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. 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 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 Sheats 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?