of match style games where you're playing whatever because like you have all this training you have all like you you've been practicing forever whatever and you have one chance to like do really well against this other person and like if you like if you put all your scores together there's going to be some like normal distribution like bell curve or whatever and there's going to be some like spikes on the end for whatever and it's fun and interesting to me to like try to find where those kind of bell curves overlap at the right moment and stuff like that and like having like like a single opponent or whatever Or if you play with them, playing with them every week, whatever, you can learn their tells and learn. I learned – I know how to beat certain people in the community just based by playing on whatever. Like this one person, if you let them go first, which is – you usually want to go second in pinball, whatever. If he went first, he would just put up a killer score and just have like whatever. Yeah, that's me. But if you – I love going first. I love going first. I did that in L.A. and just was just crushing when I was in L.A. because everyone was like, well, I'll go second. I was like, I don't care. And then I just put up a massive score, and that's so demoralizing. Yeah, and that's how you beat him. He was a really good player, but you win first, and you put up that board score, and he was staring down at his zero, ball one zero against like 60. Because you know you've got to do it. Yeah, you've got to do it, and then you can usually win those, whatever. Another person I learned, oh, you just put a dollar in the game, and they just get in their head, and they just lose. So like there's something there's and like there's the kind of min max of like like trying to get like the strategy or whatever of like if you're playing a game, it's like, OK, they have this score. I know I can get, you know, I can reach for a multiball, but that's going to be more risky. And just kind of having that kind of like single game kind of strategy to like you are kind of like cheesing out a couple extra points for the win. But that's kind of part of the format and the competition for me. So, yeah, I think a lot of people really like those kind of like changing the formats and changing the matches and then changing like, well, if I'm my player order matters, because then I know I only have to get here. If I start off, I have to go, well, I need to put up a big score. So I might play a riskier strategy if I'm playing later. I was like, oh, nobody's playing well this round. All I have to do is hit this left ramp over and over and I'll get there. Sure. Yeah. So I know some people like that strategy. This is not how I play pinball. Like, I'm just like, yeah, you're shooting for the moon every time. Yeah. Let's blow this thing up. like blow it up in a minute it just doesn't do it man it's just i've tried it like it's just not satisfying to me like it's really like i'm a high score player like i want to put up a high score i don't want to put up a mid score in a tournament like to win a round like that's just not interesting like it really there has to be like a limit though like it's like you could play a game for like ever like infinite time then you could just get the highest score of all time so like to me that's not very competitive where it's like that's the best like you just you just put more and more that's what's motivating to me that's not how you think at all not in terms of competition no oh my god that's but i don't chase high scores either my competition is 100 the score on a machine that i want like that's it like that's why that's why tournaments to me i don't play them it's like the competition is like damn water boys got this fucking score hell no like i want that or Rhodes or whoever, any one of us, right? Like, nah, man, I want that. That's my game. Like, I'm going to play this until I get it. I like brute forcing the high scores, just playing a million games of Dracula until I finally get a triple stack come together. Yeah. That's how I got the high score on the, on Bram Stoker's when it was game of the month that way. Yeah. For the game of the month. I just wanted it enough that I just played the game enough until it finally came together. Sometimes though, you actually just like, what's your, Isaac, what's your least favorite format? If that's kind of your favorite then. Anything that's like four players per game on a weeknight, and it's one game, and it's only for the sake of like trying to get the most like IFPA points, like that. You don't like the grindy. I don't like four-player games in general. Me either. Because they're... I agree. They're, uh, well, you don't like playing matches, so. I know, but especially like I'd rather... You like playing one-player games forever. I'd rather play matches of just me and one other person than four. this four all of a sudden is like oh my god each round is gonna take forever you get yeah you get you get iced out pretty early the pinberg i don't know what the the format is now but for a while they had it was four four players per match the matches were four games over the course of two hours so you like had a mini tournament with like these four people and it was rad like you had to like gotta meet with them and stuff like that it was like a kind of a mini community and you got points whatever like that that was really cool trying to like squeeze in as many like the worst tournament format ever is random seeded double elimination bracket which i know is kind of my bread and butter but uh it is an awful awful that's what you got started doing that was just what we were doing at the time so like that's what we that's what we did but in that's an awful awful tournament because random seeded because then you could have like players that are supposed to be good like playing each other knock each other out or whatever and then a double emission bracket if you lose the first round you have to play twice as many matches to get anywhere close to the first whatever so yeah it's extremely punishing it's great for like backyard barbecue like no one cares or whatever but like for like tournament integrity and stuff it's a pretty pretty awful format um and i'm glad we don't use that at the weeklies anymore well i want to thank you isaac for coming over to the basement and joining us for another episode of the wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I think you explained kind of the Portland scene's history, tournament pinball, your role in it, creating Brackalope, the first tournament software for pinball, running a lot of tournaments, some advice for people playing in tournaments and for running their own tournaments. And we'd like to end this episode like we usually do, which is you're listening to the show, go play some pinball on location. Subject is tournaments, so go play in a local tournament. Go find one near you and go play in it. Even if you never played in it before, give it a try, try it out go learn to code and make apps for your friends nah go play pinball instead we want to thank you the listener once again at the top of the episode we mentioned our way to support us should you so choose you like the content you reached out and you wanted to support us we set up a site it's called coffee ko-fi.com slash wedgehead podcast link is in the show notes and if you want to give us a one-time donation just thanks for the show or you want to set up a monthly donation. We're trying to fundraise to get to Pentastic and we hope to see y'all there in April of 2025. Yes. I don't have anything to add. Okay. So that's it for the show this time. We thank y'all for listening. Until next time, good luck. Don't suck. You play any pinball today? No, I did not. Damn. We should ask every guest that I feel like. Yeah, you're a fraud. What the fuck? Wow. Start that off. Why are you on the pinball podcast? Wow, bud. Yes, he doesn't like pinball that much. I played pinball today. No, but we're going to start. We'll play pinball after we record this episode. Alex has got a nice basement full of games. Yeah, Alex didn't invite me to play pinball. Yeah, you didn't get here early enough. Oh, okay.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: d52c2273-87aa-4922-9b8e-97f5cd563907*