It's Time now for another Pinball Profile. I'm your host, Jeff Teels. You can find everything on pinballprofile.com, past episodes, subscriptions, and more. We're also on Instagram and Twitter at pinballprofile. Email us pinballprofile at gmail.com. Now that 2020 is over, here we are in 2021. There was a coup to try to take over the presidency last year. A mob of people protested, used social media to try to get their man as the chief and commander, and it all failed. So here we are. Josh Sharpe is still the IFPA president, and he joins us right now. Hello, Joshua. Does that make you the QAnon conspirator guy or whatever, the buffalo-looking dude? Not a bloody chance. No, no. What is it, the shaman or whatever? The shaman. Yeah. You're the shaman, man. I have a water buffalo hat. That's as close as it gets. But I have yet to face paint or do anything like that. So not this guy. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. How are things going? Things are all right. Things will be much better when my parents both get the vaccine. I think they're old enough to be in the first round of things. So hopefully by the next time we talk, I can speak to them both being vaccinated and Amanda's parents both being vaccinated. And it's really the reason why we're so careful day to day. It's really because of them. So as excited as we've been as things start to take a turn for hopefully the better. I think we are on that road. I mean, yes, it's been pretty bad with the holidays and everything and just general flu season. But yeah, I think we're on that path for sure with the vaccines. And I guess in the States, they're talking about hopefully 70 to 85 percent by June. In Canada, they're talking about September. So will that change things as we relate to pinball as far as maybe the IFPA sanctioning events again? I would imagine each state or provincial rep will continue to update things on how their local guidelines are recommending, you know, people getting together in groups of X number of size. I think for Illinois, I switched back to a no. And then was it like two days ago or something like establishments all were able to open up again or something. It just happened recently. I haven't even updated the spreadsheet, but like I'm back to a yes for Illinois. So I imagine the no's will turn into yeses over the next six months or so, probably. I wanted to ask you about what's gone on on the IFPA because without any competitive action since March, there's been a lot of decay as far as the points. There they go. There are the whoppers. So long. It's like a Burger King closing down. There are pros and cons of the decay as we are dealing with it in this pandemic. One of the pros I was thinking about was when the IFPA gets up and going, more people might be excited to join tournaments because they'll see like a bigger surge for them personally in rankings. Current events are going to be weighted so high with all the decay we've had. That's true. People are going to come back. I mean, I think regardless of Whoppers, there's probably going to be a very intense interest of getting together to play again. I know that I am dying to be able to go play and see people and all that stuff. I think, you know, with the stance that we're taking with the rankings and how we're handling the decay, we're sort of announcing, and really this is kind of forward going, that the rankings are what they are. The formula does its job of calculating, based on a formula that we've been using that really hasn't changed much in the last five years, of the achievements of people in competitive pinball over a specific period of time. And it doesn't take into account anything that impacts that time. And a global shutdown is obviously the furthest extreme that we can get. But there's no telling in the future of areas in the world where people may not be able to play because of maybe not a pandemic, but something else. You know, Florida or California, there's an earthquake in California, breaks off the end of the world or whatever, the end of the country, and they can't play pinball for three months. Are we getting into a position where we're picking and choosing events and when they're not decaying and when they are? And it's easier for us to keep it extremely black and white that the formula is what the formula does. And everything that happens in the world around it is just the variables of what happens in the world around it. That does make sense, whether it's a national disaster in certain areas or just some sort of unexpected shutdown. You're right. I think with the pandemic, though, it is global. It is something that affects everywhere in the world. So it's not just select regions. So I think that's why the IFPA is correctly shut down for this time period. But one of the cons I've been hearing about the decay is we're coming up to March, where it'll be a year of people basically losing a big chunk of their three-year window of collecting Whopper points and therefore ratings and rankings and all that kind of stuff. So with the bleeding, is the accuracy of the IFPA ranks something that might be questioned compared to a normal three years of data? Is there any talk of, okay, once we hit March, okay, let's just kind of press the reset here and maybe not decay because we've already lost a full year? For what reason exactly? Accuracy of ranking. So if we go, let's say, hypothetically 18 months of inactivity for the IFPA, you only have 18 months of data. Is that a true and accurate statement of where the rankings really are? I think so. It's the most recent 18 months of data. I mean, only the third year of activity is the part that's truly going away, right? So, I mean, I think it just continues to work within the formula. I don't think you're going to see a situation... I mean, aren't you enjoying the fact that the only reason you're ranked higher than Zach now is because nobody can play to defend their points? I have no idea what you talking about I think it was just based on projections more than the last little bit The rankings are far meaningless We dealing in a world where we continuing to not play and I think the rankings are kind of meaningless during this period of when we're not playing. It kind of doesn't matter what we do. So when we turn things back on, the new activity is going to be, and rightfully so, the biggest impact of who are the greatest players right now. We've had this long break and it's like, why not allow the formula to dictate that the current activity is the most important and now it will be by far the most important of the most important because of, you know, the decayed cards from people. So I'm willing to accept that as especially the best way for us to continue to allow the formula to sit kind of agnostic to everything else and just do its thing and not set any precedent for freezing for six months. And then what? Like these events are now decaying on June 30th. It's just logistically far more challenging as well to know at the end of the year, what is my card going to look like? Rankings are going to go up and down no matter what, whether there's decay or not decay. But with this pandemic, how has it affected people maybe on the cusp or trying to get their Stern rewards from IFPA? So the Stern Rewards issue was solved by Stern being super great and allowing everyone that previously qualified to just qualify again. So for fear of decay, anyone that fell out of the top 1,000 was not impacted if the rewards program was their goal. I imagine if we dip into 2021 without a whole lot of play activity, what can we do with this program to continue to nurture those people that want to play and reach this goal? And they simply can't because of the world we live in at the moment. I am sure that I can convince them to continue to allow these people to qualify. It is very generous for sure. And I do know people that were on the cusp or once they passed that threshold of being in the top 1,000 that they did take advantage of the Stern Rewards Program. So it's a very lucrative offer for some IFPA players. I've used Ron Hallett as an example to Gary Stern about these people that that was their goal of playing IFPA-sanctioned events for the year. Because Gary was kind of dumbfounded of like, are the people that are buying these games just the people that are in the top 50 and top 100? and I had enough evidence to support, like, no, it's not, you know, the Elwins and the Eschers and the Ramons. I mean, Raymond used to buy into the program before he joined Stern. And before he won every game. Right, before he won. Why buy when you can just win? Most of the buyers are people I don't really know and are people that, you know, like Ron Hathlet, you know, the emails that I get from people that are like, hey, I'm so excited. They were so excited to have broken into the top 1,000 and qualify. And for Gary, he was surprised that it dipped so down the player pool for it. And I think it's great to see there be a level of success that players can find in the Whopper system that doesn't involve them needing to be ranked in the top 100 or whatever. So with the decay and lack of major events and sadly things like Papa going away and Pinberg, what have you been doing? I guess that's kind of the question people have been wondering. You're the IFPA president and people really don't like lame ducks. What have you been doing over the last 10 months? IFPA-wise, updating a lot of profiles. Those are kind of the only emails that we get. It's long enough between tournament result approvals that I have to like reteach myself how to do it or send Adam an email to his personal email because he's not checking his IFBA email address much anymore. This used to be my favorite time of year because I would always give you a jab and stuff like, hey, how's it going with all those state and provincial championship trophy buildings? You had to do 50 of those things, and there was none of that this year. No, I'm actually getting the 1099s sent out for everyone's tax returns. And along with needing to prep that in the beginning of the calendar year for last year's winnings, which is a giant pain in the ass, cutting all the checks to send to all the state reps for all the winnings. And I know Adam handles that for Canada through your guys, whatever payment system stuff. So that helps me immensely. But I'm usually upstairs printing, signing checks, recording them, getting the trophies built, shipping all the trophies out, making sure all the trophies arrive at all the state reps without being broken, without hopefully being misspelled any longer like I used to for Mr. Murie out in Oklahoma. How'd you spell his wrong? Oh, I did O-K-A-L instead of O-K-L-A. Wow. Right? Right? So it's been a lot less work, and I can't lie. I miss the work because of what it meant for something that I love so much, but it's very nice to not have to do all of that crap. And you used to be able to dip into the IFPA funds and say, hey, this is my labor cost, and pad your pocket. We know all about that. I mean, I could still do that. I still have all the dollars for the first year of 2020. It's like 60 grand, man. Plenty of money to go around. Yeah, absolutely. You know, needing to organize nationals is not easy when I'm working with like a remote staff with whoever our hosts are at that time. And that would usually be something we'd be in full swing of right now at the end of January. Needa States would have just ended and I would have been emailing all the winners and trying to find out who's going to nationals and handling if they were also going to be playing in pinmasters and managing a pinmasters, you know, alternate list that's 30 or 40 deep or whatever. and Worlds. You know, Worlds emails go out at the same time, that first week of January. It's just, it's a nice break after, I don't know, 15 years in a row of having to kind of deal with this in the beginning of the year. You mentioned the World Championship. You mentioned Nationals. Let's just talk about things that are probably more accessible to the masses, and that would be the Stern Pro Circuit. So help me understand what's going on with that, because you have to still play the Stern Pro Circuit Championship for the top 20 from 2019. That's to be determined at some other time. But moving forward you did have two 2020 Stern Pro Circuit events in Indisc and Pinmasters That was it What is the Stern Pro Circuit going to look like at the end of this calendar year I think that probably depends on how much we able to how many events are able to happen. Are none able to happen this year? Like I have no idea. I honestly have no idea. I don't know what's scheduled. The idea is for 20, but 20 isn't going to happen. That's just not going to be possible. So is there a minimum number you need or no? I don't believe so. I think until we know we can run, like, it's not even something that's on my agenda, and Zach and I talk enough. Like, it's not on our agenda to even bother talking about until we know we can run the 2019 final. And right now, the world is not safe enough for us to run a 2019 final with 20 people, let alone talk about what are we doing for the next season. So for me, it's let's get through the season first and then see where in time that lands. You know, if do we miss, is InDisc happening in January of 22? It's like, I hope so. If it happens in 22, do we want to have that count for the 2022 season with finals in 2023 and run what we can based off of the 2020 results? slash 2021 results as best we can. Like to me, that sounds any opportunity to get 20 people in a room and play for a bunch of money that isn't theirs. Sounds great, right? If Stern's willing to give a game for what you would consider a combined 2020 slash 2021 season, find 20 people that would love to play for a new game from Stern. Yeah, I think that's very attractive for sure. So what about the actual events themselves? If they were on the Stern Pro Circuit, what is their status going to be? Every tournament that was on the 2020 circuit will have the right to be on the circuit when we're back. This won't be a year of the bottom five being eliminated? It is not. Okay. It is not. I will say there's one thing that's been really positive in 2020 with pinball, with competitions, and it created a big buzz, the ICR, and that is basically playing remotely, maybe the same game, maybe not. You have to be happy with the success of that. I know we got to judge your, was it me, Kaylee, and Lefkoff for your match? Is that right? I've done a few now, so I can't remember who was with who, but it was cool to, you might have been our first match, too. Were you our first one? I was, and can I just tell you, so Vinny Below, I hope I'm saying your last name right. I'm sorry, Vinny. You're a great player. Vinny Bologna? All I know is he's the greatest player of all time. I'll just say that. Vinny destroyed me playing his Lord of the Rings and his No Fear while I played World Cup Soccer, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Simpsons Pinball Party. Poorly. But I would have lost anyway the way Vinny played. So you had yourself, Kaylee, and Adam Lefkoff judging me. And I got to say, we were kind of streaming it on Discord, which you can see other matches, in fact. And I was extremely nervous, which is ridiculous. I played. We could tell. We could tell. I bet you I have played, if you think about it, I bet I'm in the top 50 in the world in number of tournaments played over the last few years. Because I just go and go and play, play, play. That's the only reason I have any success is the volume. Let's not kid anybody. So the fact that the three guys watching me were people that I respect and think are, holy cow, amazing players, that's what made me nervous. Like, I've got to play up to their standards, which is not going to happen. That's really what it was. Yeah, like, going into it, I didn't really talk with Adam or Kaylee beforehand. And I think, you know, what we ended up doing, kind of judging your match along the way, is kind of how we've now done it going forward. which is instead of sitting off in a corner and it's like, all right, the match has ended. What is your vote? I think it made Kaylee and Adam and myself more comfortable to be talking about the action as it happened and what we saw as impressive and what we saw as something that would be considered more disappointing. And it allowed, I think you played Simpsons last. Is that right? Yes. And we had kind of in our mind a target score for you to hit. 35 million I needed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we were talking, you know, 30, 40, you know, we were starting to have those talks. And I felt it was really good to kind of set some kind of baseline expectation for you, the participant, of you putting up $8 million. And maybe in your mind thinking, like, it's like you see when a boxing match goes to the decision cards. And you see, like, both boxers so confident that they're going to win. And then they raise one arm and not the other. that, and you'll have to let me know, was that something that was good for you to hear rather than it just being a total blind vote? Well, I think the fact that it was a blind vote was fair because it wouldn't have been fair to Vinny otherwise. First of all, Vinny basically almost got wizard mode on Lord of the Rings on his last ball. So I knew I had to blow up Simpson's pinball party, which didn't even come close. The point is being blind was fair to Vinny because he didn't know what I needed or he didn't know what he needed. So why should I be able to know what he did? And what was the fairness in him going first, too? Like, there was no real rhyme or reason. So I thought the blind made sense. It didn't give you an advantage or disadvantage of going first or second. But, yeah, no, he played great. I was, how nervous I was? World Cup soccer, I didn't hit one left ramp. That's how nervous I was. Yeah. This is a game I own, for crying out loud. Well, that's the funny part, too. I was chatting with Adam, you know, after similarly, where you can kind of see the nerves of people. And it's like, they're playing on their own game. Like, if you want to talk about how comfortable you normally get in like a pump and dump, by the time you're like at the end of day two of qualifying, you kind of walk up to a game and you're very comfortable because you've played a game, you know, five times. It's like, you're probably playing a World Cup that you've played hundreds of times, I would imagine, over as long as you've owned it. And to me, it was great proof that the ICR is doing enough to scratch the itch. because if I can get people to be nervous about playing on a game that they should be super comfortable with because it's their own game, set up their own, you know, it's working because it means that the competition is relevant. You know what I mean? It was excellent. It's nice to see. And 64 people out of 725 advanced from the 2020 ICR but you changed things a little bit here in 2021 Seeing it more as less of a ranking system and more as a tournament I think having a year qualifying process doesn't quite make sense. And rather than try and revise the formula to make it into a ranking system, which I don't really think it supports it well in terms of, you know, are these the best players in the world? The system itself, the formula for how we calculate the ICR Whoppers is so easily exploitable that, you know, switching over to this sort of qualifying system with a playoff is the route that we've chosen. And seeing how much fun people have had playing in the playoff matches, the idea, and not knowing when real world pinball is going to come back and how, you know, does anybody care about ICR after we are able to play again? That doing things kind of quarter to quarter made more sense. And so that's what we're doing for 2021. The first season is January 1st, and then we'll take a snapshot of the standings on April 1st, and those will be your 64 finalists for the first season of 2021. I think it's great. It's a lot of fun. I've been able to meet people I've never met before on Discord or on Facebook Messenger, and it's nice to see, actually, a lot of the people I played are still in the ICR, I guess, top 16, even top eight. So lots of kudos to you and everyone for putting that together. So the last thing I want to ask you is, how are you going to be spending next week for International Josh Sharpe Day on the second day of the second month? Oh, that's just, that's, that, no, that's overplayed. That's not, nah, that's lame. Lame. Lame? Lame. What am I going to do? My answer is I'm going to take all my second place trophies off my trophy wall and I'm going to polish them. Sweat. If you send me a bottle of your sweat, I'll polish all of them. Listen here, pinball profile has elevated your status, all right? No one knew who you were. They thought you were just a smug prick in Illinois and now you're a famous smug prick in Illinois. So just you remember where you got your start. Pinball famous, as Lydon says. Dangerous. Dangerous to be pinball famous. Well, I will be celebrating, all right? I will put two candles on a... Have a Fireball on me. Ooh, maybe. You don't drink Fireball, do you? What's your poison? I like Goldschlager. I mean, that's hot. Okay. Well, maybe people could raise that. I have the same bottle of Goldschlager in my bar since, like, 2010, probably. Too many kids, man. Too many kids, not enough drinking fun anymore. I hope you and the kids are doing well, and I hope to see you soon. I have a good feeling it will probably be this fall. Fingers crossed the world championship in November in Fort Myers, Florida. That's going to be a lot of fun if that, in fact, happens. And I think it will. Amanda and I were just talking about that recently. And outside, like the IFVA 17, but also we were just talking about, is IAPA going to happen? Because that's truly a global show with like 100,000 people that show up. It's so easy and so hard at the same time to be like, picture it even beginning to happen yet. So I'm hoping once we hit the spring and we start to see numbers really come down. I mean, here in the U.S., it's like every day is still like, you know, double the number of people that died on September 11th die every day still. We just need to get these numbers down first into not catastrophe on a daily basis. And then maybe I'll start looking more positively about November. Would the IFPA, when they do come back, would they mandate masks? Or is that going to be up to the facility? I would say, and we haven't talked about it much on the board, but personally, I'm not for the association itself mandating masks. I'd be in full support of tournament directors doing that. Like if we had a player complaint that a tournament director was enforcing masks, I would be fully supportive of the tournament director for doing that, you know, making that decision. I know that Becker has joked about normally after Pinberg or after IAPA, you know, you come down with the post-Pinberg plague anyway, even before a pandemic, that he was a mask, you know, after this, just as a player for his own health outside of COVID, just to try to avoid whatever Johnny Monica style plague always hits these huge events. And I think you will probably see more of that, you know, in the years to come of people that are just, you know, not mandated by anyone. They are just playing things safer for themselves. And I think that's great. Anything that makes it safer for everyone, whether it's tournament director mandated or a player choosing out of their own will to do it, I think it's all positive stuff. I probably will be wearing a mask for the rest of this calendar year just to put others at ease, really. Let's put it this way. You can't get sick wearing a mask. Is it needed? Maybe, maybe not if you're vaccinated, but I know it doesn't hurt either way. So I'll just do it for the rest of this calendar year. I think Zach and I, you know, when it comes time to really focus in on IFPA 17 happening in November or not, I'm sure we'll discuss whether we want to make masks mandated for it. Because with us as the tournament directors, we have the right to do that. And I think it'll depend on, you know, possibly our wives dictating a certain level of if they want a certain level of safety for Zach and myself to be able to to travel and do it. you know, for, we would probably do it. Josh, good to talk to you again. And, uh, we'll do this soon. You got it, brother. Always a pleasure. Good Nate Shivers episode. It was nice to, before I, it was nice to wake up to a text from Nate of like, sorry, I think that was in reference to, yeah, but I'm listening now. And then it didn't take too long for you guys to, to get into me a little bit and Nate letting me know that my best days are behind I mean, it's wonderful. Truth hurts, my friend. It does. It does. Okay, talk to you soon, bud. Yeah, later. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find everything on pinballprofile.com. Subscriptions, past episodes, and more. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, at pinballprofile. Email us, pinballprofile, at gmail.com. I'm Jeff Teolas. Just a man with a man's courage. My wife won't let me play. I'll never win a major. Lemon, idiot. Lemon, idiot. Lemon, idiot.