it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teels you can find everything on pinballprofile.com past episodes and more all your subscriptions you can also see us on twitter and instagram at pinball profile emails pinball profile at gmail.com i mentioned past episodes I've been putting old episodes on. So I think there's actually about 90 of the almost 300 still to go. They'll get on there. It just takes a little while, a little bit editing and maybe freshening up, adding a few intros, extras, that kind of thing. And also the search engine. But one of the ones I just recently uploaded was one from March of 2018. The first time you heard our next guest because he was coming off a big win at TPF in the, I think it was the Wizards Challenge or whatever it was. Robert Byers joins us again. Hey, Robert, how are you? I'm terrific, Jeff. How are you doing? Good, good, good. I hope everything is well there as far as coronavirus land and all that. Everyone's safe and sound? Yeah, we're safe here. We're taking precautions, mask, minimum touch points where we can, but still want to live. It's that tough balance. So, you know, still being extra cautious. That's all we can do, right? Just throw on the mask and make sure that we are washing our hands and all that kind of good stuff too, and we can still continue on. How's your toilet paper stock? What's your Lysol wipe situation like? Lysol, okay. Got lots of toilet paper. Got stocked up on that. You know, good Costco run when everything got back to normal. So I think I'll make it. Okay, good. Because you're a busy guy. You've been competing even though the IFPA isn't happening right now, and you're one of the top players in the world. But there are some competitions still going on. I know with Ray Day, Raymond Davidson, you've been kind of tackling his pin baseball. Can you explain what that is? Yeah, it's an interesting format that Raymond put together, and I was actually one of the inaugural people. He put it together, and I just happened to be set up to play, and Zach from Slam Tilt, and we fired up a game in Jurassic Park. So to quick overview, it's like playing baseball. You play innings in a game, so you set target scores on the machine, and you play. If you reach the first target score, you get a single, double, triple, or home run. If you don't reach the target score, you get an out. So you get to bat nine players, So you get to play nine one-ball games to try to score runs. That's the overview of it. Which is interesting because the way you and I as competitive players play, we don't really play that way. We play the long game, which is what you're going to get at the end, whether it's setting things up, getting things ready for maybe stacks of modes and multi-balls, as opposed to just one ball, not so much a speed run, but just put it all in one ball. You can't really play the long game that way. Yeah, it's definitely a strategy switch. So we played Jurassic Park, and usually I'll hold off to start T-Rex multiball until later in the game or if I can stack it on something with a control room mode or different things. But in this format, it was $30 million to get a single. So if you didn't get $30 million, you got it out. You got three outs, your inning's over. So my strategy had changed to I'm going to get into this multiball and try to get the $30 million. Once I get the $30 million, then I'll step back and decide where I'm going to go from there. How many outs an inning? Three? Three outs an inning, just like regular baseball. Is it a three-inning game or a nine-inning game? You can pick however many innings you want. The inaugural, we just did three innings because we started at like 9 o'clock at night. So, you know, it depends on how hard you make it. You know, I think nine innings, you know, is a long time because you could bat nine balls, nine players each inning if you don't get three outs. That's going to be a long day for better players. But the one thing, too, is when you get that home run level, you stop, right? You can't do any better than a home run. What are you, rounding the bases twice? Well, it's just like a baseball game. If you get a single, you got a guy on first. And then if you get a double, the guy on your next ball, then you got a guy on second and third. There's no extra base advances. You just move around. And then if you hit a home run next, it clears the bases. But you still got six more batters. You fire back up. Wow. So it can be some strategic moves when you come into, okay, I got a guy on second. I really want to go for a double because this is my last batter. Because if I get a single, it doesn't do me any good. So it changes strategy based on players you got on base and how many outs you got, how many batters you got left. So it's intriguing, and it makes you think and adjust your gameplay from, quote, batter to batter. You need to add things like tilt as like a double play or some kind of interesting baseball audibles. I don't know how you could do a steal. Death save? Yeah, maybe. He talked about that. is that you set that minimum score for the single, but then you set a doubly minimum score that if you don't get like 10 million, then you get a double play. So that's kind of interesting. You can check that out. Contact Raymond Davidson maybe on Facebook or check out. He's got a Discord channel too for his pin baseball. It sounds like a lot of fun. But you mentioned Jurassic Park. Now that is a game that's going to be highlighted in IE Pinball. Carl D'Angelo's Pin Clash, which is coming up in early December. Tell us about what's going on in the Pin Clash and what you've got to do there. So first off, we'll give Carl super kudos for putting this together. One, just from a tournament standpoint, a lot of work on his part. But then to set up and have an interesting qualifying because he had so much demand was also brilliant because it sets up for a quick four, five, six-minute gameplay on a stream. And what they're doing is the best 24 qualifying times on Escape Nublar Challenge without the randomness make the finals. So you've got all these streamers going online trying to beat the best time. It's just brilliant, and it's fun and exciting, and I thought I would get tired of it after a couple goes. But I'm just right now just talking about it. I'm itching to fire up Jurassic Park as soon as we're done and play some runs. And you do that online, like you said, with the streaming too, so that everyone can kind of see your progress. And it doesn matter whether you have a Pro Premium or LE he does different setups so that everyone kind of basically playing the same way Correct The Escape Nublar challenge is pretty standard across all the models so that kind of neutralizes things and he didn set too much store in set this set this I mean you can move in and out lanes if you want to, but most people have factory setups. You have to have your tilt, and you have to play online. That way, he's editing each one, so within 48 hours of your stream, you have to... I've been clipping highlights of just that game and then sending it to him, and he reviews and posts it. So on the PIN Clash website, you can see all the qualifying times and you can actually click that time and he set it up where it links you to the Twitch page so you can watch that person play that time. It's just, it's brilliant. Yeah, Carl's done amazing with his IE pinball and really during this whole COVID-19 thing, his incredible wizard mode runs and now giving back to the community with this PIN Clash, $1,000 prize for the winner and so many different entries. I know the top 24 are going to make it, but I think I counted 43 different people are going to be participating in this. So watch for that in early December. And good luck to you on that, Robert. Thanks. I know in Austin there have been some changes there. Sad to see Buffalo Billiards closed down again because of the pandemic. That place was the home of the Bat City Open. I loved what Jesse and the crew did there. So much fun in Austin on 6th Street. And it was a bummer to see that one closed down. Yeah, that was unfortunate. I knew a little bit about the potential for that, but it was just kind of hearsay here and there. And then there was a post. And I think that that property been down for a while. It's right in the middle of Sixth Street on the corner. And I don't know all the details, but I know they're repurposing it. But long story short, we lost the best place in town to play pinball and have tournaments. Of course, we didn't have the Bat City open this year with the COVID thing. So that that was a bummer. But we've had some spinoffs off of that. a couple of new locations open up. Yeah, I saw Shooters, which I had to look at their website and I was shocked. I'm like, okay, am I in Austin, Texas here? What's going on here? Because it was like a Green Bay Packers headquarter. What's up with Shooters? Shooters is a, they have two locations. I'm excited because they're on the north side of town. Most of the locations have been kind of south. So it's a good 25, 30 minute trek for me. But Shooters is on the north side. there's one on the north side one on the northwest side of austin and it's just your standard your bar lots of tvs pool tables atmosphere but one of the things that the owner there wanted to do was to bring in pinball and start exploring that so he finally got a hold of jesse and jesse's still working to route the machines that were in buffalo billiards and he brought up five machines and it's seven minutes from my house. So I'm excited to, once things settle down and it's more open to start maybe setting up a league night and maybe weekend monthly tournaments here and there. Pretty excited about that. Best of luck to shooters. There's also Cidercade, which I thought I saw, was it 150 different pinball and arcade machines? Correct. So Cidercade is not really an arcade. They're a cider maker. um they have two locations in dallas and they finally opened up one here in town and they couldn't have picked a better place so there was a joe's crab shack that was located on ladybird lake on the opposite side of downtown so this location has balconies it overlooks the walking trails overworks looks the lake overlooks downtown and i think they have about 25 pinball machines most of the new ones heck one of my streams at top rope colin and i set up uh with the owner there we were able to stream an Avengers Affinity Quest LE on site. That was pretty cool. You mentioned Top Rope Pinball. That is your stream and you can find that on the Pinball Network. It's fun and, first of all, you get to see some great play, but also a lot of entertainment too because as we know from previous streams and appearances in tournaments, Robert, you certainly love wrestling and the intros you put on Top Rope are very funny. Thanks, I appreciate that. That idea of Top Rope came because once everything started getting canceled and more people were streaming, I said to myself, I'm going to think I'm going to gear up to do some streaming. It'll be fun. Once COVID's over, I can go over to Colin McAlpine's place or Brad Holiday's place or Buffalo Billiards tournaments. We could set up streams. Unfortunately, that's not going to be possible now. But it kind of grew. I figured, ah, top rope. But after a couple of my initial streams, I came up with the idea to do wrestler intros to open the stream up. And that's been fun and kind of crazy. You've always kind of done some fun things, whether it be on streams or, gosh, I remember you doing karaoke in your videos from your drives on Facebook. And I'm like, this guy's fearless. It's a lot of fun. But that's the thing I like about you because, you know, you're just trying to have fun and make people smile and laugh, and you do that. And that's the key to Top Rope. You know, I do gameplay tutorials. I've done a couple drinking streams which have been over-the-top funny. I'm a happy drunk, so once I get, you know, five or six shots in, it's all fun and games. I remember one of the streams I was doing on Star Trek. I was pretty toasted and started a new game. And next thing I know, I had collected all six gold medals for the sweep and didn't even know it. That was pretty impressive. Well, your pinball play must be good when you're hammered because your trivia sucks. We had you on final round, and that was fun. This is going back to, I guess, episode six or seven or something like that. Middle of the pandemic, we're throwing up our hands. We're like, what the heck can we do? Everything was closed. Zoom was really popular. We're like, you know what, we're going to get a bunch of people on, and we're going to have a little drinking contest. And you did not disappoint. I will say that. Yeah, I'm a fun drunk, for sure. So I don't drink often. That's the thing, especially when tournaments. When I'm out of town, I very rarely have a drink. But when I do, I have more than one.