The Pinball Network is online. Launching final round pinball podcast. Hello once again, my name is Geoff Teolis. And I'm Martin Robbins. Welcome everybody to the Final Round Pinball Podcast. How are you Geoff? Good as can be and really excited that this, this episode right here, the best final round pinball podcast episode ever. The other five, dog shit. This one, this is the one where it all comes together. Okay, I think that's a bit harsh. I was very proud of what we've been able to do so far, but sure, if we're going to raise the bar even further, whatever. Marty, I faked it the whole time, all right? It was a total fake out. It was all just going through the motions, but now I'm really feeling it for this episode. You know what kind of makes me feel good and thank you very much for those that do it. It's the people that say thank you for doing these kind of podcasts or anything, whether it's streams on Melbourne Silver Ball, whether it's Pinball Profile, whether it's Final Round Pinball Podcast. I guess these things mean something to people that are looking for some sort of pinball content. So we're glad to do it. We're glad you appreciate it. I gotta tell you, it makes you feel pretty good. Yeah, and I'm still seeing more and more pinball content popping up on social media. They're, you know, Facebook, people are streaming to Facebook, they're doing strange videos relating pinball and obviously a lot more streamers, as we were hoping there would be, are now streaming. So, it's great. We're still getting our fix of pinball and we're still staying connected, I think, which is the most important thing. Did I ever come up with a different name for final round? Was it like Stay Connected? They were, and I think Stay Connected Pinball Podcast is also of that vein. Marty's the talent. Let's not kid anyone, all right? Marty's the brains. I'm just the guy who pushes the buttons here. Hey Marty, how was your week? I saw you passing the buck at Melbourne Silver Ball, getting other people to do streams. Well, that's correct. So Oz Eric, Eric Hansen is a guy I often go down to his house to stream. He's got about 40, maybe 45 machines now. Is that all? Yeah, I know that's all. An amazing collection. So I've really enjoyed going down there and playing a lot of his machines. Some of them I dislike. I'm looking at you, Star Trek Next Gen. He whips my ass every time on that. He's got effectively all the greatest... If you look at the top 40 on pin side or IPDB ranked machines, he's pretty much got And we hope you enjoyed this social media and tempo- realistic, video. Thanks for watching, and we will be backing you up on social media soon! Some of my streaming gear, effectively my mobile streaming gear, and he started streaming. So check that out. And there'll be other people coming on to the Melbourne Silver Ball channel as well. But the big thing that happened this week, Geoff... Do I know about it? Maybe, maybe not. But inspired by Karl Karl DeAngelo trying to get to open season, congratulations by the way, Karl, I think after 500 tries, I decided to go wizard mode hunting. The first one I went to was Wizard of Oz to get to Somewhere Over the Rainbow and guess what, Geoff? I did see the satisfaction and congratulations. Not easy to do. It's not easy to do and it was always the getting the mega jackpot in Rescue Multiball that was always my nemesis. I couldn't get it. Finally got it and got to Somewhere Over the Rainbow. So So, very, very pleased about it. Unfortunately, I had overloaded my computer on that day, so even watching it back now, it's all just choppy as fuck all over the place. So, anyway, I still got to do it. Major milestone. The next machine I'm now going to go wizard hunting on, my Star Trek. Lord of the Rings. Ooh, Star Trek. No, my Lord of the Rings is still not working. Oh, darn it. Like, as I fix something, another thing starts. It's just, I'm just going to park that for a while. No, I'm going to go for five-year mission on Star Trek. You've never done it. You've been close, haven't you? I've been... No, not really. I wouldn't say close. I've gotten to... So there's effectively three levels of wizard mode. The first one is Kibayoshi Maru. The second one is Enterprise Amok, which I've done twice. And then the third one is five-year mission, the final one. So it's a tall ask. I've got to be able to get there, but I'm going to give it a go. Let's see. I bet you do it. And that's something that I was thinking about too. I've been playing a lot of my games as well. And by the way, I don't know if I've been to many wizard modes on any of my games. So I really think about it. I got to think now. Hold on a second. Fishtails, there is no real wizard mode. ACDC, still haven't done Encore Jackpot no matter how many times I've tried. Simpsons, forget about it. Okay, I've done the wizard mode a bunch of times on Guardians. And World Poker Tour never came close. No, that's a hard one. And then the other games are older so there isn't, oh I guess the Wizard Mode on World Cup Soccer, yeah I guess I've done that. But your games are much harder than mine I believe and yeah you're right, watching Karl do that 14 days of big buck hunter, god, I kept emailing Karl, I'm like that game is such a freaking turd. And he's like no, what are you talking about, it's great. All he did was prove it to me how much I hate that game. And you like it, don't you? I do like it, but I think if I had to play it over 500 times consecutively, I would have torched it by then. Exactly. It's not that good to want to play for 14 days. No way. But he set himself a goal. He had a lot of people watching, a lot of people cheering him on. So good on him. He did Simpsons. He did Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle. He did Valinor on Lord of the Rings. I can't remember what he's on next, but you know he'll do it. And it was neat to see him and Escher kind of go back and forth. I think it was on Deadpool, if I recall. Well, and so speaking of sort of doing multi streams as well, it's really good to see, I don't know if you've seen the Dead streams where he's got 15 to 20 people all streaming together. So I think the first one he tried was Jurassic Park just to test it. The next one was... Maiden was the first and then I think Deadpool. I think Metallica's next. Oh wow. Yeah, I know. So if I had a Metallica, I would be, but no, not to be. But I think that's great. A great use of technology to bring people together. So good on him. I think it's amazing. But again, I was wondering, playing your own games over and over again, you are, I am, a lot of people who have their own collections are doing that. I imagine when this is all done and life gets back to normal, whatever normal will be, we're going to be really good at our games. I hope so. That familiarity when you go and play that machine at a different location or tournament, is it going to help you or hurt you? It's going to help you with rules. It's probably going to hurt you with the shots. Yeah. I always say don't play a game that you've got at home because even if you're sort of practicing and you know that it feels different, after a while, you're still just going to go in autopilot mode because you've played it so much and they don't play the same. I never do well on a machine that I've got at home. I think of Wizard of Oz when you go out the right out lane and it spells Toto and I watch you on your stream. Whenever you get Toto, I don't think I've ever seen you miss to be honest, right? So very rarely. It's one shot up the ramp, right? And then the next time it's two shots, then three shots, then four shots. But on the first one, you're holding both flippers to get the ball to come all the way around. It kicks around the crystal ball and you've got one shot on the left flipper and I see & D So imagine you're playing Wizard of Oz in a tournament somewhere else. That shot might not be just the same. The angle might be different. It might be tilted. The flippers might not be as strong. Whatever the case may be, that might be a brick shot for you. Yep. Correct. And I do actually have an exact example of that where I did play Wizard of Oz in a tournament. And exactly that situation happened. And it just because the flippers are weaker or stronger, the rubbers are weaker or stronger. It's just so many variables. So it does make it a different game. You've got to adjust. Another thing that I was busy doing, and I've seen a few pinball groups or pinball leagues do this. Really a lot of connection with Zoom or Discord playing maybe just games, maybe not necessarily pinball, but it could be, I mean, Jackbox.TV. If I had stock in that and the Zoom and Discord, my goodness, all these kind of interactions that are really fun and again, keeping us connected too. And we have a really big thing that we're going to do on our next episode about connection. We will get to that in a little bit. But right now, the feature of the show, we have a very special interview. We do indeed. And again, final round, we often talk about tournaments. Well, I mean, who effectively runs the biggest tournament in the world? That would be from Papa, Doug Polka for Pinberg. And obviously he does an amazing job. He's got a team of people. He will talk about that. We will ask him some questions. There's probably a question we won't get into, and that is what's happening with Pinberg this year. Too early to tell. Not really what we wanted to focus on this week, Geoff. And to let you know, this episode of Final Round is being released on April 22nd. We recorded the interview with Doug on April 11th, so a lot could have happened between now and then. And two, when it comes to people with tournaments, whether it's that, whether it's Chicago Expo or anything down the road, let's say, you know what? I think all of these tournament organizers are in a holding pattern. They're waiting to see what direction the governors, the senators, the presidents, the prime ministers, what kind of... Allowance we can have as this crisis continues. Correct. And you know, we're already talking in Australia, people are calling for there to be some relaxing to the social distancing laws. We don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. The curve started to come down a little bit. Who knows? Too many variables to know. So we sort of just didn't go there. What we do know is Doug Polka knows a lot about tournaments and he's the guy we wanted to talk to and he joins us right now. Hello Doug, thanks for coming on. Thanks, it's great to be here. So Doug, you and Marty have done something that not a lot of people can say they've done and that's run big multi-day tournaments. Melbourne Silver Ball in Australia in the fall, something I'd love to get to one of these days Marty, and of course as we mentioned Pinburgh too. There's a lot that goes into that and we'll briefly cover off some of the things that you have to prepare for when you're running these multi-day tournaments. But we also want to get to the point of what makes a tournament successful. What are your checklists, so to speak, when running one of these big tournaments? So before we even pick the format of tournament, whether it's going to be match play or... Best game, pump and dump, yeah. Papa style. Yeah, Papa style, exactly. There are things you have to do before all that's done. Oh, I don't know, maybe securing a facility and getting proper costs. When you go through your checklist, Doug and Martin, what are some of the things that you go, okay, before we get started, it's this, this and this? So at this point with Pinburgh, most of the basic groundwork is done. You know what I mean? So like we know where we're gonna have it, we have a facility, but if you've been following Pinburgh since we restarted it, you'll know that the reason we're currently where we're at Pitman Flex'sbiz Tim Tim Kitzrow, Tom Tim Kitzrow, Joseph Tim Kitzrow, Robert Kitz, and other people who have done some of the most important aspects of the show, whether it's from teching or TVing or even doing stuff like participating in the broadcast. There's a not insignificant amount of time dedicated to that. How many people do you think would be on that team, the people that are doing tech, TVing and broadcasting? So if we just count the people that are dedicated to Pinburgh and not the people on the other side of the show, we have, I think we had 27 total people last year, not counting me. I bring that up because I just want people to understand that that's a significant size team to put on an event like that. Yeah, and the other thing too that some people don't consider is like when you're running either an event like yours or an event like Pinbird like they're looked at is events that everybody wants to play in and in general you're trying to get your people to not play in the event. I'm very fortunate that I have a core group of people that are There are pinball players who are willing to put that aside in order to help run an awesome event. But, you know, it gets hard sometimes trying to find people that are willing to give up that experience of playing in the event in order to work like a dog for a week or so. It's a good point that you bring up because when you see other tournaments, not just these, and you see people say, Hey, can you volunteer to score keep? You might be asked to do that for one or two hours. You're asking them to give up a whole weekend and probably set up and tear down as well. Yeah, for the group, basically the core group that lives in Pittsburgh, we start setting up on, at the convention center, Monday morning around 9 or 10 a.m. depending on when the first truck shows up. It's basically 9 to 9 every day and then the show starts on Thursday and at that point it's, you know, 8 a.m. to 11 or 12 at night every day. So we do ask a lot. We try and stagger shifts so that the people can go and enjoy the rest of the show as well. But it's a fairly large commitment. So what's what's stressing you out the most before the tournament starts? How far out are we? So after everything is set and in the convention, like the setup is really stressful. Because we We go from a hall with no games in it on Monday morning to try and get to a hall Thursday morning that has not only, you know, just under 400 games we need for Pinburgh, set up, leveled, play tested, but also, you know, the rest of the show is coming over on those trucks too. So we try and space out the delivery so that the Pinburgh team always has something to work on. But sometimes whether it's, you know, an issue with a truck or how they loaded it or whatever, we'll literally lose a couple hours where we'll be, won't have anything to do in Pinburgh and I know that's probably the case with you, Martin, getting machines located. I know that was what Dr. John Koston had to do for his recent event in January. So you got to set up those times with all these people bringing in their prized collections. Yeah, for me, it's obviously it's a smaller scale. Melbourne's Silver Bowl Championship gets about 120 people. So it's growing. We're on a growth one day. Hopefully we get a thousand. We actually only have about a three to four hour window to get everything set up before the tournament starts, but that's okay when you've only got eight machines or 16 machines. But yeah, sourcing them is the big challenge because it's part of a bigger show. You want all those games for the show, so people who aren't in the tournament are playing as well. For me, it's actually, and I know this is what Pinburgh does really well, and I think And Doug, it's what you're saying, you spend most of the year is setting up the banks, setting up the games so they play for about the same amount of time or at least you know how long a bank is going to go for. You want to be able to predict the time because, and I know it's happened a couple of times at Pinburgh where one particular bank has had a really slow playing game and it's hit the limit before the next round starts. So the most important thing for me is to make sure that I've given enough time to set these machines up so you haven't got that really one long playing game that just delays the whole tournament. That's a really good point. We do spend a ton of time working on the length of the average game time. And even then, when you're dealing with some of the best players in the world, they can blow up your best intentions. Again, as we're talking about setup and you've got multi-day events too, we see this with Pinburgh and probably some other tournaments too, although it's sometimes overlooked or sometimes it's not possible. But boy oh boy, if you want to grow your tournament and you can find things like a hotel partner, maybe a special deal, a special rate, that's a big factor too and certainly makes it a little more attractive for people coming out of town. Yeah, luckily I don't deal with a lot of that stuff. Mark handles most of the external stuff, the partnerships with the hotels and all that kind of thing. But that's literally, you know, people are usually emailing us before tickets go on sale, which hotels have the rates, you know, how can I get in, can I call and ask for my rate early? Yeah, there's definitely a lot of people that are keyed in on that because they want to make sure they get, number one, somewhere close to the event. Because, you know, with Pinburgh, the majority of people that come to play in that tournament are travelling. They're not local. So what that means is they need a place to stay and a lot of people don't want to get a rental car. So they want to have it somewhere close in that downtown area where they can just walk to the venue. Speaking of people then, one of the things that you've got to manage as part of a big tournament like that, and arguably I'd say Pinburgh is probably a lot more, well, a lot more serious for some because there's a lot at stake. Not just whopper points, but prestige and money. How do you approach having to manage a thousand players and some spectators in a tournament like that? So luckily with the software we've had for a few years, it does a pretty good job managing people as far as getting people where they need to be. We've worked out the schedule over the years, so it works really well. One thing that kind of ties into that is, Hamburg is kind of in a unique situation when thinking about how to structure it, how difficult to make games, because not only is it an elite tournament, but it's also a casual tournament. And what I mean by that is, we'll have, you know, the majority of the top players are going to be there, and like you said, they're playing for a huge cash prize and tons of Whopper points and all that stuff, but we have a thousand people, you know, so there's 800 people there that aren't elite players. And there's a lot of people that this is literally the one tournament they'll travel to every year. They're not a super hardcore player, but they like the environment, they like the match play aspect of it, the sheer spectacle of it draws people. But you kind of have to balance making every game, you know, A Division difficult so that you never get a flip on it versus you want everybody to have fun. Because if only 50 players are having fun, you're not going to end up with a thousand player tournament in a few years. So you're getting a lot of people from out of town, certainly at this event at Pinburgh, and you're doing so at Melbourne Silver Ball, and we see that at INDISC and some of these other bigger tournaments. Sponsorship is obviously very, very important. Maybe it can be something as simple as a food sponsor that might be on location, because you've got to feed these people if they're going to be there hours and hours again. So I know you mentioned Mark Steinman looks after some of the hotels and things like that as far as booking groups, But making sure the players are fed is just as important as having fun at the tournament. Yeah, so you want to make sure the resources are around. We were at, when I say we, I'm talking me and Mark, we're at the Southern Fried Gaming Festival one year. Actually, no, actually, I think it was Freeplay Florida. The hotel we were staying at, and this was when we were planning Replay Effects, like before we even had the first one, the hotel we were staying at, there was a gentleman John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Raydaypinball Podcast. From that point until the time they leave. And what he meant was like, you know, sometimes things are out of your control, but you want to get as many of those things under your control as possible. So like at the old pop up facility, anyone who was there, that place was in an industrial park. It really wasn't near anything. But we tried to make sure every year we had a food vendor on site. We used a couple of different ones where they would set up outside so there was literally food and drink for anybody who didn't want to leave. So you could stay on the premises if you want. You didn't have to leave. The convention center, it's a little bit easier. I know the first couple of years they didn't quite understand our players' needs very well, so they weren't opening and closing their food stands as at the times we would have liked. But after one or two years of working with them on that, I think we hit a pretty good balance with it last year. The Kraken Rum Bar was a big hit last year too. A lot of people seemed to enjoy that. And having it in a downtown area like downtown Pittsburgh, there's a few restaurants where you can literally just walk out the convention center door, So, when you're picking a location, if you have the ability to put in a location with lots of, you know, easy transportation, lots of hotels, lots of different choices for players to do when they're not playing, that's obviously a bonus. Yeah I guess we fortunate in that the Melbourne Silver Bowl Championship is part of a pinball festival which is Flip Out and it at a it called a hotel I trying to let call it a sports bar for one of a better word It is it got a gambling section it got a bet on the horses section but then it just got this big event space that we use And people have always commented on the fact that the food there is really good and it pretty much in the same location where the pinballs are So you absolutely right People will judge any anything that happened to them They will link to the overarching experience. And I remember at Pinburgh as well, if your round has finished and let's say you've got 45 minutes to get to the next round, the thing that you're thinking about is nourishment in between those rounds. And I think there was like maybe five, maybe six different vendors at the David Lawrence Center, and varieties of food as well. So it was never a problem. Get your sustenance, get ready for the next round. When you describe about getting off the plane or getting to the city or getting to the facility, everything that happens is kind of lumped in as your tournament experience. I would say it begins even before then at registration and pre-registration. Also something that's very important too because when you get there, you want to be able to go as soon as possible. I want to start playing, especially if it's a pump and dump. I don't want to be in a long lineup. I want to know where I have to go and get right at it. And your tournament does that very, very well, but that pre-registration is extremely important for a lot of tournament players. Yeah, and that's one of the things when immediately once we went to the convention center and moved to 600 people in Pinburgh, we realized that we wouldn't be able to check in 600 people the morning of. So we scheduled to have those pre-registration sites off-site where players had a number of hours they could come the day before the event and check in and get their wristbands and be ready to go. So that way when they come to the show, all they have to do is basically walk through the door, show them their ticket and their in, and they can start practicing or at least be in the area ready to go. The people that do our pre-reg booths do a great job with it. I'd like to think we got that process pretty much down at this point. There were a few hiccups last year, but I think we went pretty smoothly besides that. Well, so let's talk about buying a ticket for Pinberg because obviously that's something that is, I'll say it's controversial each year, really only for those people that miss out on tickets. Steven Bowden calls it round zero. That's probably appropriate. What's the thought process each year having to go through the ticket buying process? Yeah, so it's, we go through this internally every year where we're like, okay, this is the day tickets are going to go on sale, you know, and we have different things people have suggested over the year that we try and it never seems, you know, first come first serve seems like the quote unquote fairest way to do it to me, right? Unfortunately, as quick as Pinburgh tickets sell out this year, it becomes a, you know, a race to see who can hit the website first. In the past, people have suggested going to like a lottery type system. But to be honest with you, I'm not sure that would alleviate anything. I'm not saying we would never do it, but the positive side is, you know, you could sign up for the lottery and if your name gets drawn, you get an opportunity to pick a ticket. But I think that just kind of shifts the people that are upset. You know what I mean? Instead of being the people that didn't get a ticket in the rush, it's now the people whose names didn't get drawn for the lottery. Every once in a while we'll get emails from people saying how, you know, we manipulate the tickets to make sure that only the people that we want get to go in to the tournament, which is, you know, ridiculous. If we could have 1500 people in the tournament and we had the machines to support it, we absolutely would. Pinburgh and ReplayFX are the main thing that keeps the foundation running all year. So, for us to not allow in more people just because we're trying to put an artificial cap on it, it doesn't make sense to me. We've talked about different ways we can increase it. You know, last year we bumped it up to a thousand players. There was a couple bumps in the road last year, so we were keeping it pretty much static at a thousand this year. It's one of those things where, you know, it's exciting that we can sell out a thousand person tournament, Because if you'd have told me, you know, seven or eight years ago that there would be a pinball tournament with a thousand people and it would sell out in ten seconds, I would think you're crazy. But not only does it sell out in ten seconds, but then we'll also have three hundred people on the wait list in the first twenty minutes. It's tough from the perspective of somebody who wants to run an event where people have fun and have a good time. We're there to entertain people, basically, is what we're doing. Run a high-level event and entertain people. And when people get upset over the ticket sale process, it takes a little wind out of my sails just because, you know, you never want to see people complain about something that has to do with your event. But we really haven't found a better way to go about it yet. Yeah, but still, the fact that you're running an event that is in such demand that people make such a big deal over it obviously just shows that you've created something that's pretty special to a lot of people. Spoken Packers Doug, I can relate completely. I mean, my old pinball profile world tour had 10 events, 8 sold out immediately and people were like, oh, get me in, get me. I think I know exactly what you're talking about. The exact same scale, completely the same thing, just as high profile. I get it, Doug. All right, I'm there with you. I was pissed off because Pittsburgh couldn't even get an event on the Jeff Teolas World Tour. We didn't even get an event. Hold on a second. We finished like 18th in like seating for locations. It was ridiculous. I told you, you son of a gun. All right, let's peel back the curtain. I told you when this comes again, and it will, you can expect us to be in Pittsburgh, very likely at Kickback Cafe. So forget that. Who's your rival? I'm just kidding. It'll happen again once we all get past this mess. But again, as Martin was saying, you know, and even said it yourself, you go to lottery, you switch the complainers from not getting in on the website to, oh, that's not fair. It's just shifting them, I think. And from an administration side, it becomes a little bit more difficult as well, because then we have to manage the list of people and we have to manually invite them. Yeah. So there's also that the time that we would have to put into managing this list of list of potential buyers and how much time do you give them once you send out their email to respond and you know mark deals with most of the ticket stuff but usually for like the first week or two after pinberg ticket goes on sale all he's doing is talking to people about how their email was wrong and the thing and they didn't get this so they didn't get that it's just there's double Mark I want to ask you a question, Doug. I'd like you to give some feedback on this. Martin, you said when you set up the Melbourne Silver Ball Championship, you've got three, four hours to kind of set things up as the players are coming in. I want to know what you do in those time constraints. Maybe, Doug, you can offer some suggestions about setting up machines for your type of tournament, which is a pump and dump. Yeah, look, the good thing is that I've got really good people on my team that come in early, specifically just to set up machines. So, Stu and Stacey, obviously, you know both of them. They're really good intuitively with what a machine needs to look like for it to play for a certain period of time. So, they will literally go through each of the machines. Because what you got to remember is that at that same time as they're setting up those machines, I'm setting up all the streaming gear as well. So, you know, this three to four hours, there's just all these things happening at once. But for me, it's ensuring that I've had enough time on these machines beforehand because I don't have the luxury of being able to set them up ready for with their tournament settings beforehand. I've got to do it on the day, but I've got to know in my mind exactly what rules I need to change and what changes physically to the machine I need to make. But that's really what it is. Whilst I'm setting up gear, people are going all through these machines and making sure that they time them and they intuitively know what's going to make a long playing game and what's going to be short. And it's really, it's knowledge of the machine, particularly modern machines, Sterns and Jersey Jacks, where the rules are a lot more complicated. You need to know those rules really well to know what you've got to change. Yeah, I totally agree with what Martin said. You've got to have a good team, number one. You gotta have other people you can lean on. You can't do it yourself when you're running a big tournament. I have a couple people that help me do settings on games, and we work together, and, you know, I change this, well, let's change that. You know, we have the advantage with Pinburgh, Replay has a warehouse where the games sit on their legs. So, you know, we run a bunch of practice events, basically, where we'll go through and we'll do game timings, and we'll adjust settings, and we'll do stuff like that. I'm also not above contacting somebody if new rules come out for Jurassic Park. I might reach out to, you know, Stern or Zach or Josh or Keith and say, hey, what does this really change? How do you think this affects tournaments? Just to get their feedback, because they might know more than I know, especially as we for Pinburgh get closer and closer to the actual event. I don't have time to play all the new games with all the new code. And it always just seems Pinberg week, three weeks before Pinberg is when everybody drops new code on all the machines as well. So a lot of times we won't even update those. We'll put we'll just put signs on them saying that this is the version of code we're using. If we don't have time to go through and adequately test it and see exactly what changed or figure out if there's a bug in there that might throw everything out of whack. So yeah, having a team of people that you trust, that you can give them the power to make those decisions and make those changes, that's huge. Martin, I know that Pinburgh has that huge bank of backup games. In fact, that's probably bigger than most tournaments, but a tournament like yours, other tournaments, I wonder what they do for backup games when the techs just kind of throw up their hand, can't fix it, I'm not gonna be able to do it in time, we've got to keep play going. What is it like for you and do you have a fallback option for backup games? So over the the year so I think four years we've been running the Melbourne Silver Bowl Championship and we've had to make so many improvements year on year and because it's it's a pump and dump the thing about a pump and dump is if a machine is out of action and can't be repaired it completely throws the whole tournament because we're qualifying because You can't replace that, otherwise scores get sort of completely out of kilter. So I've just got to make sure that I've got a tech on standby and that's the whole thing. So as I said, because it's part of Flip Out and Wayne from Mr Pinball who you know he was on head to head, he's got a great, great team of techs. So I just literally put my hand up and a tech will come over and they are so good that they will fix machines. I mean we had to do, we had Mustang in the bank last year and they had to completely repair a bank of targets and it was done in 15 minutes. That's how good they are. So pump and dump I don't have the ability to replace machines in qualifying and qualifying goes for two days. In the finals I can and I usually have one or two games just sitting there nearby if we need to put them in. Yeah, the one thing I would add to that is, and it sounds like you guys got this covered, if you're running a big tournament and you're using a limited bank of games, unlike Pinburgh, it doesn't really matter what game you're playing, you're only playing the people against you on that game, so you're not comparing scores. So we swap games out all the time and give our techs time to fix them, but with like Papa Format or Pump and Dump, you need to have somewhere in your rule set, for sure, a rule about what happens with a disabled game. So like I know at the old pop world championship we had a rule in there and I think it was like after two o'clock on Saturday the scores stand. If the game is eliminated at that point we can't fix it, any score that's on it stands. If the defect occurs before that then those scores that are on it will be wiped out and the players that put a score on will be refunded their ticket or given another ticket. So the number one thing you can do if you're running a tournament in that circumstance where a downed game could cost you something Doug, that brings up a lot of good points right there. So when you're talking about a pump and dump or a pop a ticket format tournament, the general The first thing we see is if that game has been in play or being repaired for more than 50% of the time of qualifying, it stands. If not, and they can replace it, you bring in another game and you refund everyone. So that's what we usually see in these tournaments. I have to bring this up because there are still some tournaments that don't use proper software for keeping track of tickets purchased, for having some sort of virtual ticketing. Paul Lencon, Absolutely. Pinburgh uses a custom piece of software that Kevin wrote years ago, but Match Play and Karl's Never Drain software are generally the go-to for me for anything that I'm running. Yeah, as you know, I use Karl's Never Drains and it is an absolute godsend because he's thought of everything. So when you, as the tournament director, you go to your admin screen, everything's there that you need to configure the tournament. And if something goes wrong in the tournament, you've got the ability to go in there and change things to keep the tournament going. He knows, because he's a tournament director himself, what a TD is looking for to run a tournament. But also, and I think this is probably the biggest thing that I would say about any tournament, but particularly these big tournaments, is no matter what is happening behind the scenes. Doug, you would know this because I've seen you at Pinburgh. You're stressing and you're frantic and you're having to make a hundred decisions a minute, but the player doesn't know any of that. All they know is that they're having a good time, they're on the machine they need to be and they've got the players they're playing against. That's it. The most important thing is to focus on the player making sure that they are having a good time and completely unaware of the machinations that go into running a tournament. Yeah, I agree 100%. At the end of the day, it's about the players. Once again, you're basically, you're there for their entertainment. So you're trying to make sure everybody has a good time and enjoys the event that they're there for. And, you know, problems with software and, you know, it happens from time to time. It happens to everybody. It happens with any piece of software I've ever used. You know, there might be a problem recording a score or a ticket or whatever. And in all those situations, the best piece of advice I can ever give anybody is err on the side of the player. Tim Tim Kitzrow, Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. Go to TunnelCharge doğalIf you want a free trial then make sure to subscribe to our channel where we post more future episodes and putlifebricks on those diehard pins or I want everyone on the same page for rules, whether it is a physical rule book, whether it's following the PAPA, IFPA, combined rule set, whatever it is. And you have to have your TDs kind of agree. And I've always enjoyed when I see a TD not necessarily make the decision right there on the spot, but maybe consult with another TD. It's more verification for me that, look, these two or three are on the same page. That's what the rule is. They can show me the rule. All right, that's what it is. I feel better. Even if it doesn't favor the player. Yeah, honestly, that's one of the first tips I have anybody when they ask me about starting a league or even starting like a local tournament. You know, I usually say start with the IFPA pop-up rules as your base, those are your malfunction rulings, and then go from there. But just make sure that as you run events, whether it's a league or a weekly or a larger event, like if you encounter things that aren't covered in the rules, change the rules. The rules. Like, rewrite the rules for next time. There hasn't been a Pinburgh that's gone by yet where something hasn't happened that we've changed the core rules for. There's always something. There's always some weird outlier thing that isn't really covered in the rules that we usually either have to add a rule to or adjust the wording of a current rule. You know, we were talking about one of the biggest changes that occurred with Pinburgh and the general rules is, so you have a player, four player game, player one tilts through on player two's ball, so player one is disqualified, right? So player four then comes up, and you know, it used to be that if player four accidentally played player one's ball, even though player one is no longer a player in that game because they got DQ'd, player four would get DQ'd. Boo. So, because it was you playing out of turn, right? You were playing player one's ball. But we actually had a Pinburgh where three of the four people in a round got DQ'd on one game, because they all kind of lost track of who got DQ'd for doing what, and like it ended up just being three people got DQ'd and then the other person won that round, and then we're like, that's kind of dumb when you think about it, because, you know, player one already got DQ'd, What harm is it if I play his ball? Yeah, it's extra practice, but everybody else should stop me. I'm not interfering with the game really at all, so just say something to me and I'll stop playing. So that was where, you know, basically the wording about, you know, a D-cubed player's turn becomes a dead turn and doesn't impact anything, but, you know, that you don't really think about until it happens. And then once it happens, it makes, definitely have a role for that. There's a layer to that I'll add as well, and it's, you touched on it, and it's how you deliver The news as well, because I think we've all been on the end of what we would say is a bad decision. And by bad, it means that it negatively impacted us doesn't mean that it was the incorrect decision, as you know, but usually, if there is a TD that that's called over side note, so quick at Pinberg to come over and make an adjudication. But the other thing that that's good about them as well is a, they'll either refer to the rulebook. So it's kind of like, sorry, Sorry guys, I'm just the messenger, these are the rules. Or, if it's not even that, there is a level of empathy that you need to show to these people, otherwise you just come across as a bit of a dick. And it comes back, you know what I mean, and it comes back to what we were saying before, it's that can ruin someone's entire tournament experience. Because even though it's a quick decision from me and we're moving on to the hundreds of other things we're going to talk about, that person, all they're thinking about for So, that's one of the things we talked with a lot of the Pinburgh TDs. If you're new, I'll pull you aside and we'll basically have not training per se, but you know, different ways to handle situations. And you know, the number one thing is everybody has a copy of the rule book at Pinburgh. All the TVs have one. You're supposed to carry it around with them. Some of them don't. So that way when somebody questions why we're making a rule, you can literally flip the book open and show it. They may still argue that it's unfair because of X, Y, or Z, but when you show them the printed copy, I mean, this is an actual line that I've used before. I know that that ruling sucks and it hurts your chances here, but given how this rule is written, there's literally no other way I can interpret this. This is how it has to be handled. You don't have to say, you know, we often joke about going, ah, that's a zero or whatever, you know. I don't do that in competition, obviously, and it's a thing we joke around about, but even the casual players at Pinburgh are taking it seriously to some degree. And nobody wants to lose because of a rule, right? Everybody wants to lose because I didn't score enough points. Because everything was completely even across the board and I just didn't play as well as you and that's why I lost. I don't want to lose because of some obscure rule or something happened that I had no control over. But, you know, sticking to the written rules, is what I always tell people, is extremely important. Like, even when you know that the written rule probably should be changed... Here, I'll give you a perfect example here. So, this was at one of the Popple World Championships in juniors, I believe. There was, in the playoffs, the finish of the game was decided. The game was over. We knew who finished first, second, third, and fourth. The scorekeeper, when they went to write down the scores, it was an old bally with the start button on the coin door on the right hand side. We be right back Rules were written at that point was you needed to have scores to record points So basically the way our rule was is that that game was void Even though it was over, everybody knew where everybody else finished. We didn't have scores and according to our written rule book you needed to have scores. Needless to say, people weren't super happy about that. But at the same time, if I'm saying my event is going to use this set of rules, then that's the set of rules I have to use. Once again, that's another circumstance where the rule was changed for the following year. Now, I think it basically reads like if everybody agrees on the finishing position, then that can be the finishing position or something like that. But back then, that's not how it was. You needed a score. So we went by the rules. You know, you try and, like Martin said, you try to have as much empathy as possible. I think even in that situation, I said, hey, this sucks, but there's literally no other way I can interpret this rule. It literally says I need scores. I don't have them. And it's totally our fault, which makes it a catastrophic malfunction, which is a game replay. They still may not agree with it, but at the end of the day, when they look at the book, you know, it's written down. It's all you can do. Follow the rules. I mean, it's not personal at that point. It's something that's available for everyone. You know, a lot of great things that we see at tournaments are good websites. We talked about that pre-registration, but a lot of those websites will have all that information. So again, there's no surprises there. I think that's very important. One thing Pinburgh is very lucky to be able to do, and not everyone can do this, but maybe you have this same fortunate situation at Melbourne Silver Ball Championship. The spacing and the lighting of games is essential for a player to have a good time and to have a great experience. You do that at Pinburgh, you've had to do things on the fly, we've seen different lighting, you've added pin stadium. What would you say to that suggestions to people running a tournament when it comes to spacing and lighting? As much as you can. Generally, each game in Pinburgh takes up four feet of space side to side. So we kind of plan with that, which basically leaves you a couple feet in between, you know, about a foot and a half to two feet between each game. Obviously, when you're trying to jam a thousand people into a space, you don't want them crawling over on top of each other as much as possible for many reasons. Not the least of which is it's not comfortable to play in that, but also we have techs that have to get through with carts and TVs have to get through to games and you don't want to be tripping over people and possibly creating a hazard as well while you're trying to get there. Lighting can be a challenge. I know just from doing it at the convention center, we never kind of really know what's going to happen until we get there because we've used a couple of different layouts in Pinburgh. I think last year we kind of nailed it as far as where we need to have games and the lights and everything. I know like two years before there was at one point a day there was like a laser beam of light that came in between two of the drapes that just went right on to the playfields of a couple games so we had to work around that and have them hang some curtains. Lighting can be difficult. In general, I prefer to default on brighter lighting than dimmer lighting when possible. Yay! Just because I think more people have a hard time. Personally, I like to play in a dark room when I'm playing, but I know that in general when you're talking about a competition setting, I would rather play in a room with all the lights on, providing there's no glare, than a completely darkened room. That's how I look at it, and that's generally the feedback I've gotten from players. You generally don't want people walking around with headlamps, because that probably means you don't have enough light. Not that I would prevent somebody from doing that, but, you know, that's kind of indicating that you might have a problem. Look, it's not just, for me it's not just lighting. I mean, lighting is obviously very important. With far less machines than the 500 that they've got at Pinburgh, I do have some options to be able to move machines around. That's what Stu and Stacey are doing when they're setting up. They're positioning them so, because they're players themselves, obviously they know what glare is going to look like, so they'll move machines around to make sure that there's no glare and lighting's okay. I guess the other thing that I'm really thinking about when I'm setting up the, and this is for anybody that is setting up, let's say 8 to 16 bank of machines, try and think about how people are going to congregate. And that's a hard one and it does require a bit of behavioural science to understand because what you don't want to create is zones where people are hanging around to look at the action that's getting in the way of people. And I'm not just talking about putting a line that's a metre behind the machine so people know not to go before, but it can become bottlenecks for throughputs for people going to the bar, etc. You've got to think about where you're putting these machines and in your mind think about where are people going to be walking to and from, where are they going to be standing, where are they going to be talking and is that going to get in the way of people playing their games. And a lot of that happens on the fly. You've got to, when people start crowding around, you'll see what happens with the behavior. But beforehand, just try and envisage in your mind how people are going to hang around this John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Raydaypinball Podcast. We try and discourage that behavior as much as possible. I'll say this and when I'm planning on traveling to a tournament, one of the biggest factors for me, when you look at the expenses of the hotel, the travel itself, the gameplay, the registration, all those type of things, I want to maximize my experience while I'm away because maybe it's my only trip, let's say. So when you have more than one event, that's a way to give yourself an opportunity to play more pinball. Pinberg does that with certainly all the free play stuff but if you're there for the Whoppers you've got the intergalactic as well you've got whipped which is 128 women you've got different tournaments available over and above Pinberg you better have a pretty good darn single event if you're only gonna have one event because that might be a factor for some people choosing to go to your event or not to your event yeah one of the back when we did the initial requirements for what is now the Stern . We've also been to events where they've been running literally five or six different events and you can tell they're just completely overwhelmed. Like there's too much going on, they have too many events going on for the staff that they have. So you gotta find that balance, right? Where you can run maybe an additional event or two knowing that the quality of those additional events is not gonna suffer. So, for example, like for Whipped, that's almost a completely different staff we have that does Whipped. Kate basically puts a lot of that together. Bowen helps her out and they've got their own set of TDs to handle everything. That tournament wouldn't exist if it relied on me running it because I couldn't do both. And that's the same way Intergalactic this year, Brian Dye is set up to be running it. Every year somebody different has been running it and they are in charge of that event from start to finish. They make up all the decisions, you know, everything gets run by me, but as far as the actual handling of play testing and selecting machines and stuff, it's pretty much all up to them. Because with the scope that Pinburgh is, I can't split my attention amongst three or four events. I agree with you, especially I would say, because for each year I've been sort of asked, I should be running more tournaments over three days. So at the moment we've got the main tournament, which is obviously best game of pump and dump qualifying with match play finals. And we run a Flip Frenzy and we also do a women's tournament as well. And then there's talk of, well, we should do a different tournament each night. And my take on that is, and back to what you were saying, Jeff, as well, is if you are not able to run all of those tournaments well, just run the ones that you know you can run well. And I guess it comes to Pinburg as well. You've got a massive tournament with a thousand people. That's enough of your resources having to focus on that, then have to do side tournaments as well. So it's kind of good that you've got separate teams running the other things, but for Melbourne Silver Bowl, it would be the same team running those things. So I would rather make sure that the Flip Frenzy and the main championship are really good, well-run, solid tournaments than have another two or three side comps on top of it. Diminished returns if you thin it out too much. I have to say I was at a tournament in Copenhagen at the European Pinball Championship last year, last October, and they did something that was pretty neat. It was a second chance tournament. So once you got knocked out, you could play in this other tournament and maybe it was a different TD or whatever the case may be, different machines. They certainly had a big, big facility, much like Pinburgh. It was the upstairs of the famous pin lab. The second chance tournament was kind of neat. I kind of always thought of Intergalactic that way too, but we see some of these great players do both. Second chance tournaments, I wonder if we're going to see more of those in North America. If you have the resources to run it and you believe that you can run it at the same quality as your main event, I say go for it. When I looked at the schedule, I know for INDISC this year, I looked at the schedule that they were running with all the events they were running and I was like, you know, wow, that's impressive. You know, if anybody can do it, it's going to be Jim and Karl and Bob and that crew. But they had a pretty aggressive schedule of events and tournaments that they ran out there. And by all accounts, it went off great. You know, I wouldn't personally want to sacrifice the quality of one event for another. But if you can run those multiple events and you don't feel that you're cheating the main event or you're cheating the side event just to jam it in there, then go for it. Speaking of, let's call them complementary tournaments, Papa. Let's talk Puppa. I was there for Puppa 20, the final Puppa at the Puppa facility in Carnegie, which was freaking amazing. I was like, what's the future for Puppa for doing another tournament besides Pinburg? It's pretty good. Unfortunately, the stuff going on in the world today has... Besides that, obviously, yeah. You know, with what I can say is that, you know, me and Mark have had conversations on I've been on it and have done some location scouting on it and I am exceptionally confident it will return. Love hearing that. Yeah, same. Because I also feel that when it sort of stopped, that sort of put more pressure on Pinburgh and I think that's when you had a lot more demand for Pinburgh because people do one big tournament a year that was either PAPA or Pinburgh. Now there's only one, that's when you had the oversupply of, or sorry, the over demand for tickets. So maybe it'll give you a bit of relief if you can sort of spread it somewhat. I think that that's partly true. We were still selling out the last few Pinburghs and we were still getting incredibly large wait lists out of there, even when we were still running Papa. But I believe you're right, there are people that would alternate, I'm going to go to this one this year and this one next year. And I think that if we, I should say when we get it back up and running again, that maybe might alleviate some of the . Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. We don't know. Doug, one thing I always enjoyed after a big tournament was receiving an email from you basically asking for feedback. What did you think of the tournament? And there were all kinds of different questions. And maybe you can relay some of those questions and what you personally feel makes a wonderful Tournament experience for a player. So we talked a little bit about it earlier, like pretty much everything the player experiences while they're at your event is part of the tournament experience. So I know we used to do, we didn't do one last year, but all the previous years we sent out surveys specifically just for Pinburgh. Basically to kind of tailor the tournament to what people want and to be able to address people's concerns. Because while I try and be as public facing as possible and I'm on a lot of the forums and stuff and people direct message me, there will still be people that have an issue that will discuss it in their local community or whatever but won't discuss it, won't bring it to your attention. You know, and when I'm dealing with like a local event, for example, if I'm running an event that has 30 people in it and we run an event, like I kind of know everything that happened in that event, right? I'm running it, there's 30 people, not much really gets out of your purview. But when you're talking about, you know, an event with a thousand people where like, there will literally be people like, I'll say, oh, I didn't see Bob Matthews this weekend, did he even come? And people will be like, oh yeah, Bob was here, just because there's so many people you don't even necessarily run into everybody. I think that kind of stuff is really important, especially when you're trying to expand. Because the only way to get better is to know where you're failing people. And they're going to tell you where they're failing people. And there's varying degrees of feedback, too. There's there's stuff that is out of your control. So, for example, the biggest complaint we received in year one of Pinburgh at the Convention Center was we hate the concrete floors, like, by far. And if you were there, the concrete floors sucked, honestly, because you were used to walking around with the carpeted floors and popping. But the thing with that is at the time, in order, because we've looked into it, in order for the decorators to put carpet on that part of the convention center, it would have cost us like $20,000. Like that's a non-starter. You know, you're immediately putting a tournament in the red by a lot for carpet. So, you know, there's feedback where like, okay, maybe someday we can improve on this, but at this point I kind of have to shelf that. That is sort of out of my control. And I think I addressed it on some forums and stuff, you know, ...Basically saying our hands are tied sometimes based on the facility. People every year ask for food trucks downstairs outside the convention center. It's not allowed. That's another thing that's just completely out of our control. Food trucks aren't allowed to park on those streets. Can you have more presidential conventions show up? That was pretty cool. That was somewhat of a nightmare too. Didn't really impact Pinball so much as... What happened? ...didn't impact the rest of the show. Hillary Clinton had her, it was raining outside, they had to move an outside event to indoor, so here's Pinburgh and Replay FX Foundation, it's massive, and they had to change the Hillary Clinton rally to inside that David L. Lawrence Center. By the way, I totally went to it because I'm like, oh, why not, let's check this out. So while it did impact Pinburgh that much, we saw a huge impact from during that time, like the number of tickets we sold to come in fell. Because like locals weren't going to come out to the show and put up with all that traffic and security and stuff. And the other thing that really suffered was actually the cosplay contest. Because they weren't allowing the cosplayers to come in with any type of simulated weapon. Like and a lot of them have like guns or axes or stuff that they made that go as a part of their costume. And they weren't allowed to bring them in the convention center because the whole convention center was under basically the secret services rules for getting in. So, I know we got pushed back from a lot of the cosplayers with feedback after that year, but that's another thing that like, we didn't plan on that happening. Like, that's just like an oops. Well, I remember, I don't think it was last year, I think it was the year before, it happened to coincide with the Cheese Expo. So, well done. That was freaking amazing. That was actually great. A lot of people, the feedback for that year, a lot of people were like, that was great because we went down to the Cheese Expo for a couple hours. We took a break from Pinburgh or replayed, went down and checked out the Cheese Festival. We're like, yeah, why not? That was awesome. It was so good. One year it was the same weekend as Picklesburg. Picklesburg! They shut down one of the bridges and they run basically, it's outdoors on the Roberto Clemente Bridge. They run like a pickle convention kind of thing. Like, and a bunch of people went down to it. It was awesome. It's always cool when other stuff is happening that's complimentary to what you're doing, because, you know, not everybody wants to come and do nothing but play video games for four days. They want to, you know, if you brought your family or whatever, they might want to actually, for some stupid reason, not be stuck playing pinball for four days. And having those other events around is kind of nice when it works out like that. But sometimes it doesn't work out so nice. So besides the concrete floor, what's the biggest piece of feedback that you get that you're just yet to work out how you can implement it? I think we've done a pretty good job. It used to be, the first few years it was restrictions on divisions. Everybody has their own take on who should or shouldn't be playing in a division. We changed them up fairly drastically last year and I think we did a pretty good job because I didn't hear about, I didn't hear as many complaints about the restrictions not being good. I heard more complaints about people being not sandbagging, but basically like I got locked out of this division because somebody got pushed up, which is a different complaint, but at least it's not this person shouldn't be playing in B division. Ticketing is always kind of a pain. We touched on that earlier. We try and push what we do every year and change things a little bit to meet demand without, You know, because it's always the side of like, well, you guys can do something X way. But then the other side of it is like, I understand that you do X at your local tournament with 25 people and 10 machines. But to scale that up to what we do is not as easy. So, like, I had a really long conversation with a gentleman who runs a lot of tournaments in his hometown. This is at last year's Pinbird. And he was basically telling me we need to have two techs and two TDs stationed at the end of every row. And what that'll do is that'll make sure that everybody gets, you know, within 30 seconds, everybody gets a tech or a TD instantly and it doesn't delay the tournament at all. And I explained to him how we do the distribution system that we use now because you might have five calls in one row. You just don't know. You know, the games that tend to be a problem over and over again will pull, but you never really know where the calls are coming from. And while that would be great, we'd also have to triple the size of our staff, which right now is impossible because we're basically getting all the people we can possibly get to volunteer for it to do it. So that's the circumstance of where the feedback he's giving is completely legitimate. Would it improve the tournament? A hundred percent. It's just not feasible where we're at. Like it's, it's the difference between running a smaller tournament and a hundreds of people tournament. Constructive feedback is wonderful too. I know I've talked about lighting and I know a lot of other people have too. You've made some improvements. You talked about the rule change for the seating of players. When you look at tournaments in general, is there a common theme in the feedback you receive that suggests maybe an improvement needs to be done in such an area? The biggest thing I think would be resolved by people complaining at most tournaments would be a written set of rules. I think that's one of the simplest things tournaments can do, but yet a lot of them don't. For whatever reason, they don't have a written set of rules for how they're running their tournament, or only a really vague written set of rules. And something comes up, and the tournament director is forced to improvise a ruling, and then, you know, somebody's always on the wrong side of that. Whether it's, you know, a time thing, or, you know, I've been to tournaments, and this was years ago. I was at a tournament playing, this is when I played more tournaments, I was at a tournament playing, And it was at an arcade show and there was a band going on that the TD really wanted to see. So what the TD did was stop the tournament for about 40 minutes so that everybody could go watch the band, but did not add any time to the end of the tournament. Obviously not the best decision because like there were people that were only there for a certain period of time. And then like, you know, I would have no problem, honestly, if he decided that we're going to stop the tournament from, you know, 5 to 8 p.m. if it's in the rules and in the schedule. You know what I mean? Because then you're setting people up for that expectation. There's going to be no tournament pick-in from 5 to 8. Making that call at the event is probably not the best decision that they made. That tournament doesn't exist anymore, by the way. Okay, Doug, I'm putting you on the spot here, all right? This is, I've got a lie detector on you right now. You're running Pinburgh right now, and then all of a sudden, a free impromptu concert done inside the David L. Lawrence Center in another room where they have the Hillary Clinton Convention. All of a sudden, Bad Religion decides to have a free concert. You're telling me you don't postpone Pinburgh? So not only don't I postpone Pinburgh, but last year, Bad Religion was playing less than I'm 10 minutes from, probably about 15 minutes from the convention center on Sunday and I chose to stay at the convention center and clean up rather than go to the show. This man has sacrificed everything. That's it right there. I have proof this is what I would do. Doug, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for your insight. I mean, we're getting some wonderful intel here for not just Marty and myself but for Doug Polka, Thanks for the thousands and thousands of listening here on Final Round Pinball Podcast. Hundreds of thousands these days, I think. I believe so. You know, we have our sponsors, they force their employees to listen as well too. Hey, Doug, thanks very much, buddy. Yeah, thanks for having me. If you guys have any other questions, let me know. No worries, man. Thank you. And I'm not doing Pinberg this year, but hopefully next year I'll be able to come and say hi in person. Well, look forward to seeing you there. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Doug Polka for coming on the program. I appreciate all your insight and we're going to talk a little bit more about what you would like to see in tournaments. But first, you know, Marty, we do this every week, you know, we plug something. I don't know, I kind of feel bad, you know, a lot of people are hurting right now with the shutdowns, the economic crisis. I don't know. Well, at least we're all in this together. I know, but instead of us getting rich and padding our pockets by plugging a sponsor I have a better idea. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Exactly, Marty. A final round Pinball Podcast public service announcement Stuck at home Can see your friends and family Have you watched every episode and movie on Netflix and now there nothing left to do Or is there? Head to your fridge or liquor cabinet and start day drinking! I've been doing it for years and look at me, confident, smart, handsome. And here's a little secret, I'm not even Australian. This accent is just how I slur my words when I'm hammered. But Marty, won't people judge you if you're drunk at home? What will people say? Who's gonna see you? Fuck them! But what about side effects of day drinking, like forgetting your kids names, drunk dialing, or heaven forbid, pissing your pants? Sure, some will call those side effects, others will say, liquid courage. So I'll be brave if I start day drinking? Works for me. I like it! Bottoms up from final round. You know Marty, I don't want to be a shithead and just plug something without doing it. Yes, right. I'll be a shithead for other reasons, but you know what? If I'm going to plug day drinking, damn it, we're going to do it on the next episode of Final Round. Yeah. Are you in? Put your liquor where your mouth is. Where else would you put it? Well, let's keep this semi-PJ. So what are we going to do? What have we got planned? I think this would be great because the next episode will air in May and we're going to record the next episode on Friday, May 1st, 11.30pm Eastern Time, which puts it around 1.30 in the afternoon Saturday for you and the Australians. You guys okay drinking at 1.30 on a Saturday afternoon? I'm already hours in by that time, so should be no problem for me. Good. Thumbs up. Okay, so we don't want to do it alone. I mean, we will. It's not exactly pathetic. It's not pathetic when you've got other people doing it. I think safety in numbers is what it is. I love it. So we are asking you, you listening right now, to join us for the live recording Friday, May 1st, 1130. We will connect to you on Skype. The only condition, you've got to have Skype and be able to talk on it. You can do it on your phone. There's apps for that. And you better damn well have a drink in hand because you know what? We're saluting us now going into our third month of this frickin' crisis and we're gonna have some fun next week. I gotta tell you, when I used to listen to head-to-head pinball and occasionally, especially the New Year's Eve episode, Marty, you just got more drunk and more drunk. As the episode went on, I laughed my tits off. It still is the one episode I've not been able to listen back to. Oh no! So here's the funny thing is we're gonna I'm gonna have my fireball I'm sure you're gonna have your gin I might have something else too um I have to produce this later on when I'm sober mm-hmm mmm so how did you not listen to the show so did Ryan produce that show and you that's why you never listen to it no no no so I I had to edit it straight after so as soon as we finished recording I spent the next three hours editing and I I don't really remember. I, I, I... Wild drunk! I, I honestly was and I swear to you, I, I know that the, I did all the editing, I know that it got uploaded, I, Ryan did all the social stuff, I just don't remember much about doing it. It just, it happened, it was such a blur. I mean, it was, it was fun and people still talk about it, but it's a big blur. I don't want you to think we're complete degenerates. The reason this is going to be the theme of episode 7 for Final Round is because when you go to events, when you go to multi-day events, think about it. You're probably not driving. You damn well better not be driving, but you're likely not because you're probably at the hotel at the event. So you know, you're socializing with people you haven't seen in a while and you might have a pop or two. I remember the first time I went to the Louisville Arcade Expo and I remember being in a powwow, There's a lot of fun in the boardroom. Four o'clock in the morning. By the way, we all had to play at nine o'clock the next morning. We were all in the playoffs. It was Elizabeth Cromwell, it was Steven Bowden, it was Greg Pavarelli, it was Lyman F. Sheats Jr. and Nixon Deos and so many others. And we just laughed and laughed and laughed and had a great time. It brings people together. Why not? Well, we're missing tournaments, right? So I mean, like I would have been at Yagpin in Edmonton. There would have been some of that going on for sure. The NYCPC, I'm telling you right now there was going to be some of that. We miss Texas Pinball Festival and we pretty remember what happened last year, Jeff, between you and I at Texas. 5.30 in the morning. Yeah. I remember maybe going back to my room. Yup. And you know one thing I'm not a big fan of? I'll say this. All right. Oh, and let's give you the great thing about next week's episode is too, one thing about Drinking is it's the greatest truth serum ever. So all, not that we're lying, but I'm just, you might be a little more forward, a little more honest when you have a shot in year two. There were people in that room in Texas. Look, we were all having fun. Nothing bad happened other than we're all hammered. No, it was all good. If I remember. It was good. But some people, and I don't know if they were sober or not, but started recording it. Who does that? It was fun, fun times. There needs to be no video evidence. Come on. No, I know. Leave that stuff behind. Anyway, that's fun. We're missing that stuff. That's really what it is. These events, yes, there's pinball, there's tournaments, there's trophies and money on the line, but we're missing the opportunity to just get drunk and have fun with our pinball friends. So we're going to do that in spirit. Oh, pardon the pun. Next week. We've done enough isolation. Time to bring friends together again. Think of this as your little pinball gathering. We hope you can join us. Recording Friday, May 1st. Send us an email. Direct message on Facebook. You can contact us on Instagram. Email us finalroundpinball at gmail.com if you'd like to be a part of it. We'll give you the details and get you set up on Skype. We hope you can join us even for a drink or two or five minutes or so. I've already got a few people coming on and we hope you can too. Get onto it, guys. Now, there is something else we should probably do and it's really related to what Doug was talking about. When we're talking about tournaments to different people and even when we had Phil Grimaldi on the week before, we were talking about what are the things you look for in tournaments? What are the things that are important to you? Whether it's the games themselves, the format of the tournament, the prize elements, the whoppers, the location, all those things. Yeah, so many variables that go into it and some things people like, some things people want to improve. So we'd like to find out what's important to people. We're just one voice. I only have one vote, you only have one vote, but what about these people that listen to this podcast? Obviously you like competition pinball, you probably go to some tournaments or want to go to some tournaments. What are the things you look for when you go to these events? So we're going to run some polls on our Facebook page and if you haven't joined it, I don't know why not. But final round pinball podcast on Facebook. There's a nice page there for that. And if you don't do that, you can email you the poll. We want to know what you think. We're going to put a bunch of different categories on and we'll give you those results on the next episode. We do get a lot of feedback and I know we saw some emails, we saw some texts and a few other things. What's the first email we got? Well, let's talk about the email from Tim. And it's it's in response to when we were talking about the Stern showdown In Take 10, Black Water, Pinballjangin's Pinball Show, La Londona this Tim Tim Kitzrow, Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. And my response back to Tim, I think explained it well enough, which is it doesn't matter whether a playfield looks similar. If it's slightly different, it will play different. And one of the case in points I said was Metallica versus Guardians of the Galaxy. A lot of people have said they've got a very similar layout. They don't even play remotely similar at all. Wild card magic, First off, And even though Stranger Things arguably looks a bit like Attack from Mars, doesn't play anything like it, it doesn't feel as good. I just, I don't know. I don't know why, but Tim, I get it. You love Stranger Things. I'm not a fan of it. Jeff, you're a big fan of it. The TV show. The TV show is awesome. Yeah, sorry, I'm not a fan of the game. I don't hate any game. Well, I guess I do, but I certainly don't hate this game at all. I see the code being updated. I have fingers crossed that it'll get better and better, but again, when the main toy in the Demogorgon doesn't really work and now it's a Bash toy, it's just a little disappointing. I think it looks beautiful as far as the ultra, what do you call that? Yeah, the UV kit, whatever it is. KENZIO KALAWKIS, Sure, the projection, cool. I think the music, you got Hopper doing the callouts. Those are all great things. Not crazy about the artwork, I think it looks pretty crappy, actually. Oh no, I actually... I like the artwork. Gimme Franchi on that? Oh, well, of course. That's the gold standard right there. But I still like, I still like what it does on the playfield. Like, I don't know why you're so down on it. Sorry, I like the playfield art. Sure, I'll give you that. I'm just talking the back glass does nothing for me. Tim Tim Kitzrow, Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. I really understand that when I say I hate a game, I'm not saying I hate people that like that game. And I think that that's where people kind of go, oh, but I love that game and now I feel really bad. No, don't. Love the game. You know, Adam's family, right? Everyone knows how much I dislike Adam's family. And everyone who owns it. Shut up. But you said that to me after the podcast. I was like, oh, those fuckers who own the game. I thought I heard you say that. I could be wrong. I might have. I'm not saying it's a bad game. I'm saying I dislike the game and it's on me. It's still a great game. And, you know, we again last week when we did the Stern showdown, there were games that I didn't like, but I still put them through because I know logically it is a better game. So, you know, just understand it's just an opinion and we can't all like the same things. Well, I'll read you this text that I received, okay? I haven't shared this with you. Just listen to you and Marty do the Stern showdown on Final Round Pinball Podcast. Clearly Marty is brilliant and you, Jeff, are dead to me. Please pass along my phone number so I can talk to him directly from now on. Love, Dwight Sullivan. Was that because... I think it was because I said how amazing Game of Thrones code was, I would say. I think, yeah, I can't remember what the matchup was. It was Game of Thrones versus Walking Dead maybe? Maybe, yeah. Wherever it got to, and I was like, really? And I said I like both games, but I just thought there was more to do on whatever the other game was against Game of Thrones. It didn't matter. Game of Thrones didn't even beat KISS on the Stern showdown. KISS! I thought it did! KISS 54% Game of Thrones 46% That one shocked me. I like KISS and I also like the fact that the code has really evolved nicely to make that a great game. What do you think it is that would stop people voting for Game of Thrones? You know what it is? I think Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, they're not on their end of the road tour right now. Now, they've talked to the KISS army, they said, look, we gotta get the votes, we gotta make KISS the number one game in all of pinball, it's the greatest band, it should be the greatest pinball machine. So they have gone to their fans, whereas Game of Thrones, they don't have a fan base anymore, the show's over. That's the only thing I can think of. And also too, you know what, I think we do look at things differently, and I totally understand and respect that. I look at games for what I want to play, maybe in competition, what I would have fun playing with it.баormal Insight The art was terrible. Yeah, yeah. And KISS has got amazing art, so... Kevin O'Connor. Kevin O'Connor, indeed, who did the original. Um, okay, sure. So again, collectors would probably go more towards KISS in that sense. You know, an iconic game from back in the 70s, certainly a band. It's got the songs, it's got the demon head, there's good toys there. I don't know. That one shocks me. For competition players, I think it's probably, I'm guessing no brains that it's Game of Thrones, but who knows? I'll tell you what though, if I had a choice between Game of Thrones and KISS in a tournament, I would pick KISS every time. Why? Because... Of the scoring? Not, no, not just the scoring, I think that... how do I explain this without sounding like a conceited asshole? Too late, go ahead. It's too late. It started when I introduced the podcast. I think I have an advantage over other players because I think KISS requires more precision. That's what I'll say. The Paul Stanley shot, you know, the Starchild shot, that little funny area. Love gun? Yes, love gun, but also the right ramp. I think that I can get that more times than other people. I also find it a bit more controllable, a bit more predictable. Like if you're going to miss those shots, it's your fault because you missed the shots as opposed to it just sort of being random sideways play. So I feel that I'm going to consistently get a higher score on KISS whereas Game of Thrones I may get a good score or a bad score. It's a bit more random. I think with Game of Thrones too, you can be playing well but if you don't use your multipliers the correct way, and the same could be said about KISS. KISS certainly the new code, the multipliers are there now. But on Game of Thrones, if you go the wrong angle and your path is ruined for whatever reason, like if you're not picking Lannister and cashing in on the playfield multipliers, you could be at a big disadvantage because those jackpots are going to be worth so much. I think the scoring is, I wish I understood the scoring on that game and Dwight's going to come on this program in the future and although he won't talk to me, he'll talk to you. Kevin Hart, thanks for sending us a note on Facebook. You can find it on Final Round Pinball, a nice Facebook page. Hope you can join it. Great episode again, thank you. My wife wants to try a local tournament when they happen. It is a couples pinball tournament. The couples play at the same time and each control one flipper, kind of split flipper, I love it. Not exactly sanctioned but definitely a fun way to start tournaments. By the way, my wife was the one who suggested it. I think it's great. And we wished him well, hope he was safe and sound and this will happen hopefully soon, fingers crossed. He wrote back, thank you for asking. So far the family and I are doing well. Hope you and yours are doing well. I enjoyed the latest episode. I really enjoyed the interview with Ed Ed Robertson. A friend of mine met him and played a game of pinball with him a while back. By the way, we're about to pick up either a Last Action Hero or a Lethal Weapon 3 once the lockdown loosens up. What do you think of those two games? Do you know what? I actually quite like them. I've got a bit of a soft spot for Data East games. I think mainly because the real heyday of Data East, when they started getting into The first time I played licensed games was really when I was probably at my most intense playing pinball. Like I was playing six to seven hours a day for a good two years. And I'll tell you why offline. And a lot of the games that came out were Data East. So we're talking late 80s, early 90s. So I actually really like Data East games. Out of those I actually really enjoy both of them. I like Lethal Weapon. I don't know, I think it's kind of nice and short, sharp. You know, you've got to get the gun to do those sort of little video interactive video moments. I really like it. If I had to pick between the two, I'd pick a Last Action Hero just because the rules are a lot deeper. Very interesting. I would pick Lethal Weapon 3. Of course. And in fact, I did. It was the first game I ever owned. Wow, okay. My kids hate that I got rid of it, but it went to an owner. It was their first game too, so it was kind of a nice story there. The video mode you talked about, that was great when you do an orbit shot and you have to shoot the villain and you got to do it at the right time. If you wait, the longer you wait, right when he blinks his eyes, boom, boom, boom, six million, that's fun. I don't like, obviously, repeatable shots and they've changed the code so the ramp isn't worth crazy amounts. I've seen people do that in tournaments. That's where all they do is the ramps. They used to do that on the Star Wars Data East game and they fixed the code on that. But for me, whenever I played it, all I did was hit 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, and move on to the next. Yep. The ramp was there for multiball, pardon me, tryball. Yes, that's right. Do I like Lethal Weapon 3? Do I like Last Action Hero? Yeah, they're both fun games. So I think, Kevin, you're going to enjoy either one. So good luck with the new games. Yeah, absolutely. Agreed. Can't go wrong with either. Thanks again, Ed, for coming on the program and all of our guests too. Doug Polka this week. We certainly appreciated Doug coming on to share his insight on pinball tournaments and running them. I mean, one of the finest TVs. If you've ever seen that Pinberg book or just go through some of the PAPA rules and the IFPA, the combined rules, they really do cover everything. It's funny. I always think you're going to find something that's never happened before in pinball. It's rare. They found it and it's usually in the rules. Yeah, they add it each time it comes up. Well, that's it for this episode of Final Round. And who knows, could be the last time you'll ever hear us sober. Well, it's certainly the best episode we've ever done, according to you. So... They just get better. I mean, really. And next week, I might not make that claim, but I can tell you this, it's gonna be a lot of fun. And hopefully you can join us too. Yes. We're going to be recording on May 1st. And that's 1130 Eastern, PM Eastern. So if you're in Australia, it's a Saturday afternoon. It's not like you buggers don't like to drink, so come join us for a little bit of fun here on Final Round and how can they connect with us? So there's a number of ways. Instagram, we're on Instagram, obviously. Email us at finalroundpinball at gmail.com and please go to our Facebook page, like the page, we'll communicate and talk to you from there. Have you thought about what you're going to be drinking? Funny you should say that, Geoff. What? Well, because everybody knows that I drink gin. Okay, whatever, we're all sick of it, boring, gin, whatever. I've discovered, I know, it sounds so weird, I've discovered a new drink that's an old drink but it's a new drink. And I know you know what I'm talking about because we spoke about it and you thought I was freaking crazy. I'm talking about bourbon. Now just go with me on this. So we're talking about renaissances, right? The first renaissance came with whiskey. Whiskey exploded and when you go to a liquor store, bottle shop we call them, the amount of different types of whiskey you could buy, I reckon probably about two, three years ago, just expanded exponentially. And probably about two, three years ago, that happened with gin. The next renaissance that's going to happen is bourbon. And that's what I heard. And so I thought, I'll go down to my local bottle shop. I'll get ahead of the curve. I'll make sure I'm setting the trend. I'm setting the trend. So I did. I bought this bottle of bourbon and it's not like bourbon of old which is just in your face. You might as well be just sculling down petrol. This was really smooth but also very rich in flavor and had a lot of depth. So I reckon I'm going to go bourbon. That's going to be my drink of choice. What about you? Well, you need a trip to Kentucky, my friend, because whereas they have micro breweries in most places in North America, the distilleries they have in Kentucky are unreal. Bourbon's tough for me to do. I mean, I certainly can't do shots of it like other things. You're a brave man, but if you're saying smooth, that's really the change that I haven't seen, and I'll try it again, not on the next episode. You can bet your bottom dollar it'll be fireball whiskey for this kid. Fair enough. Well, it doesn't matter. We'll all be drinking together. Doesn't matter what you choose, as long as you choose. And stock up, because it's going to be a fun episode. It will be. So thanks everybody for listening. Until that time, keep flipping and enjoy pinball and stay connected. My name is Geoff Teels. Thank you very much. My name is Martin Robbins. Thanks everyone. Subtitles by the Amara.org community