My number one rule when it comes to commentating is remember who your audience is. It is the people that are watching the stream, not the person sitting next to you, not the person eating a sandwich five meters away from you, not people walking past saying hello to them. Remember that this is a broadcast. The only people that are important to you are the people watching your stream. And I think not a lot of people really realize that. And as a viewer, it doesn't make a great stream. To me, one of the most important things about commentators is the audio. It's one of the most underappreciated parts of the stream. We just talked a lot about the different camera gear and the visuals and make sure we have lots of lighting. I think audio is one of the most important parts of a stream. You want to make sure that you have a really good audio quality. Too many streams have really low quality microphones. The commentators can't really hear themselves talking. So they're speaking really loudly into the mic. There might be a lot of background noise. So having a good microphone and making sure that the commentators know how to speak into it, where actually they need to position their mouth, things like that. And I think now it's becoming more and more common to have game audio being piped into the stream as well. So you're actually able to hear the jackpot callouts. You're actually able to hear the flippers flipping and the mechanisms chattering away. I think that actually adds a lot to the ambience of the game. And so I think as people are setting up their streams, audio should be a much more important component of the streams. That's a good point. It really gives you that feeling like you're there, too. another great innovation that we've seen over the last year or so is scorebit and i think that's really nice to see that immediately when some of the fonts on some of the displays aren't exactly great i know maybe the worst font in pinball over the last few years is trying to read a display for aerosmith that white on the light blue you just can't see it even when you've got a camera dedicated to it but another point i find and i guess i'm looking at it more from a broadcaster standpoint I don't enjoy when commentators second-guess the players and their decision-making. I just don't really see a lot of that in sports. You know, it looks like you don't want to be the know-it-all, and you don't want to be talking a lot about your own stories, and here's what I would do. Just kind of evaluate what the player is doing and maybe try to see what they're trying to do. And, you know, sometimes people can do it, sometimes they fail, and then that's where a lot of the second-guess comes in. It's a big turn-off for me. Okay, I agree to that to an extent. Obviously, it depends on how it's done and how much humility it's done with. I like to know either what's at stake or what they could have done differently or better. But yeah, the whole, well, if it was me, I would have done this. Well, it's not you because you're in the booth. True. So it's a fine line. Yeah, I mean, I think you can balance that a little bit by trying to maybe get into the player's head a little bit and tell the chat or tell the audience what were they trying to do or what do you think they were trying to do or accomplish rather than saying, oh, you know, that wasn't a good idea or good strategy. I'm just saying, oh, I think they were trying to do this particular thing. It didn't work out for them rather than saying, oh, that was a dumb idea or that was a bad decision making right there. I think that's why they start talking about it being pilot error it's a nice inoffensive way of basically saying they screwed it up or they misfired or whatever it is just saying you know what it happens move it on as a player too I mean you can get in the head of a player I mean everybody's been under the well most people have been under the camera before they've played in high stress situations people make mistakes right I mean, I've definitely made a lot of like pilot errors or so to speak. And then I go back and I think, oh, my gosh, what was I thinking? So, you know, as a commentary, you want to give the player a little bit of benefit of doubt and realize that they are human. They're not going to make superhuman decision making or superhuman play at all times. So it's important to add a little humility to it. Most of those competition streams have more than one person commentating. So I think it's important to let each person behind the microphone talk equally. So you have to be conscious of that. If somebody is dominating the conversation, it doesn't offer different dynamics. And I like to hear the different people's thoughts, voices, strategies. And for the most part, most commentators are doing that. So, Jeff, you have a background in broadcasting. Is there like a strategy or are there different roles that you can put people in to say, like, here are the things that you're going to talk about or here are the things that so-and-so is going to talk about that kind of helps balance who's talking and how you can get that balance? among the commentators? It's a lot easier when there are two people because you would have somebody doing a play-by-play and another person doing color commentating. With three people, you have to figure out what the dynamics are going to be. Maybe somebody is an expert on rules and they can go over that aspect of it. But I think there's still, whether it's two people or three people, you need to assign someone as, okay, I'm the director. I'm not going to be dominating the conversation, but I'm going to be pointing to you, which people can't see on camera. Okay, you go, you go, you go. Or put your hand up behind the camera and say, I've got a thought to say, let me jump in here without interrupting. It's like you're reading my mind, Jeff. And apologies to everybody listening. I'm about to pay Jeff a compliment, which pains me to do. But not only are you obviously a really good commentator as an individual, and you do a lot of those one-on-one interviews, which just really connects the viewer to the players. So that's great. you do that well but what i've noticed that you do really well is whenever you are on the commentary booth and there's two maybe three people there you do act as director and you sort of preface people and ask them questions and you guide them down to their lane of how they commentate so my point was going to be and you just made it somebody on that panel needs to consider themselves the director and they're guiding the conversation as opposed to just letting people speak free form. There you go. I feel dirty for saying it. I feel great. I'm going to capture that and I think that's going to be our soundbite. So when we're up for the twippies or whatever, that'll be the clip right there. But it's true. It's true. Thanks. A stream is always really good when you're in the commentary booth. And you're not the only one. There's obviously others as well. But it's really, you brought up that point as I was thinking it, which is have somebody lead the group. Phil, you're in Texas there, and I got to tell you, my favorite person by far when it comes to being in the booth, although I'd rather see them play, and a lot of times they are in the finals, but give me Stephen Bowden any day of the week. I love Steve Bowden on the mic. He does such an excellent job. He's one of my favorite commentators, and I'm super, super lucky to have him in the state of Texas right now, so he can commentate on a lot of my streams. But, yeah, more often than not, he's actually in the finals. But yes, yeah, some sort of magic. What is it that you think makes Steve excel? I can't articulate what it is, but I know he's my favorite. The reason I mentioned his name is because, first of all, he's very personable. He's funny. He knows the games. He's a great player himself. He's got a very infectious laugh, which I also enjoy. And I've just never felt uncomfortable ever listening to him talk. And I've learned a lot, too. from when I first started playing pinball. So to me, he is the gold standard. Yeah, I would agree with you. And I think that the secret sauce that he has is he knows the audience. He knows that there's a variety of people that are experts watching and people that are new to it. And so the language that he uses is very succinct, but any person that's new to veteran understands exactly what he's saying because of his razor focus language that he uses to describe what's happening as it's happening. One of my favorite events that he commentated on was, I think, the 2018 TPF Finals. And this was Robert Byers' win. But what Steve did was he gave such a sense of excitement and made you really just get into this game. And he can emote in such a way that gives you a sense of what's happening is really, really extraordinary. and it helps the audience, it helps the people that are watching really get into that moment. That's one of the things that I can't quite articulate, but he has a good way of bringing you into that and making you emote and making you feel happy about watching pinball. It's unfortunate, like all of us, we didn't get a chance to see you at TPF. We will in 2021, but you've got a big event that I was very lucky to be at in Houston, and that's coming up in November, your big Houston Arcade Expo. I have been coming to the Houston Arcade Expo since I moved to Houston, obviously. I was pretty much blown away by how awesome the show was and how kind of unknown it was amongst all of the big conventions around the country and the world. Not a lot of people talked about it before I moved down to Texas. I didn't even know it was a thing. But I was used to going to the Chicago Expo before moving down to Texas. And I was like, hey, this is actually bigger than Chicago and better, I think. What's going on here? And yeah, about three years ago, I kind of threw my hat into the ring to be the tournament director and took over. We've kind of revamped the whole tournament and is now called the Space City Open that takes place during the Houston Arcade Expo. The expo itself is just a fantastic time. It's a big party atmosphere. Everybody's having a good time. Lots of live music goes all night. Everybody's having a good time drinking and, you know, just catching up with everyone. And then the tournaments have kind of morphed into, you know, a really top class event. We switched over to a match play format two years ago, and we started off with a cap of 60 players, which wasn't a whole lot. And just last year, we shuffled around our rules for the tournament a little bit in the format, and we were able to increase our limit to 120. And we sold out. We filled up 120 players. So that puts us at one of the bigger match play tournaments in the country, if not probably the world. Phil, explain to Marty how that tournament works, because it's difficult to get into the playoffs. Sure, yeah. So it's not like every other match play tournament out there. The way we had to do this, because we could not, we're limited in space and the number of pins that we can have, we use a multi-phase or like a multi-session match play format. So there'll be four distinct qualifying sessions. Each player can play in up to two of those sessions. And I think it's capped at like 52 players per session. And you can play in only one or two. And so you play in that 52 player session. And I think we took the top five or six and there's only five games per session. So you really have to knock it out of the park on all five of your games. So first and seconds only. If you get a third, you're pretty much out of the running. And yeah, it's a whole lot of fun. It's very, very taxing for the players. So definitely puts you through your paces. You need to be on point. Like I said, if you get a third or fourth, you're pretty much you're pretty much toast. But it's a great format for if you want to increase your player cap and make sure everybody has the opportunity to play in the tournament and see the show. It's a good balance of balancing show time and tournament time. Yeah, it's a very good format. Thanks very much for coming on, Phil. I look forward to coming over there once we can get out of our houses and I can travel again. Keen to check out your setup at TPF. I'm going to be there next year by hook or by crook, guys. So I'm looking forward to meeting you, talking tech, and let's keep up all the great streaming. Thank you so much for having me. I'm sad we couldn't see you at TPF. We're all heartbroken over it, obviously. But, you know, the show must go on. We'll be back and we'll be having even more fun next year. Thanks very much, Phil. Thank you. We actually had some questions about streaming that came from our last episode. Hopefully we answered some of those for you this episode with Phil joining us. but there was a question received on our Facebook page for Final Round Pinball Podcast. Yeah, so thank you, Andre, for reaching out to us on Facebook. And everybody, please feel free to log into Facebook and have a chat with us. We love that kind of stuff. Andre writes to us saying, I think there's lots of people out there, including myself, turning into this in these times. I have a question I haven't been able to find an answer to online. Is streaming music game themes problematic? I was going to start with Metallica, but don't want to end up with copyright strike on my account. Thank you. And it's interesting because I did notice recently that a stream by Chuck Webster was actually flagged by Facebook because he was obviously playing a machine that had music that was copyrighted. Really what happens is that with Twitch, they won't really flag you during your stream, but they will flag you after. and what will happen is that they will just silent out those sections that are copyright infringed because I don't think they've got an agreement with any of the record companies to monetize it so they will just make that three or four minutes of that song silent. When it comes to Facebook and YouTube, it's a little bit different. Facebook will link it to the original music or they will actually flag it and bring it down effectively and YouTube will do the same thing. It will either link it to whoever's the record company that's got the rights to the music or they will completely take it down. But as you're doing it live, it's not a problem. But a lot of people like to archive. So I guess it would make sense to maybe turn the volume down on something like that. Yeah, correct. My streams of Iron Maiden would get flagged every single time. Interesting. Thanks very much. Again, email us finalroundpinball at gmail.com or check us out on Instagram or Facebook. And also, I just wanted to say thank you to everybody that's reached out to me in the last couple of weeks, because since we did speak last week about just getting a basic setup, I've actually had four people reach out to me wanting to set up a stream. So I'm really pleased by that, and I hope more and more people do it. Very nice. As we look to our next episode, Episode 6, we have a special guest joining us, because the topic of conversation will be about tournaments. I know they're on hold right now, but they will be back, as we know for sure. and what makes a tournament successful. This guest of ours compiled all kinds of data on that. In fact, he would send out surveys after every single major tournament. He's Doug Polka. You know him from ReplayFX and from Pinberg, one of the best tournament directors you'll find anywhere, and he will give us his insight, and we'll also put out a poll on the next episode where we can get feedback from you, the listener, on what makes a tournament a great success in your eyes. Awesome. I'm really looking forward to it I've met a really nice guy obviously got the weight over his shoulders when he's having to run a tournament like Pinberg and Papa back in the day so I'm looking forward to speaking to him That'll be on the next episode Until then, thank you very much for joining us My name is Geoff Teolis And I'm Martin Robbins Thanks everybody for listening Stay safe, stay at home Stay watching my stream, Melbourne Silver Bowl