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Part 01 | 2018-19 IFPA NA Championships & 2019 Women's World Championships

IE Pinball·video·1h 41m·analyzed·May 19, 2020
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TL;DR

2018-19 IFPA NA & Women's World Championships broadcast with expert match play commentary.

Summary

Broadcast coverage of the 2018-19 IFPA North American Championships and Women's World Championships from Las Vegas, featuring head-to-head match play tournament commentary. Karl D'Angelo, Colin McAlpine, and John Replogle provide detailed analysis of competitive pinball gameplay on Tron, Star Wars, and other machines, explaining tournament format (best-of-7 matches, single elimination), strategy, and technical gameplay mechanics.

Key Claims

  • Head-to-head match play format requires strategic decision-making mid-game, unlike high-score tournaments where strategy remains static

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine explaining match play vs. high-score format advantages

  • Most competitive players choose to go second in head-to-head matches to gain information advantage from opponent's first ball

    high confidence · Karl D'Angelo discussing play order strategy in match play

  • Tron has a loose right flipper requiring earlier shot timing than normal, discovered during warm-up

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine reporting technical issue found on Tron machine at venue

  • On Tron, double scoring doubles bonus multiplier when draining with double scoring active

    high confidence · John Replogle explaining Tron bonus mechanics

  • Tron end-of-line combo value persists throughout a single ball but resets to 500K on subsequent balls

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine discussing Tron scoring strategy

  • Star Wars competitive setup disables multiball stacking and requires selecting character that determines which modes are spotted

    high confidence · Karl D'Angelo explaining Star Wars tournament rules and character selection strategy

  • Raymond Davidson was considered a top favorite but did not attend the championship

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine answering question about expected winners

  • Flipper Spiel Arcade Club relocated to a new, more open venue compared to previous year's cramped space

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine discussing venue changes from prior year

Notable Quotes

  • “This is pinball March Madness.”

    Karl D'Angelo @ Early broadcast — Characterizes single-elimination bracket format appeal

  • “Match play is just where it's at because it brings so much more dynamic aspect. Every game will be different.”

    John Replogle @ Format explanation segment — Emphasizes format's competitive value over high-score tournaments

  • “Tron is such an on-the-fly, you know, shot-making timing game. It is not a stop-and-go game.”

    Colin McAlpine @ Tron strategy discussion — Describes gameplay style requirements for Tron

  • “The beauty of this format is you have a tendency if somebody just kind of gets on a good run, anybody can beat anybody.”

    Colin McAlpine @ Favorites discussion — Explains why match play is unpredictable despite skill gaps

  • “I would much rather go out by playing well and just somebody playing better.”

    Karl D'Angelo @ Tournament philosophy discussion — Reflects competitive player mindset

  • “You have one chance, and if you don't survive your round of seven, you're done for the day, and then you're going home.”

    Karl D'Angelo @ Format explanation — Emphasizes high-stakes nature of single elimination

  • “The last game we watched was what I would call an extremely live game... I seem to gravitate towards a more controlled style of play on Tron where I will take a lot of dead time.”

    Colin McAlpine @ Play style comparison — Demonstrates different valid approaches to Tron strategy

  • “You have two simultaneous competitions taking place at the North American Pinball Championship.”

    Karl D'Angelo @ Event overview — Notes concurrent NA and Women's World Championships

Entities

Karl D'AngelopersonColin McAlpinepersonJohn ReploglepersonRaymond DavidsonpersonZach SharpepersonMike John LundpersonSagel FrazierpersonMatt ScottpersonRobert DiStasiopersonDalton Eliperson

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Tournament attracts top competitive players from across North America, with some traveling significant distances

    high · Multiple state championship winners competing; reference to players from West Coast, Utah, Nevada, and East Coast

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Star Wars character selection strategy shifting from unanimous R2-D2 choice to diversified approach with Han Solo and Leia gaining popularity

    high · Karl D'Angelo notes recent tournament trend away from R2-D2 dominance toward alternative character strategies

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Competitive Star Wars ruleset intentionally disables multiball stacking to constrain strategy depth

    high · Karl D'Angelo confirms standard competitive setting prevents stacking multiballs and modes

  • ?

    event_signal: 2018-19 IFPA North American Championships and Women's World Championships held concurrently in Las Vegas with bracket-based match play format

    high · Official broadcast from venue with real-time bracket updates and multiple concurrent matches

  • ?

    product_concern: Tron machine at tournament venue has loose right flipper requiring players to adjust shot timing

    high · Colin McAlpine identified loose flipper pawl during warm-up; noted shots must be hit earlier than usual; no technical service between warm-up and competition

Transcript

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0:00
and there it is Oh! a little Lazarus action Oh! You walked away! Oh my God! Oh no! The ball was on the free-court Small heart there for half a second. Oh.
0:35
The man left transferred into another double LW. Into a double catapult super. What are we wishing here?
0:47
Watch out here. Clark. Is it Clark? Clark got it first. What? Championship happen. Hello and welcome to the 2018-19 IPA National Championships and Women's World Championships.
1:13
This is Carl D'Angelo. Joining me on the mic soon is Colin McAlpine and John Rapogo. And it looks like my intro had no sound, but well.
1:25
How's everyone doing today? All right. We are getting set up here. Josh is getting grouped on the games. The cameras are currently set up for Tron. So once the group is set up for Tron, we will have our first game.
Kyle
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Flipper Spiel Arcade Cluborganization
2018-19 IFPA North American Championshipsevent
2019 Women's World Championshipsevent
Trongame
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IE Pinballorganization
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1:48
Sweet. Awesome. How are you guys doing? Good. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. Great to be here in Vegas. For those of you in the chat that aren't familiar with Carl D'Angelo and IE Pinball, huge shout-out to him because he shows up here early to get things set up and transports all this gear over here from lovely California. So a big shout-out to those. And anybody in stream, if you have a Twitch Prime membership to give because you're an Amazon Prime member, be sure to subscribe to this channel. If you don't have an Amazon Prime membership, subscribe anyway and throw Carl and IE Pinball a few dollars so that he can keep up this awesome streaming work. Another shout-out to Carl. I mean, he is one of the great innovators in the pinball streaming business. So he has done many wonderful things with streaming that many choose to copy afterwards. So thank you, Carl. You guys are awesome. Thanks. And Bits, too. Thank you, Buffalo Pinball, for the Bits. Anybody else with some Bits to throw out, that's awesome. and also to support this great event here. This is a huge, monstrous event in terms of both significance as well as the number of players and matches that will be going on all at one time. If you're new to pinball and if you've seen other matches where you've seen people just trying to put up a high score on a machine, this is not a best game high score format. This is a head-to-head, mano-a-mano format where you're playing the best four of seven and the top seed of each match gets to choose first, like either game or position, and the loser then chooses every game after that. And if you win four, then you move on. If you don't win four, then you are gone. It's no double elimination. It's single elimination, high intensity, high stakes. This is great. It's great for pinball, and thank you everybody for joining us this morning or this afternoon, wherever you are, or evening if you're around the world. Colin, I think this is one of the best formats to pair individual players against each other. This format, you have to make decisions of strategy during the game, and you might change what you're doing, whereas in a high-score tournament, you're going to probably enact the same strategy all the way through the process. This, you have to change your decisions on the fly, and you'll notice as we go through this what some of the top players will do. They will do something completely different than what you would expect at a certain point.
4:18
Agreed. Yep, it's match play. That's why everybody loves match play. And, you know, every tournament it's different. It's more difficult logistically in terms of number of games as well as the duration of the format if you do heads-up match play or if you do four-player match play. But, you know, match play is just where it's at because it brings so much more dynamic aspect. Every game will be different. And instead of you're just trying to, well, I'm going to try to do like a couple million more than a high score table or I need to get roughly a 30 million score on Tron to get X number of ranking points. No, you're just trying to beat, and it's not even a four-player match play, you're just trying to beat one score. And so that's why it's also very critical in terms of play order. and you will see most players choosing to go second because that extra intelligence, that extra value of information you have of knowing exactly what you need to do, or even in balls one and two you see how far they've gone or how much progress they've made towards certain multi-ball or scoring features. So, yeah, heads up, it's so much fun. It's also fun because it's single elimination, so you don't get another chance. So it's got a bracket, too, just like March Madness. This is pinball March Madness. Yeah, very much so. You have one chance, and if you don't survive your round of seven, you're done for the day, and then you're going home. Okay, so currently on Tron, they are past their practice. I wasn't watching closely enough. I think they went straight into their game. Okay. They did not practice. So this is Ed, who won the Rhode Island State Championship, and Mike Lund, who won the Utah State Championship, gets a nice roll there into the in-lane. And this is their game one. You can see there in the information under each player how many wins they have. So it's 0-0. This is the very beginning of the tournament. And it looks like Ed was not able to get a whole lot done on his first ball. And so right now Mike is one light cycle from qualifying his light cycle multi-ball. Almost gets it rolled there through the gym. And he could be going for combos here. Okay, yeah, he's looking to set up his score. and score for an end of the line, which would get some points. But he's also taking pot shots as that recognizer. So he might be – I actually like this strategy because he's actually doing a strategy of opportunity, and he gets a portitious bounce through the gym, which will give him a bonus multiplier. Yes, which can get big if you've played for a long time in a ball. Essentially, your bonus X is really just highly dependent on how long you've been playing in terms of the number of features that you've scored throughout that ball. So he's 2.8, but he's going to end, he gets an extra 1.2 there at the end. The other interesting thing about that bonus on Tron specifically is if you have double scoring running, it will actually give you double your bonus, double whatever you had multiplied, when you drain if you are draining with double scoring running. Now Ed has stepped up. He's immediately plunged in. He started light cycle multiball. You can see all the light cycles are lit. He also has Clue stacked on. Ooh, that could be over, though. That's it.
7:29
Wow. There's no ball saved for that. That's two quick drains out the left, and he is taking a ride to the back of the bus. So, John, you're in the telestrator seat, so feel free to go to town on that thing. Oh, you don't want to see my ARC prowess. I'm good at pinball, but not ARC. I'll give a shot here and there.
7:51
So you can't see it at home, but, you know, instead of just a little tablet or something for us to telestrate on with big, fat fingers, we have this beautiful, huge Dell, you know, I don't know how many-inch monitor this is. What, 30-inch? It's more than five. Yeah, so we've got a nice telestrator here. Okay, so now Mike has also started his light cycle. And so in light cycle multiball, you want to shoot those square, yellow flashing light cycle inserts, and you want to shoot them in combination. He is now drained out of it already. So we've seen two very quick light cycle multiballs. A lot of times what players will also attempt to do during light cycle is they will use it to get more Cora shots, which is the green circle insert right here to shoot that shot. And you simply shoot it enough times and you'll light Cora multiball. All the multiballs are qualified, and you'll see them lit here and here, and you shoot into the scoop here to start any of those two multiballs. And preferably when you're starting one of those multi balls like a quarter for example You'd love to do that with the end of the line combo So an end of the line combo is any combo that ends by shooting it into that same shot there and
9:04
There's about six seven different ways you can do that combo Can you do that from an orbit as well or you have to be through on the side ramp? It's going to end with the side ramp into so you're gonna do the side ramp into that scoop and that's going to be the final two shots at the end of the line. But up until that point, you have multiple ways you can do it.
9:24
And that's actually, if you can get a good, it will hold that value of your end of line for the rest of the, now it looks like, so congratulations to Mike, he won game one. He had the most satisfying plunge in pinball, which is when you're the last player and you don't even have to play your ball three. That plunge feels good.
9:43
So, yeah, as John was mentioning about end of line combos, is that value you build up by shooting combos throughout your ball, it will hold that value for the remainder of that ball. It will reset back to its base value of 500K on subsequent balls. But it's a very valid tournament strategy, a points-pressing strategy, to simply, if you can juice up your end-of-line value, and then even during your multi-balls, all you then do is just shoot the side ramp into the scoop, and you keep collecting that end-of-line over and over and over. Yeah, it really depends on how the shot to the side ramp is. If it's a very comfortable shot to the side ramp, you'll see a lot of players pressing their points hard for end of the line. And another shot that's very important is the Quora shot, that green shot we were talking about earlier. Because that's a very common end-of-the-line combo. So you do Quora, which would be up here, and then it comes around, and then you hit the side ramp, and then finally you go up into the scoop. So that's a three-way combo, and that's what I would call the typical end-of-the-line combo. Correct, because you're looking to set up that upper flipper in the easiest way and consistently do that is whip Cora. So we've started now. This is practice. They've only queued up one player. So in this format, every game you are allowed to take 30 seconds of practice for each player so you can get a chance to see how the game is flipping, give it a couple nudges, to see where that silt bob is. If you're new to pinball, you are supposed to move the game. I didn't learn that until much later in life playing pinball. I thought it was just cheating to move the game. No, you are supposed to move the game, and there is a physical pendulum inside the cabinet that is measuring how hard you move it, and modern games like Tron will give you a danger every time that pendulum makes contact with a ring around it. Other older games that we'll see later today, as soon as you make contact, your ball or even your game is done. So if you're learning and you're new to pinball, do nudge. Actually, it's fun. It's fun to physically manipulate the game and find out just how far that tilt bob will let you go. In this particular level of competition, these tilts are all set up quite tight. And so that's designed to, you know, it's a delicate balance to try to strike where you want good players because nudging is a huge part of skill in pinball. You want them to be able to nudge, but you also can't have the games playing all day. And so that's why you will tend to see high-level competition have relatively tight tilts. Colin, when you were doing warm-up before we started here, did you try to do a dead bounce kick out out of the scoop, where it comes out of this scoop here and just dead bounces? I didn't, but I saw the person in front of me do it. And it was working, but it wasn't controlled. Okay. So you didn't die. So in other words, a lot of times if you try dead bounce, it will become a deadly bounce. And instead of doing, you want the dead bounce to hop over to here, but it wasn't a nice control. It would hop too far into the sling and then bounce around. So that was no bueno.
12:41
This right flipper, there were notes that were put up here on Tron. I didn't see anybody teching it in between warm-ups and now. This right flipper is loose. And so I found that because of that, the shots are, you have to hit them earlier than usual. I think maybe there's a little bit of delay possibly in the coil, but also the actual, you know, just the mechanics of the flipper inside of it. I forget, is it the pawl that's loose? Generally, yeah. Generally, it would be the pawl. You flip it, and you can actually see the flipper in its raised position. When you first fire it, it will give a little bit of wiggle and jiggle to it. And so what that's doing also, though, I found when I held up the flipper, that the scoop was kicking out and just settling right there on the flipper. Without firing the slingshot. Correct.
13:25
So we'll see if some of these players choose to do that. The last game we watched was what I would call an extremely live game. players were playing without slowing the progress of the ball down very much, and they were playing for redirection shots, which is a shot, you know, you basically fire it back up into the play field. I seem to gravitate towards a more controlled style of play on Tron where I will take a lot of dead time. Wow. Shats to the double scoring. That's something. That's just an interesting way of how the ball bounces. A shats is when you either intentionally or unintentionally shoot the ball up through the in-lane return. And in that case, the in-lane return went all the way up into these Tron targets. And the Tron targets will give you one of three awards. It can give you double scoring, the yellow award. It can give you pops, super pops, or super spinner. So Sagel here, this is Sagel Frazier representing Washington and Scott Elliott representing Indiana. This is their first game. You see Sagel doing more of what John was referring to, where he's looking to control the ball before he shoots. And here comes the combo. Now, this will be interesting to see. Did you see how far that thing bounced back in the ramp return? I did. That will actually sometimes negate your ability to get an end-of-line combo because it's on a very short timer. So we'll have to see if that is something that persists, and that's just going to be a nature of pinball thing, where that may end up nuking or nerfing the end-of-line strategy if your side ramp shot is bouncing too far back up this ramp return. it eats into your timer, and then by the time you shoot it correctly on the fly into that scoop, it may not give you the end of line. Well, we'll have to keep watching that and see if that becomes a factor in the game. Right now we have classic control on, oh, boy. Wow. He got one miss, and he was dead on that multi-ball.
15:15
So for those who are joining us, we are watching the National, IFPA National Championships. I'm Carl D'Angelo with Colin McAlpine and John Replogle on the mics. And we're broadcasting from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. Yes, the Grand Line Games. And this is part of the Flipper Spiel Arcade Club. They have their games. They moved locations since last year, for those of you that watched the stream last year. Yeah, so this is nicer. It's a little bit more open feel to it. As far as, I'm not sure about exact square footage, but this has definitely more open feel than previously. It was like in a very narrow little room. And then kind of a lobby area that was also rather cramped out in the front. So there's more space here, but it doesn't really feel like more space right now because there are so many people here. You have two simultaneous competitions taking place at the North American Championship. We're watching this game between Sagel and Scott. And then concurrently we'll have the Women's IFPA World Championship taking place at the same time. Wow, so this game is playing pretty tough. That left out looks to be very hungry, and it looks like anything that's going in that general direction is going out right now. So the players will have to adjust. I thought player one's accuracy was extremely good, except that he missed the end of the line shot. Oh, wow. Nice dig in the center.
16:35
Look out. Yeah, he hit the U target of general death, that U spanned up to the right of the left ramp. Is that the official name? That's my official name for it, yes. U target of general death.
16:49
General Zod would be proud of that. Here we go, end of the line, opportunity. Oh, he's late. But his light cycle's lit. He definitely wants this multi-ball. Another shot. The general strategy, if I'm playing a new game or a game I haven't, I've played Tron plenty of times, but this physical copy of Tron I haven't played much. So you're generally going to look to try to get into a multi-ball as soon as possible just to be in the safety of having two balls in the play field, of having a little bit of ball save, and try and just find your shots. Tron is such an on-the-fly, you know, shot-making timing game. It is not a stop-and-go game. And so you need to find where those shots are going to be and the timing on each flipper. And his ball save is over now, so if he drains one of these, his light cycle will be over. He also has Clue running concurrently. And Clue, you can see his little helmet targets in these four shots. He's playing with one of them here, and then he has one more in the left orbit. And those will give you some mediocre points. Generally speaking, you don't want to shoot for those. Keep shooting for your light cycles. Or the other strategy here is to either stack or make an attempt to chain your multiballs of light cycle and Quora. And you can make progress towards Quora by shooting that loop here, the right lane. Sorry, left lane, if you will. There you got Quora. You can see he has one more to Quora multiball now. So he's in prime position to either stack on Cora or have Cora one shot away from qualifying if he were to drain out of this multiball.
18:23
And just to give everybody an idea of what we're doing today, we'll be spending a number of games on a particular game, and it'll flip through all different players. It'll be players in the North American. It'll also be players playing in the Women's Championship here. And then we'll eventually move on to another game. So we have one camera rig available for us today, and that's how the broadcast will go. That's the format. I want to point out something a lot of people don't know on this game, or maybe some other current games, that when you're coming out on the ramp, like I watched the clue lanes, you'll see that the ball actually bounces a little when you hit the switch coming off of the ramp, and if you're quick, you can get two letter collections. Indeed. So as it hits, switch the lane, and you'll get two. I'm watching them both the left and the right. Oh, interesting. Just a little tip for if you're not paying attention. I know ACDC does that a lot, too. That's something I really never really do. Yeah, I don't take advantage of that enough. I remember there was one. In this game, it's not as imperative. I mean, the clue lanes are nice to have because it will get you to your next clue mode. But there are many other modern games like this one where some of those in-lane completions can be ridiculously powerful. The clunk fest of Avengers comes to mind of being very powerful if you can get your two in lanes for one.
19:45
All right, he has his recognizer open. And I know he definitely has made some progress towards Cora. Oh, that's a flipper fumble, and that leads to the end of his game. So he's going to be in the house looking to see if player two can come up and get another five million points. And this is the power of being the last player, the second player in this format, is that Scott knows exactly what he needs to do. He knows that he needs roughly 4.6 million points. And so you can then, based on your game state, say, okay, where do I get those 4.6? And I can tell you right now, the way to at least get a good start towards that or maybe get him all even in one is if he can even plunge into this multiball. We can see that four multiball is ready because of that green flasher. and any shot, both a plunge into the back door of the scoop or if he gets all the way around into the normal shot, we'll start that core multiball. Oh, there you go. You got it right there. Perfect. I would add my balls as quick as possible here. And to get an added ball, you're going to want to hit the recognizer shot, which is the three-bank target right up the middle.
20:49
And you can add up to two balls during this multiball, which extends your ball save, and that is so big. So he just added a ball, so now he's playing a three-ball multiball with an additional quick ball save. It's already gone. That ball will probably not come back. Oh, it did. Good grace period there. So now he's trying to shoot the Cora shot. So in Cora multi-ball, you want to shoot the Cora shot, and then more importantly, you want to shoot the very difficult-to-shoot gem shot to get your super jackpot from Cora. Does he have time? He might get one. Nope, he's going to go around. Go for the end of the line. He's got it. He got it. He won the game. Good job. So very well played there from Scott of knowing what he needed to do. He plunged into that Cora multiball. He got both the skill shot points, and he got enough points from just simply making a few shots. He didn't even need to collect the Cora super jackpot, which is from the upper flipper going into this little U-turn shot there. It's called the gem shot, and that's where you collect your Cora super jackpot. I love that look when he looked up because he had not looked up to the scoreboard up until his ball drained. He looked up with a look of, did I do it? And then there was just that resigned look of, yes, I did. Yes, that relief.
22:01
It's always a good feeling. I mean, it's a first to seven, so, you know, game one isn't necessarily the end-all, be-all. But, man, if you can start out on a good note, kind of get that momentum built, you're psychologically then feeling good of, hey, I've got a game, I've got my first win. Especially, you know, everybody here has traveled for the most part from long distance to attend this. You have a few players, obviously, from the West Coast or, you know, one here from Nevada and, you know, from Utah. and everybody else coming from all over the country, all over North America. And so it gets a bad taste in your mouth if suddenly you lose your first couple games and you're thinking, oh, man, I came all this way, and I'm going to be out possibly after one round and I'm not winning any games. I don't know. I mean, we've got to keep in mind that you're playing against some of the best players in the world here. So, like, there's going to be good games that are put up, and people are going to get beat with good games today. We're going to watch players play flawlessly, and they're still going to lose the game just because the luck of the pinball was not on their side.
23:04
So, I mean, I guess, I mean, that's the way I want to go out, though, if I'm going to go out. I want to say I played well and I got beat, and that's wonderful. Yeah, I would much rather go out by playing well and just somebody playing better. So you can see Carl out there. Carl is moving the camera rig right now to a different game. Carl is in the red shirt with the large camera rig surrounding him. So we are moving on to a game, a new game. And I don't know which one it is. So I'm going to be just as surprised as everybody else out there, and I'm going to call it whatever it is at that given point.
23:41
So we're trying to bring up the bracket here for you. All right, here we go. And you can also, it looks like on Chalons, you can vote and create a bracket just like you can in March Madness. So feel free to fill those out just for fun and see how you do at predicting who's going to win each one. You can see the bracket here, and you have a bracket where round one does not include all competitors. There are some that have a buy in the first round for the top few seeds. And so here you can see the top of the bracket with Zach as the number one seed and all the rest here. It looks like the matches that we just watched were right down here. So we watched Stagel and Scott. There we go. And we also watched the first match between Ed and Mike. And so you can see the brackets here updating live. Zach is doing that. And so you can go to this link here, which I'll have somebody else post in here. So this first round is probably going to take quite a while because we have a lot of different matches that are running, and we have a limited number of space and a limited number of machines to work with during the day. So just stay patient, and eventually you're going to get to see the player you're looking for, I would bet, during the day.
24:59
You know, actually, I wanted to ask a question. I love doing this question at the beginning of a broadcast and say to the other broadcasters in the booth, do you guys have any favorites for who you would expect to win it today? Take it all down. I mean, what do you think, Colin? I really don because I seen this That the beauty of this format is you have a tendency If somebody just kind of gets on a good run anybody can beat anybody I mean the person I would probably have favored because of watching him last weekend as well at TPF would be Raymond Davidson But he's not here. And that's because of this format. He was knocked out in the same style format in the state of Washington by somebody who's not as highly ranked or favored as Raymond. but they still beat him because they simply played better over a 4 of 7 series. And that's the beauty of this format. I mean, I would still say the 4 of 7 series, you're still going to generally see the higher skilled player rise to the top. I don't necessarily think that this is a random format at all. No, no, no, no. But it's something where you can, because you only have to beat one other player each game, when you play a four-player bracket final, there's a tendency that even if you maybe beat one other player, well, that's great. That's going to get you third place. Right. And third place in a series of three games is not generally going to advance you. It's not going to get it done. So that's where I still think it can come into play here. So we've now moved to Star Wars, and that was ball one. They got done with their warm-up. So we have Robert DiStasio from New Jersey, and we have Dalton Eli. I don't know if it's Eli or Eli, so I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that. And he's representing Georgia. And Star Wars, I don't know of any specific game notes on this, if they've done any type of nerfing. Or generally speaking, in a competitive setting, you're going to have it so you cannot stack. You cannot stack multiballs, and you cannot stack another mode with a multiball. So most players are going to be going to try to get to one of what we lovely called the hot dog inserts. And so you want to get these hot dog inserts flashing by completing the various modes that go into it. So this one, for instance, takes these three modes. And depending on the character you choose, it will spot you some modes based on the story of Star Wars and if they weren't actually present during that story. And so he is playing R2-D2 as the character. And so it spots you two indoors, and it spots you two Death Stars. So, therefore, you have two multiballs where you're one mode away from qualifying your multiball, which is a strategy he's taking right here. That's an interesting strategy. I've actually seen a lot of players choose different strategies on this recently where it's not. It used to be a very simple strategy. You would choose R2-D2 all the time. I've seen a lot of people go Han Solo now. Right. And I've seen a lot of people playing Leia. And Leia, yeah. So, okay, TIE Fighters felt. And right now he is furiously banging on the lockdown bar. There's a button on the lockdown bar that gives you TIE Fighters once you start that little mini mode. And you could probably see him vibrating while he was doing it because he was trying really hard to get those. Yeah, and there's a little, it's difficult to see because it's relatively small text in the scoreboard, but next to each player's score is a little icon of a TIE Fighter and the number of TIE Fighters they have. So you can see here, it looks like he has three TIE Fighters there. And so as you collect TIE Fighters, you then qualify TIE Fighter multi-ball. And I think in competition settings, there's 35 TIE Fighters? I want to say either 35 or 45. Or 50. Well, it is a number that is divisible by five, and it is more than five. So we're good to go. Here's a TIE Fighter hurry-up. Good call to save the ball first. Yeah. Don't take your hands off the flippers in order to hit that button without saving the ball first. So he got up to in the 20s on his TIE Fighters, so he's probably maybe one TIE Fighter hurry up away from having that. And generally speaking, the TIE Fighter multiball is not in and of itself incredibly lucrative, but it's a great thing to have to make progress towards modes that you have running, or you can stack that TIE Fighter multiball onto another multiball. So let's see which mode he's going to go with. He's now, yes, he's going to go for his Death Star multiball. Multiball has begun. So the object here is going to be for him to get the force targets on the left-hand side as quickly as possible. And that will give him the access to an add-a-ball if he gets them in order. And how do you get that add-a-ball? You get that by spelling force in order, F-O-R-C-E. And then you can hold the lockdown bar button in order to give yourself an add-a-ball. It will glow an orange color, which is sort of cool, but it changes color. It is. And just for a note, it's not hitting the lockdown bar button, but you actually have to press and hold it once you have it qualified. I didn't realize, is that something you have to hit them in order? I think you just have to hit it enough times. Well, perhaps it's a setting. I know there's certain settings where you have to hit them in order. Oh, really? Okay, because I thought they all reset every time you hit it, all the job target reset. You just have to hit all five. Maybe the code has changed since I've last done that.
30:20
What, have you had a baby or something like that, John? Yeah, we had a wonderful little girl, and the rust is thick on John.
30:29
As you saw, the ball saves have been dramatically reduced. That was a pretty big move, and so he got two dangers for that. It's difficult to tell, but just based on how long that danger was flashing, I think he got both as dangers. So anytime he makes another big move, he will immediately tilt this ball. Well, he's on ball three, so he needs to make some progress here. This is his opportunity. And, gosh, that's the end of the game.
30:53
It looks like Star Wars is playing pretty mean. So $75 million takes down a game of Star Wars, which, look, you're going to say, oh, I've gotten higher than that in arcade play. This is match play. This is a completely different beast. You know, it doesn't matter where they put up $5 million or $100 million. You've just got to beat that score. Yes, sir. And so the strategies all change. And so this is an interesting one because this is a game where you get to select an award from a set of awards on your plunge for your skill shot. And as brought up in the chat, it was a little bit different. I was kind of surprised he didn't go for his five TIE Fighters. So depending upon the character and depending upon the ball that you're on, you may be able to choose, you know, spotting a certain number of TIE Fighters, which would have gotten him really close to his TIE Fighter multiball. And when you're only having to catch 50 million or catch 75, TIE Fighter multiball is a very valid strategy to simply get into TIE Fighter multiball, hit a few multiplied jackpots on TIE Fighter, and you're done.
31:57
I personally am not a huge fan of Star Wars in competition play just because the playfield multipliers get what I would call out of control.
32:09
I don't think it's a bad game. It's a beautiful game. The shots are actually very pleasant to hit. But the actual coding for it, for expert level play, like an amateur cannot walk up to Star Wars generally and beat an expert player. Correct. And I think the mark of a great pinball machine is where an amateur can walk up and beat an expert player on the very first time they play the machine. Not likely, but possible. Yeah, I mean, I guess, Kevin, I also like playing board games. And, you know, there's a – I do like the element, though, where you need to learn the rules. And so the good news about the pinball community is you can pretty much ask the people that you're standing around with as you're watching a game, or you can go online to pin tips.net. You can watch tutorials that are produced by Papa TV, by Buffalo Pinball. You can go watch Carl when he does his streaming from home, even though he doesn't call them tutorials. They are effectively tutorials in terms of him playing a game. so you can learn about those games. And these modern pinball machines like Star Wars, you do have an element of rules knowledge that is going to, you know, you have to understand not just the rules, but you need to understand how to apply the rules. And so I think that's a good element of modern pinball, especially with people having it in their home and wanting the game to last for them for a long time, to continue to explore the game and get their value out of it. These are not cheap toys to have. And so I like that element. But Star Wars in particular, why it's frustrating for competitive play is because the plunge, even with the ball save it's on, you can still drain off the plunge. I think as most IFPA tournaments, the ball save is going to be off. And so you may end up seeing a lot of players on Star Wars actually short plunging. And when I say short plunging, normally you would want to full plunge and get these targets here because that gives you additional bonus multiplier for your skill shot and then a super skill shot if you can bounce into the correct force target off of that ricochet. But with no ball save, you may want to just barely loop it out here to try to then catch it on your flipper so you have control to start your ball. What do you think? Is that the strategy you would use in this game? For Star Wars, yes. You're going to short plunge. Yeah. That's what I think. You still get your award. You can still get your choose your path award regardless of whether you hit the targets or not. So all you're getting from hitting this three bank here is you're getting those additional bonus multipliers, and then you have the chance to get some additional benefits if you can ricochet it in the timing on that course target. And we saw Davey walk up and immediately try to do that, and he did. Yeah. And, wow. This is going to be some very quick games. So Travis there ends just with a scant $1.6 million.
34:56
Gosh. And it looks like, so Davey is player two, I guess? Oh, okay. So, yeah. So Travis is player one, Davey is player two, and that's because it looks like Davey won the first game. He's up 1-0, so Travis likely selected this game. Oh, man, there's a danger already. He just got two dangers, it looks like, I think, from those two moves he made. And the other option you have as a player is you can let the till box settle for a few seconds. I would there. I would, yeah. I definitely think, look, and for the players who don't understand, Tournament etiquette. Take your time. Make the moves that you need to make to feel comfortable and for the machine to get back to a state of comfort as well, in which case the tilt bob was definitely still swinging on that ball. I would have taken a few seconds, just so you don't accidentally tilt.
35:48
Indeed. The other thing you can do if you're running tournaments, and I don't think that they've done it here because they didn't make an announcement about it, but at last weekend's tournament I ran, and I installed little pieces of earplug in the crook of where the tilt bob stick is, so that way the tilt bob will come to a settle faster. You'll have less time waiting for the tilt bob to settle.
36:11
I'd like to get critical just for a second on his play at the end there. He had both flippers raised, and I don't know if he could have necessarily saved that ball or not, but he wasn't in a position where he could have saved that ball if it was stable. That's true. You want to always have your flippers in a down position because that puts you in a defensive state to better be able to have the ball not drain as well as. Oh, my goodness gracious. That's not fun. This is why Star Wars is not necessarily in favor or in vogue right now for a lot of competitive pinball because of that what happened there. That's really, really tough.
36:49
And there's not really a nudge that was going to bring that ball back once it hit the slingshot. I mean, before that, sure. I don't know. I mean, he actually took a danger nudging it out of the left out lane area and then just was unfortunate as far as the bounce of that coming out of there hit the sling and drain him anyway.
37:07
Boy, oh, boy. Star Wars it is. Somebody's getting blown up. And hyperspace hurry up is running. That was a good subtle nudge to get it out of the right out lane area.
37:20
His Star Wars hurry up is essentially worthless now. There's no point except for making progress towards your hyperspace multiball. Which is worthwhile. It is very worthwhile. Oh, I saw that with the move of death.
37:31
Bye-bye. I've been calling it that for a long time, and I saw it as soon as it came across. I was like, well, do you throw the machine sideways and possibly get disqualified, or do you just let it go?
37:45
And considering he's up by, this is ball three, everybody. This is ball three, and player one has five million points. That was actually a perfect soft plunge That was beautiful I would have liked to have seen either a dead bounce or a live catch And he missed one shot and he's done But he took it on the fly What I mean by that is He did the great blue soft plunge And you can do a live catch and have the ball settle here And then take a controlled shot To this indoor ramp Generally speaking the usual go-to strategy Is shooting this nice big ramp shot And then you can usually shoot an early backhand shot And continue looping it over and over again until your indoor modes are qualified. He chose to go on the fly, and he paid the price.
38:29
I don't know. I've got to say, that's mean, though. I mean, his last two balls were nothing burgers.
38:37
I don't know. Well, hey, that's Star Wars, folks. Yeah, so we're going to be getting a lot of games of Star Wars in here as we have 37.9 million to 9.1 million is the final score. And next up, trying to see who looks like they're next on this game.
38:57
Yeah, it's really hard to move the camera with all the people in this room. Oh, yeah. And disturbing, trying not to disturb someone's game in progress next to it. So that's why we're sticking on the game for quite a few and then moving to the other ones. Hey, we do what we can with what we got.
39:12
So Travis bought your WWE LE Ray Day. Yes. I think that was one of Ray Day's many pinball machine bone collecting prizes that he won that. I've always wanted to win a pinball machine at a tournament. Yeah, that would be... Even if it was a WWE LE, I would keep that machine for a long time. Probably collecting dust, but you know.
39:44
It would be very important to me. diaper-changing station? Just fold it up and set it up as a diaper-changing station. No, that's not fair either. WWE is not that bad.
40:00
Alright, we're just waiting here for our next match to get going on Star Wars. As you can see, this is what I was talking about. The room is very crowded. I mean, I think we need some people lubricant in order to get people through so they can get to their game. Gosh.
40:15
This is a sea of humanity. And it's nice having the chairs in the room. That's for sure. It is. It's fantastic. But it's just a little tight. And this space that you can see here, this is the extent of the space in this area. There's a little bit of space behind this, kind of a behind-the-counter space where they have a bunch of old-school classic video games and some controllers, and they have a small fridge where they're selling the drinks from. But this is it. So you can see this is not a big space to be holding a pinball. The good news is there is a balcony area out in this strip mall. It's a two-floor strip mall, and we are in the second floor. So the balcony area is quite large, and you have a lot of people just kind of hanging outside, enjoying the nice weather here in Las Vegas, Nevada. Once again, if you're just joining us, this is the North American Pinball Championship by IFBA, as well as the IFBA World Women's Pinball Championship. and we're here with Carl D'Angelo, our producer, running the stream for us. And on the mic is John Replogle and myself, Colin McAlpine. And we are now in warm-up phase? Yeah, this is a warm-up phase. Okay. If they chose to warm up. I believe, well, I think he's playing two balls in a row, so I would hope he's warming up. Okay. And we already have a score that has eclipsed player one from last game. Well, okay. I think this is real. This might very well be real. Hey, we've got to keep it real here on the broadcast. All right, so this is Luke from Minnesota, an up-and-coming younger player. Yeah, not real. Not real, okay. So we tried to keep it real for you, but we failed. So this was actually practiced, and now it's going to be real. And they, wow, they must have been playing some other fast-playing moderns or a couple of EMs. They're already 2-1. This is game four already. Game four, wow. Things are moving along. Which I'm very happy to hear that because maybe it will move a little faster than last year. Last year was a very long day.
42:23
This is the drains off the plugs, this game, this game. But, yeah, I wish it would. Trying to strike the balance. I don't like what I'm seeing here on Star Wars as far as how easily it's draining. But I do like seeing a nice fast place for the tournament because this is such a long day for those players that do end up advancing for a long way. You can choose to wait. So as you select, if you were the top seed in the first game or you lost the prior game and you choose game, you do not have to pick a game that is open or available. You can pick whatever game you wanted. You worked so hard to get here over the course of the year. And so you can, you know, if there's a queue of, you know, eight matches deep on Star Wars, you can choose to be the ninth match.
43:01
And that is end of all one for Luke. That one was for real. And he ended right about the same, too. Yeah. Right, about 40.
43:13
All right, let's see if Steve can step up, and let's see what strategy he chooses to go for. All-important plunge. He's going to select his light Death Star missions, which is a classic start here for Luke. I don't see a lot of people playing as Luke.
43:29
I'm not sure if he knows something I don't as far as Luke. I know all the valid strategies on the other three, but Luke is usually not as selected. Interestingly. And he also chose to go with the Tatooine mission.
43:41
And, well, that's the end of that. Wow. These outlanes are hungry. My goodness, somebody better go out to In-N-Out Burger and get these outlanes some food because they're hungry. This is a drain buffet here in Las Vegas.
44:02
I like that comment I see in chat. The irony of the right scoop being the only friendly feed on Star Wars.
44:14
All right. So Luke is now good. You can see there he did nice control. He's backhanding. He's going to start an indoor mission or a death start. He's going to start both. Interesting choice. I don't quite agree with that with how this game is playing. He has to do so much to get to that. Because what happens here now is if he completes one of these two missions, he does not have the availability to start his multiball that he's qualified. He will have to complete both of them, in which case he'll have two multiballs ready. But he could very well drain this ball and the next one without finishing either of these. Let me provide a counterpoint to that. A counterargument would be the scores are so low on Star Wars right now that getting any points on the board for having more shots lit might be an extremely valuable thing. Getting to the multiballs, as we've seen, hasn't been that lucrative. Okay, that's true. Why not play them separately? You can start one, then start the next one. Just because more shots. More shots, yeah. True. I mean, I'm not saying I completely agree with it, but if you want me to play devil's advocate for that just a little bit, I'm willing to go with that.
45:14
So here we are on ball three. Oh, no. Less than a minute in, and that was a. Wow. Oh, he's not going to be happy with that. So that was ball. I'm sorry. That was ball two. Excuse me. Was it? No, no, no. No, no, that was ball three. That was ball three. That was, that's it.
45:34
Well, that was an interesting double plunge. Isn't it? Okay. Well, the game was over. Yeah, the game was over anyway. So, and, you know, the other thing that a player, you know, generally speaking in tournament and competitive league protocol is when you get to your final ball, the last player, and you've beaten all the other players, and the actual score itself isn't getting compared across other games, usually you plunge that away. Sure. You may see some players in this format because there is really very little practice time. They may choose to actually play their third ball, at least to get a few more flips in if they didn't get a chance to find all the shots. That's fine as long as the tournament director chooses not to move you along, which they have the option to do in order to save time. Because they can say, look, you had your 30 seconds of warm-up before the game. You can move it along because we have a big tournament to do here today, and we have to move it along. So that's going to be up to Josh at the end of the day, Josh and Zach. And they're going to make the decision they make, which, knowing them, they're generally hands-off. They let things take their course. And it looks like we're moving the camera rig. So I see Carl moving down the aisle past Sorcerer and Paragon.
46:49
We'll see which game he's going to select here. I didn't hear him mention which one he was going to pick. I did not hear him mention it. So you can see the other games there. I can tell you to the right of Star Wars, you have Sorcerer, then Paragon, then a Game of Thrones, then a Star Trek Stern LE. To the right of that is a Black Rose. And finally, at the very end of the hall there is Iron Man. Carl continues to move on down. We're moving on down, folks. It looks like we're headed at Black Rose. Are we going to continue going? looks like we're going to see some Ironman.
47:26
That's what it looks like to me. So, Colin, have you been playing a lot of pinball recently? In fact, last weekend I was playing a lot of pinball and also running a lot of pinball at the Texas Pinball Festival. Yeah, that was a softball question, by the way. I knew the answer to that. Yeah, I appreciate that. Tell us about it. So, yeah, the Texas Pinball Festival, like the Pinmasters that take place later here this weekend, is on the Stern Pro Circuit. And so a lot of people come to play in that as well just to go to that show because it's a huge festival. It's one of the biggest and best in the country and the world. And so you have a lot of people coming there. We had over 400 pinball machines in the main hall. That's awesome. And also a whole ton of classic video games and pinball or themes of pinball celebrities that people could meet. And the tournament itself, we had a main tournament with 160 players that signed up for that. We had a waiting list of over 100 more players that also wanted to play, and then a classics tournament, and then we also had a women's tournament that ran on Sunday. That was the very first time they ran that. We had 64 women and girls playing in that, and that was a very good event. Lots of positive feedback on that, plus two kids' tournaments, a kids' tournament and a parent-child tournament. So it was a chock full of tournaments. Texas Pinball Festival is one of the shows that I've been meaning to get to for a couple of years because I've heard such amazing things about it. And I really hope that my time will free up where I can actually come down and hopefully play in it as well.
49:02
So 160 was your capped maximum amount of players that you could have for the tournament? That's correct, in the main tournament. And, in fact, we saw Jane there last week playing in TPF. So, in fact, there's a whole number of people that I saw last weekend and I've seen this morning. You know, some people that made the trip. And then because, you know, you wrapped up on Sunday there, they just decided to make a whole, you know, long extended week of it and coming over to Vegas from Texas directly in some cases. So Jane is now player one here against Holly. And Jane has started the Ironmonger multiball. I don't think it's raised yet again.
49:39
There it is. There's the three million points. You got the super jackpot. Nice. That's big points. Okay, so she'd already made it all the way through the first period. She cleared it out, right? And in the grace period got 3 million points that you saw from the delayed B&B. That was a really clutch play just to do that because that's so hard to do when you only have one shot left and she made that count. Indeed. 3 million points is nothing to sneeze at on Ironman either. And that's the whole, generally your whole goal of why you play the Ironmonger multiball is because you want that 3 million fixed jackpot cash in. It doesn't adjust at all. No matter how many times you play it, it will always be three million. And it can be a chore and a dangerous to get there because this iron monger toy will pop up and raise in the middle of the play field, and you have to hit him enough times to spell out monger across here just to start your multiball, and then you have to essentially rinse and repeat and do that again during the multiball while three balls or two balls are flying around, and then collect that super jackpot up the middle there for that three million points. I wonder what she was aiming at in that last shot Whether she was if she was going for the ramp she missed a little bit to the left which caused an instant ricochet down the middle which that one of those saves that almost impossible to make on Ironman just because of the speed at which it happens.
50:54
So, interestingly enough, Holly did not move her skill shot over, but she knows what she needs. She needs to have a good ball here. She can go the bogey route. Didn't quite make it up the ramp. And the way that you can do bogey scoring if you don't want to play Ironman. Oh, no. There's that same dream. There's that same drain. And a tilt.
51:12
So that match is going to be even up at one apiece. Correct. So Holly is the 11th seed. Jane is the 22nd seed in the Women's World Championship that is taking place here concurrently with the ISPA North American Championship Series championship. And that is all one-all. So now because Holly lost that game in this format, she will have the choice. She can either choose what game that she and Jane are going to play on next, or she can choose to go second and allow Jane to pick the next game. I don't think we're going to be seeing too many people choosing that option. I don't believe so. You're going to choose the game you want to play. A lot of times you'll see that deferment is when maybe later on in the match, if a certain player has exhausted their go-to games. Correct. But they'll probably still end up choosing something here because you have a very wide disparity of style of games here at this location and at this tournament. You have something ranging from the modern machine like Iron Man with lots of feeds back to the flipper and controlled modern pinball play. You have some machines with two-inch zipper flippers like Four Queens with these gaping maws of outlaying that essentially every time you hit a sling, you're going to die. A gaping maw of an outlaying. That sounds like some villain, Colin. Yeah, well, the Four Queens can be quite villainous.
52:39
I sort of feel like the outlings were sort of villainous on Star Wars. They were playing the part of the Empire there. Indeed, yes. Not many people were surviving those outlings. So here, next match, we have Gretchen. I'm going to butcher this. I don't know if it's camp key. I'm not going to try, out of respect. So she is facing up as the 21st seed against the 12th seed of Emily May. And Emily is ahead in this match. You can see 1-0. Thank you to Carl Software that provides that update right there in front of you as the viewer to be able to see exactly what the match status is. Always important if you are running a tournament or a league or a stream is to have a scoreboard. Oh, that was a flipper fumble there.
53:22
And that was, okay, they already did their warm-up for the two guys. Yeah, this is for real. Oh, yeah, she's shaking that one off a little bit. Gretchen's shaking her head, and now Emily steps up for her ball one. Looks like the post is disabled.
53:36
So it went all the way around. I tend to play Ironman aggressively, like I'm chopping down a tree. I want to play it hard. I want to play it fast. Wow, there was another shot to that drone target that claimed two balls on the last game we watched.
53:55
Speaking of which, drone target to left out lane. I tend to play Ironman a little bit differently than a lot of players. I actually will start by, after I gain control of the ball in the beginning, I will be shooting for the center spinner rather than the outside spinners. Interesting. Wow. Okay. And the reason I do that is because I want to be making progress towards my drone multiball. And often I will graze a drone target while I'm going through that center spinner. True. And I think it's really important to not forget your progress on those other things. And you're going to say, why do you do that, John?
54:34
Why do you do that, John? And I can guess, but I want to hear you say it. In match play against some of the best players in the world, there's a more than statistically insignificant chance that somebody is going to make it to do or die. And I want to be ready to come catch them if they do. So, and what do or die is, is if you get all the five inserts in the center of the play field here, I'll circle them here. If you get those five inserts lit by accomplishing those goals during the ball, you get a mode where you can score 35 million points for one single shot or possibly more. Which is a complete game changer. Yeah. So that changes the entire makeup of the game. So I want to be in a progress where I can chase down a monster game. So that's why I start that way.
55:20
I thought you were actually going to say something different. As we've seen, both for Emily and for Gretchen, that typically even though you can also die off those center top drone targets, it's much easier to die off of these targets that you bounce because they're closer back to your flippers. So you're going to have to have a greater, quicker reaction time to save it. Now what Gretchen has done here, she has started the Iron Monger multiball. So she raised that toy and she spelled out Monger. She needs to shoot one of those finners again to re-raise the monger toy from the center. And she is going for the center. Now, if you're in this multiball, do you go for the center or do you go for the sides? Whichever is available. So, unfortunately, that is the end of that multiball for her. She was unable to re-raise it during multiball, and she's back to square one for that multiball. I thought she got a little bit ripped off in that multiball because the first ball that drained on her, I thought the ball save was not very far out of grace period. So I thought she was getting that ball back, but it did not come back for her.
56:22
There's a center shot. So the other thing that sometimes gets overlooked and can be valuable on these ironmonger shots is, depending on how each physical copy is set up, is whether you get lots of spins from the spinner. And that spinner can grow in value and can increase the value of your next orbit or center shot to not insignificant values because Iron Man scores tend to be quite low in match play. I've watched a player during match play get the Iron Man fast scoring mode and then proceed to do nothing except shoot spinners. And they ended up, at the end of that fast scoring mode, they did so well on the spinners, they got 40 million points on that mode. That was Lyman Sheets. He was just chain-shooting the Orbit. There's that drone death. Yeah, but she was going for whiplash because she had whiplash. I know. I didn't mean by the drone death. But death by drone. I mean, that's... The game is designed. Tony Stark would not be proud of death by drone.
57:27
Okay, there's a nice shot to the Orbit and a whiplash. Very, very nice live combo there. Okay, she's two shots away from starting bogey.
57:38
Oh, what would we... So, you need points. She's going right for bogey. Yeah, this is a good strategy. She was late on that shot. That's okay. Time is not over yet. So, once she starts bogey, she would need to get about, I want to say, four or five bogey shots to be back in the lead. Yeah, I think the first one starts at 500K and goes up 100K each shot. Right. And if you combo it, they're double value. Oh, even in bogey, it's also double, right? Yeah. No, no, no. No, just the initial ramps are double. In the end, it's just. So you can see both ramps are pulsing, which means that bogey's ready. Oh, my God. So she is either. The flippers feel a little weird on this machine. I'll say that. She's either late or she's going. Backhanded. Oh, I wanted her to backhand that left ramp. She now has war machine multiball qualified. That changes everything.
58:28
Oh, if she could get war machine right now with bogey running. That would do it. That would be game over. Look out. Nice notch. Look out. Oh.
58:38
Okay. Take your time. Oh, no. Wow. That was an incredible setup there. Oh, yeah. The dinner was on the table, and all you needed to dig in was your fork and knife to eat with it. And so what we were talking about there is on these modern games, including Iron Man and others, is the feature called stacking, where you can have one mode running and then stack on a multiball on top of it or a different mode on top of it. So she had started her bogey, which is started by hitting four of these ramps to qualify it. A fifth ramp shot will get you there. And then if you can start a multiball, for instance, the War Machine multiball, when it's flashing, to shoot that kicker also of death, but starts the multiball. And in that case, whenever bogey's running, it's not just the ramps that are lit, but all of these red arrows around the play field on the major shots are all lit for that bogey scoring jackpots of 500 plus 100K each time. And if you have the safety of multiball going on, you can cash in some very large points on bogey.
59:43
Bogey is what I call the Ironman add-on mode. So, you know, bogey, Ironman fast scoring. These modes are extremely important if everybody's playing at the same level. These are the modes that separate. That will differentiate, exactly.
59:58
The other thing you can do, if you find, I mean, it's that great feeling when you're in the flow of these modern machines that feed the ball back to the flippers from the ramp shots. And if you simply, in a crossover ramp shot, so by shooting the left ramp, you're going to get the ball in the left flipper. You shoot the right ramp, you get the ball in the right flipper. If you can dial in and find those shots. Like, I remember, I think it was Daniele did during the very first circuit final. You know, he just found those ramp shots. Like, he does on many pinball machines, by the way, and just doesn't miss for, like, ten shots in a row. I mean, there are certain paper-accurate players in the world that can do that. I am not one of them, and never will I be either. I mean, but when you get to see pinball performance like that, it's something to remember. You know, it's truly a magical control of the ball. So now we're catching back up again with another game in the Ed Giardina and Mike Lund series. Mike is up two games to one. He's representing Utah. Ed is representing Rhode Island. And they're playing their fourth game on Ironman. This is, once again, a best four of seven style of tournament format. So we will, you know, they still have at least this game plus one more to play, depending on who wins this one. and it looks like Mike is going to be going first. He selected this game more than likely, and Ed is going second. This is warm-up, so they are intentionally not trying too hard. They're trying to test the tilt, find a couple shots, and they are in the first round of the North American Pinball Championship. Thank you to all the over 400 viewers who are interested in learning or just following competitive pinball. This is one of those what I would call like an apex level pinball tournaments of this one and the World's Women's Championship where it is based upon your ranking or performance throughout a whole year or your cumulative ranking over the course of three years that qualifies you for this event. And so you are going to see some top level play as we go throughout the day here from both the women as well as the NACS. So thank you for joining us. this is all brought to you by IE Pinball the mastermind Carl D'Angelo sitting here producing this as well as throwing in some commentary and my name is Colin McAlpine John Rapoga is also commenting this first round he's taking a quick break and we are good to go so Ed is actually player one and Mike is player two so they're really confusing us I'll switch it around I don't have any order here when it's shown on the screen so we don't know until they start So you'll see there is a little bit of what I would, you know, I'm going to use the term ghosting not in the way of, like, people referring to inserts that are wearing and tearing, but there's a little bit of ghosting of the actual flasher in the ball save insert, but there is no ball save on this game. So if you miss once, or if you don't even miss, if you just simply get a sling into an out lane to begin your ball, it is done. Let's see how the short plunge works. So Ed is choosing to short plunge, which means he's not going for those top lanes for the skill shot, but he's just trying to get control of the flipper, of which he now finally has control. So he is bashing away at the Ironmonger toy, which has popped up here in the middle. It's a little bit difficult to see from this perspective, but it is up. And because he struck that and put it out of control, it drained on him. So he will have three more shots to hit on that Ironmonger toy to begin his Ironmonger multiball on ball three. Iron Man is a notoriously quick playing and brutal game in there. We just saw another reason why. Another outlaying victim for Mike Lund on his ball, too. We now have a ball three score of 1.7 to 1.0. If somebody had been plunging for skill shots, they may actually stand a decent chance of winning this. He has two more. Is it one more shot? One more shot. One more shot to the Onger Monger. There it is. He has started his Iron Monger multiball. He now seems to shoot one of the purple flashing spinner shots to raise the monger. He did. Now he's bashing the monger to spell monger. He needs two more shots to lower it and light these super jackpot in the middle lane shots. So he's down to one shot. Good control here. Let's see what kind of cradle separation he tries. He's doing an up and under, which is a good strategy. He still has one ball in control. And still trying to get. He actually goes on the fly, trying to hit that center purple shot that's lit up here for 3 million points, which is a very big score on Ironman. There it is, 3 million super jackpot for the Ironmonger multiball. Very good play from Ed. He now has a total score of approaching 8 million points, and we'll see where he goes next.
64:50
So it looks like he might be switching his strategy to ramps, which isn't a bad choice, be given that he only has this ball to play, so those dangerous speeds off the iron monitor toy have a tendency to drain, whereas the ramps, when you hit them, give you a controlled shot back to the other flipper. There he was early. I don't think he intended to shoot that, and now he just needs one more, sorry, two more ramp shots to qualify bogey, which we've already covered is a nice lucrative scoring mode where the four, I'm sorry, five major shots are lit for bogey scoring. and there it's qualified one more shot to a ramp will start bogey and whiplash is dangerous he was fortunate in getting a nice easy feed from the magnet and now bogey has begun so you can see all five red flashing arrows are lit for bogey scoring which will be 500,000 to start and then growing by 100,000 each shot right now he's now unintentionally just from bouncing around qualified the war machine multiball which started at the kicker between the left ramp and the left orbit. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. He played with his food, and his food is off the table. But still, great ball. He ends at just over $12.5 million. Mike has his work cut out for him. Mike dives right in. He's not wasting any time. He's like, I'm here to play. catches a drone and and an out lane right afterwards so that'll be that'll be it that'll be it all right so there'll be two and two i can't believe how quickly he walked up and played he just was like boom i'm on this yeah i mean i've seen the different styles from different players um i didn't see ed make a big move there so he really didn't have much of a tilt bob and settle, but a lot of times you want to go up and once again re-familiarize with where you're at in terms of game state and do that quick math and situational strategy in your head of, okay, I need this 10 million points, so therefore I want to make sure I know what I'm doing. Sometimes I'll even flip the flippers again a couple more times just to kind of get back in the feel of the game.
67:01
You don't have to do a pre-plunge warm-up, a pre-plunge routine, But I think it's important to players to get themselves immediately ready to be at full alert. And more importantly, what you were just saying, Colin, is they need to figure out what they need to do. You need to know what you need to do on that ball. It's not just, I'm just going to score some points. No, I need to get 12 million points. How am I going to do it? You've got to make a plan in order to play a successful match play. All right, and speaking of match play, we are diving right into the next match. We have Mark Gunter representing Arkansas, and he lives there in that state. It's a relatively small pinball scene. Nope, they're warming up still. No, they're not. Okay, he was thinking. I'm guessing he thought maybe there would be a ball saved because he kind of had that look of, okay, is my ball kicking back out? I thought they were warming up just because he was ready to keep plunging. Yeah, I don't think they're warming up, but we'll find out in just a second. Carrie made a nice shot there right to the whiplash and a nudge off that. That was interesting. Carrie nudged that so it would come back out somewhere more pleasant. Oh, and that look that she just had, that side-eye. Okay, they are warming up. So this is still warm-up. They fired up two players just so they could have enough balls to warm up, and they are not playing out of turn. There she is testing out. That was a great move that she does here. You can do this on Ironman as well as many other machines where you have a rail that goes along the right orbit, or the left orbit you can do it on. And you want it to, when it comes off that rail, the tendency oftentimes is to hit the top of the sling and then go out here or out here or hit the sling and fire out of control. And instead, if you can give a shove to the left on the right side of the cabinet, you get the ball to come off of that rail, and you want it to come to your right flipper. So you then have the choice of you can do a control move of a live catch or a dead bounce or shoot it on the fly at some profitable shot as opposed to the ball being out of control in the slings. All right, they're going to start their real game. Looks like I'm switching the order again. So Carrie is the only person in this tournament, or only person here today, that's in both tournaments. Indeed. She has doubled the work, then. She does. Yes.
69:18
And hopefully for her sake, hopefully she plays well and advances far in both. Carrie is the... Oh, no. That's gone.
69:27
That's it. Oh, that little look she gave the machine says it all. That's what you're going to do to me. I see how it is. I know that look because I do it all the time.
69:42
All right. So the top post on this is disabled, so you do not get a freebie skill shot if you want it. So the skill shots in this game are truly skillful. You had a lane change, but just having to control the plunge to get up to those top lanes is difficult. and now he is hitting orbits trying to get monger letters to be able to raise the monger. And he did not get, he drained. I would like to say both players, I think, had an opportunity to perform an outline shake on this game where they might have had an opportunity to save the ball. And I didn't see that either of them go for it. Yeah, especially early on in a game, early on in each ball, your bonus really isn't worth much. Right. So you might as well. You can't take those dangers with you. Tilding is trying. Absolutely. I love that phrase. I have a shirt that has that on there. I didn't wear it this tournament, but it's a good reminder to myself. Mary has switched gears here. And beautiful shot. Very nice. She's in bogey mode now. and she's also achieved three million points by getting there because she did it as part of a combo.
70:54
So let's see if she can get back in control and make some rower ramps. There's one. 500,000. 600,000.
71:07
That feed from the right orbit actually looked nice. It looked like you could possibly do some live catching and shoot that. Oh, there was that drone, but she reached out with the flipper and she saved it. A very nice save. Another bogey shot. She's getting good points, and she also has her monger ready to go now.
71:25
And for her in this series, she really does need the victory on this game because she's already down 0-2 in this best-of-seven match. And you know what? Here's the deal. So the programming of this game, it now will make it harder to get to bogey, but the good news about this is if you have those shots dialed in, just keep shooting them, and eventually you're going to get there. If you don't miss, you're not going to lose the ball.
71:48
Easier said than done, right? Shoot the blinky thingy and don't drain. All right. Mark is stepping up ball two. He is still opting. Well, I thought he was opting for a particular strategy. I think he's going orbits to try to raise his monger.
72:09
And he's now seeing if the whiplash magnet is going to be nice or if it's going to be mean. And it's going to do nothing. Whiplash magnet is going to be very mean because it's... Okay. Now, I guess the rule here is you have to wait for the ball search, and the magnet should fire, in which case it's probably going to throw it to one of the outlanes.
72:32
Spoken like a true pinball tournament player. I would say the exact same thing, by the way. Okay, so I wish he... Okay, there it comes. Oh, very good. That was coming down the middle, but it was saveable.
72:47
Nope. Nice drop catch. Okay, he's got completed his Ironman target. So the next time he hits an Ironman, he will start an Ironman mode.
73:03
Oh, power in lane. And he started Ironman fast scoring. This is a switch hit frenzy. As John mentioned, if you have juicy spinners and good live catching control like Lyman Sheets, you can milk this mode by shooting orbits and spinners. Unfortunately, it was the fast draining. He actually got almost a million points in real points while that mode was going on. I know it said a little less than that on the fast scoring. But just from moving stuff around, it can happen very quickly.
73:35
All right. Carrie is now in ball three. Right now she is going to be points pressing. She wants to just increase that gap between her and Mark. She knows that Mark still has iron monger multi-ball. Nice save.
73:48
Only one danger? Nice. Good. Oh, and a little nice control flip there. I like that, too. Yep. She flicked. It was what happened was the ball was rolling off the flipper. She gave it just a little bit of a flick to get it to settle back down to a cradle. She's letting the tilt bob settle, and now she's going back to work. she got a fortitious in lane off the ironmonger and she oh there's there's a danger so that's danger number two okay she's gonna really want to bring this malty ball in two more shots just got to survive one more and let's see if she goes off the this corner of the monger toy which She has less tendency to get grabbed by the magnet. One more shot. Oh, she's got it. She's got it. There we go. Right in the center. Dead center. Here she goes. She's going to try to pat her lead now and hopefully get a 3 million point super jackpot during this mode. One way or the other, she's getting points, which is really important, as we've seen a lot of low scores on Ironman as well today. You can't ignore also just the nature of shooting the monger toy. You're going to get 250K for every shot to him during multiballs. You make progress towards that 3 million. So you get a million and a half just from getting your monitor letters. Is it 250 or is it 100? It's 250. 250, okay. During multi-ball. It's not enough points that I advocate when you're down to one ball that you shoot for it. Let's put it that way. No, during single ball play, I think it's actually dependent upon how many spinners you had before it. She gets her super. That's big. She's now closing in on 15 million points. That's going to be a tough, tough road to climb for Mark based on where he's at in his situation or his game to make up that difference. But it can be done. All you need is one ball, and you can close anything. But Carrie is still going in Ironmonger, and now it becomes she has the monger toy back up again, and you can simply get another. Look out, look out. She was out of danger. That was a good choice because she's going to get probably a million.
75:50
Oh, she didn't have a bonus multiplier. I'm surprised. And given that she knew, she had a good situational awareness. She knew she'd already consumed both of her dangers, and if she gave it any type of big move, she was going to lose that half million or whatever points that she had in the bank on bonus Yeah I mean I say she in a very good position to win this game
76:12
So Mark has his choice. He can go bogey, which is ready, or he can go monger. Interesting. I think I would start the monger here because you're not going to get it on just bogey. Well, given the gap he needs to close, I would actually get monger one away. I would start bogey on the right ramp and then start monger. I agree with you 100%. Uh-oh.
76:36
That's gone. That is a tough thing to read on the left out lane. Yeah. Iron Man, every different pinball machine has some different physics and the positioning of the post as well as the style of rubber that are used on the post that can really change how the ball bounces over in the out lane. Sure. And so you have to learn each pin as well as each physical copy to understand what type of nudge is needed to get the ball to get the heck out of there, for one. And then if it's not getting out of there, to try to get it to go into the in lane. Generally speaking, what a lot of people don't realize is that, and it's taught by many tutorials given out there, is that you want to simply upward nudge around the out lane areas to get more up and down motion. The side to side motion is what's going to generally kill you. Right. They go to the out lane, and if you can get up and down motion, it's usually then going to go in the in lane or get all the way out of there and back to the center of the play field. Bowen always says don't let it choose. When it goes to the out lane, you have a choice. The ball is going to choose whether it wants to go down the in lane or the out lane. And Bowen says don't let it choose. And I've been like, that's such a wonderful thought process. Just get it away. Go away. Somewhere else. I mean, sometimes you put it somewhere else and it drains on you. That's going to happen. But overall, make it go away. For my sons and for, you know, when I was teaching them how to play pinball and also anybody new to pinball at league or tournaments or just casually, you know, the thing that I try to give kind of a paradigm shift in terms of how they approach a game is I ask them, in a game like Ironman, I'll say, how many flippers do you have here? And they'll say, well, there's two flippers. And I say, actually, you know, figuratively you have four flippers. And to me, I like to think of those, any outlaying post rubbers that you have are just like flippers in terms of you have an ability through your physics of being able to nudge the machine to treat those just like flippers and get the ball out of those areas. And so I'm trying to teach people that, hey, don't become passive when the ball goes over those areas. You still want to be active. You want to be giving upward nudges, just like you would give an upward nudge to try to get a dead bounce out of a flipper. All right, so we are now moving to Paragon. So we are going to completely change gears. We have moved from a 2007 or 2008 Stern machine back to a 1979 Valley game. And you're going to see something different. The rules of Paragon are completely different than what you've seen for some of these other games. This is a single ball game. There's no multi-balls involved. This is a bonus heavy game. Bonus is very important in Paragon. Also, there's no dangers in Paragon. If you trigger the tilt mechanism, your ball is over. And very important, because this is a bonus-headed game, you lose that bonus. So we're going to see something completely different on this. So you're not going to be no multi-ball to go for, right? I mean, now it's time to go for single play. Here also, we should point out before you see something weird, Players are playing as players one and players three. Player two will be the plunge off.
79:54
And you're saying, why do you do that, John? Why do you do that, John? Why would you play players one and three? That's confusing to me. Well, it's not confusing to tournament players. There's something called a tilt through in pinball where sometimes a player will tilt the machine and it tilts the next player's ball, and that results in disqualifications. By playing players one and three, we can eliminate that. We can also eliminate any other unforeseen player-induced problems. So that's why we do that. Yeah, it's a good thing to do, you know, if you have the luxury. If you're not, you know, even on sometimes on four-player games, you'll play two separate two-player games as part of a four-player group play in a different format, not this one. And because it's just so rotten to have to decide a match based on somebody getting a zero because of a tilt through. And particularly if you're setting the tilts tight because you want to have it be a challenge for the tournament play and not be too long playing, if you do a big tilt move when they're straight down the middle drain on these early valleys, generally speaking, it will tilt through. And the same thing for early got leaves. Like I know Jeannie is notorious for doing a tilt through. Oh, gosh. Look at that. Tracy got it out of the not like this zone.
81:09
So this over here is the not like this zone. and that is also called the Peace Flare, where you have this is a unique feature in terms of the, you know, there's a pop bumper over there, and there's this gaping maw of death there. But this is a one-way gate that will allow the ball to come back to your left flipper, and it will not allow the ball, if you happen to control it on the left flipper, it will not allow it to go back that way into the drain, which is nice. Unless you're playing in California State Championships, where for whatever reason they removed that gate. Carl, you're cruel and mean. That was not me. It was not me. Oh, okay. So whoever did that is cruel on me. Oh, he is. I mean, and also there's a game here today that we'll show later, which is Sorcerer, where they completely abused the game and made it not what it normally is. We'll talk about that when we get into Sorcerer later. So Paragon has not been abused because Paragon is generally abusive towards the player anyway. That's correct. Yeah, removing that gate on this, there are some early ballets where removing that gate actually is not necessarily a, You know, I think it's invalid. Like right there, that would have drained. That would have drained the California State Championship because of the one-way gate. But here she is. Great. She's making progress on these in-line drop targets. These in-line drop targets after the second, third, and fourth one will give her 2X, 3X, and then 5X bonus by going into the top saucer. Sorry, on the third drop target. So she is done, unfortunately, on that. Very minimal bonus, but she's not in a bad situation at 47,000 versus the player one score of 17,000. Going into ball three, this is a three-ball game, not a five-ball game, and Tracy needs to catch at least 30,000 points on this ball to score them on this ball in order to make Mika play her final ball. So let's talk about the standard high-level tournament strategy on Paragon, if I want to call it such, and that is to take your left flipper and do something called a tap pass. A tap pass is when you hit the flipper very gently, and it causes the ball just to do a little loop. And the reason it's so prevalent on Paragon is because there's a large amount of space on the right-hand side. It can go like that, like Colin just, or it can go up in the air a little more, and that's still an okay tap pass.
83:28
And that's Paragon for you. That's the classic games where I don't think she even got the flip. No, she didn't have a chance. It went over here and rattled. And there's no rubber on that metal divider there, and this is just bare wood on the right-hand side. So if you go in that area, this is what Bowen was talking about, what he does in all his tutorials, as far as don't let it select. Right. Because probably 90% to 75% of the time, if the ball stays over there, it's going to go out lane. It loves the out lane. You want it completely out of there, back towards the safety of being in these flipper area where you have a better chance of being able to play on. So what's the best method of making that not choose? I tend to do upward nudges off of this top of the slingshot or an upward nudge off of this bare metal. Even with the bare metal, you can still get something on it and try to kick it out of there. And even if you miss both of those, you can do something called a rattle shake, which you may or may not get away with, and it may cost you a bonus. But a rattle shake is where you very gently but very quickly rattle the machine sideways back and forth, and it might throw the ball back out sideways. Correct. And so it's all, once again, come down to situational game awareness. If you are early in your ball or if you've done the math and realize you don't have enough to catch the score that you need to get, then rattle away because the worst thing you're going to do is lose anyway. Right. So, I mean, like, what's the worst thing that will happen? You tilt the ball and you lose. Oh, if you did nothing, you were going to lose. So why not try? Exactly. Trying is how these players, though, got here today. I've got to say. Okay, so a lot of these players are used to trying stuff.
85:05
And so Holly and Jane, they are tied at two games apiece. They are coming in the Paragon. And this is going to be their practice because there's only two players started.
85:18
So this, in addition to the tap pass, the other staple of tournament play and competitive, and just pinball play in general, good skills, is to know when to do a dead bounce. And you want to use dead bounces a lot in this game because you just want the nice control on a flipper to shoot one of the shots available to you as opposed to, you know, flailing on the – decreasing your chances of hitting what you do. Because even successful shots in this game will not give you control again necessarily back on the flipper. And you can tell that this game is actually set up on the most difficult settings for the Paragon letters, which are the letters that are cycling through on the top. On the standard settings for Paragon letters, you get one letter every time you fall in this hole. This one, you have to actually land on it. So there is a strategy of play in Paragon that is sort of taken away on this particular game because it's almost impossible. But this, if you complete the word Paragon, you get 75,000 points, which is nothing to say. Okay, so they were doing warm-up still, because I was going to say they're only playing in players 1 and 2 right now. And they're powering it off. The reason why this Paragon, this is a location, and so it is set up traditionally on coin drop play. So it is not wired. There's different things you can, hacks you can do to, or even switches, adjustments you can make to these classic games to set it up on free play. But because this is a, I think it's a coin drop location. I don't know if it's a membership or coin drop, but I'm assuming it's coin drop. It's a $15 per day. Oh, okay. So in that case, I'm kind of surprised it's not on free play. Because when I was warming up on this one, you could not just press the button on balls two or three and automatically restart the game. Classic valleys are notoriously difficult to set on free play. Yes. So you actually have to do some alterations in order to make that happen. So she could actually let the ball drain right now and get her ball back. All right. But she's going to go for it.
87:18
Now, the reason why is because she had actually somehow not hit a single switch registered during the whole time from the top all the way down to her flippers. It's pretty rare. Oh, there was that side-to-side motion that I don't like to see on Paragon. So what about those drop targets on the right-hand side? Anyone ever shoot for them? Generally, no. Yeah, and not me either. I mean, Carl, do you? No. I'm just asking. Okay. Yeah, so the only thing, I mean, it's a feature of the game that it will give you, Per completion, it will give you 10,000. And Carl's talking about those drops right there. It will give you 10,000 and then 15, then 20, then 25. But maybe if you can sweep them where you can get like 10,000 in one shot, I mean, that's not bad. So the interesting thing about them is that it's something that's often ignored on the game. But situational awareness, you should know about them. Yeah, you know about all the things that are available to you. You have a whole palette of choices of how you want to score points. And as you get later in the game where you know I need exactly 9,980 points and you have one drop target left and you're on the run, you're on the left flipper, I'd be shooting for that. Absolutely. That's the situational awareness. It's so important. So there was a beast layer victim, the not like this layer where the pop bumper, it was not just a simple drain, but it was a I'm going to shove this in your face drain from the pop bumper into that. I've got to say at least that was respectful. It didn't play with its food. It killed you quick. So, oh, here's a nice. That's an interesting feed there. That waterfall, kind of squiggly feed from that one-way gate, it would be different on every physical copy of Paragon. And in this case, it's just trickling out. It's catching the sling here, not firing, and then bouncing into these right footers. That's an important thing to know. I'm actually watching that in case I have to play Paragon later today. That's gone. That was the loop of death. All right, so there are two balls that I would say were completely unsavable so far. Yes. There was no moves that I can possibly think of that the players could have made to save those balls. So the other thing to make note of when you're playing a game like Paragon is it's a classic pin, so depending upon your tournament director, they may be choosing to set it up on three-ball or on five-ball play. And so make note of that. This one's set up on three-ball play. If you're on five-ball play, and also depending upon whether this super bonus carries from ball to ball, that can drastically change your strategy. And so what super bonus is, is that depending upon the settings, if you reach the 20,000, the 30,000, or 40,000 level, that bonus will then be available again at the beginning of your subsequent balls. And if you're on a five-ball game, instead of going for bonus X immediately, you're actually better off going for strict just getting bonus, because if you can get 20,000 super bonus on ball one, that's the equivalent of getting 100,000 points. So what's the best way to build bonus? A juicy spinner. There it is. It's right up there out the middle. And so the beauty of the spinner shot is that sometimes if you hit it just right, it will actually loop around all the way over to this waterfall area, and depending upon the speed, if it's controllable, you can go back and do it again. Yeah, and watching that feed that we saw on the last ball, I'm starting to think, hmm, what do we have here? You know, we have an opportunity, an opportunity for abuse. Yeah, that spinner, though, is not looking as juicy as it would like to be to try that strategy. Exactly, yeah. So it's better, in my opinion, to go for the drop to get your two advanced moments that way. You're getting the same value for a solid spinner shot on this particular pitch. Okay, that was some solid points. Holly put up some good points on that. She now has 56,000. And Jane is walking up, and she will be player three. And this ball that she's plunging now is for real. Good point made in chat here about some moves like we were talking about, like tap passing. They take nerves of steel to tap pass, especially in competition when the pressure's on as well as people are watching you. For some players, don't do it if you don't feel comfortable with it in the situation. Absolutely. I mean, if you don't feel comfortable with anything, don't do it. If you feel like you're going to misplay a drop catch or even a dead bounce, don't do it. I mean, the worst thing you can do is inaction and drain, which is horrible to have happen, especially when you're playing an important tournament. Yeah. So Jane here, sorry, this is Holly, and she is player one. She's at 66,000, trying to just press more points to get as big a gap as possible between her and Jane. Jane has one ball to play, and this will then put one of these players on the precipice of winning their first-round match. So she ends at 72-4. You can see that in the upper left of the scoreboard here, and Jane is player three in the bottom left at 14,400. This is, it looks like she's actively, okay, good, yeah, she's letting this go. This is the dummy player of player two and player four, and now she's up. So she needs to get roughly 60,000 points. She has no super bonus. In fact, I didn't even notice from any player, is the super bonus carrying or not? We haven't seen a super bonus yet in order to make that determination. Now, that was a good idea there. What she did there on the waterfall. Oh, no, no, no, not like that. Oh, okay, so we've got to talk about that now. I was hoping we would not have to talk about that today. Yeah, we have to talk about it. So covering up that area on this IFPA scoreboard, score sheet, is the double flipper of death, the scissor flippering. and so there is no width bar there to protect you. If you hold up the right flipper, both of them will be actuated in this position, creating this big area where the ball can also drain. So it adds not just the down-the-middle drain, the right-out drain, the V-slayer, but a fourth mechanism by which you can lose your ball. I would also like to mention that that is one of the most, that is one of those drains that you go back and when you're doing your post-op about a tournament, that's one of those ones you want back. That's one of those ones like, I know it's there. I know that drain's there, but I wish I could have that ball back and not do that mistake. And we've all done it. We have. We've all done it. I've done it at the highest level of competition. And it's frustrating, but you know what? That's why Paragon is such a, what people would call probably a classic, you know, go-to game in a lot of classes, because there's many different ways to play the game. It requires a very different skill set. Look at that. That was nice. So it requires a different skill set than modern machines and even many other classic pins. And it's, you know, when I first started playing Paragon, I was fearful of it. But you really, once you start getting used to it, you come to enjoy the challenge. Paragon is one of my favorite pins because it's so mean. Yes. I tend to come back to the pins that brutalize me the most in life, and I treasure them. So we are here in fabulous Las Vegas.
94:24
Yeah, we're in Las Vegas. What's the place called? This place is called Grand Line Games. Okay. So even though on the map it shows up as Flipperspiel Underground, this is now the name of the location for anybody who's in Las Vegas or visiting Las Vegas. If you want to come play a good collection of well-maintained pins set on free play by the hour pay-for-entry fee, this is called Grand Line Games. So it's right there in front of me. I just didn't bother to look. So Grand Line Games. This is in the northern Las Vegas area. So just take an Uber or Lyft here, or if you have a rental car, make the drive. Come on by and support this location. We want to do all we can to support location pinball all around the country, all around the globe. So if you're in Las Vegas, come here. There's also the Pinball Hall of Fame. But I think most people know about this. Not everybody knows about Grand Line Games. So we want to get the word out there and also thank them for hosting these two tournaments today, as well as the Pinmasters that are going to be taking place for the rest of the weekend. Thank you guys very much. We appreciate it. All right. So David Barber and Luke Chabonol? I'm not going to try again. I apologize. I don't want to do it. So Luke is representing the District of Columbia. I'm sorry, Dave is representing the District of Columbia, and Luke is representing Saskatchewan. That was a nice live tap pass, good dead bounce.
95:50
And he got the shot you were talking about earlier. He got that spinner through the waterfall. He did. But look, his bonus only went up to maybe two or on the presses, but it's a three. This game, similar to some other early valleys, It has what is called a progressive light spinner. So it is never lit for 1,000 a spin or something greater value. It's simply the number of rotations will progress you along these playfield lights, and when you finally get past the top playfield light, you will advance one bonus value. Which just seems like not enough in this situation. In this situation with this spinner, yes. Other paragons with the juicier spinner, it can be well worth it. That being said, he is actually putting up quite a few points on ball one, and it's a good no-till because he will have 9,000 bonus points that he'll get from that. Oh, that was times two. Yep, so a good 55,000 start. He is wearing headphones, so the question in the chat, why do people wear headphones? And I would say a variety of reasons. I am not a headphone wearer. Don, are you a headphone wearer when you play video? Absolutely not. Never. I see from the people that I know that wear headphones, they do it because they want to either maybe drown out the distraction of the noise around them because they don't like to be distracted or they want to calm their nerves. Games, pinball machines, especially modern machines, have sound effects designed to get you more nervous than a hurry-up is playing. And so the headphones can be for that. It may also be because they just like to rock out to a particular jam or maybe they like to listen to classical music or opera while they play pinball. Who knows? I don't like it because I love the full experience of pinball. And that includes not just the physical nature of what's going on in the play field. I like the sounds. I like how it gets my heart racing when certain things are going on. I like to know when I've gotten a tilt warning on modern games when the audio cues tell me what's going on in the game. The only really good reason, I'll say, for wearing headphones, if you are able to control your own emotions completely, very, which, I mean, who is? But if you are able to control it, is to block out some extraneous noise that might happen from another player in a tournament who might be making a loud noise or something.
98:04
So there was a great dead bounce. So that was an excellent skill move where he just, he did not flip at the ball. And then he did another excellent skill move with a tap pass. So both Luke and David have shown that they can tap pass on this machine. Once again, we're seeing high-level play here at the North American. Oh, nice shot. He's made his next, there won't be a next. That was the end of that ball. But he had two drop targets down at these inline drop targets. And you don't start getting bonus X progress until the third drop target, the fourth, and then finally the saucer for bonus X. However, you do get one bonus advance for each time you hit a drop target. So that is something. It's true. And, in fact, depending on the settings, I think you may even offer two bonus advances for drop target. But I wasn't paying attention to which one this one's set to. So he only needs two more letters for Paragon up there. Wow. Which is, I mean, it's still a chance, though, because it's just rotating through. Waterfall feed. He's choosing a nice little interesting kind of hybrid flip there to get it into control. Oh, look at that. Bounce, nice nudge, and he's still in play. He just earned himself an extra ball there, John. Nothing wrong with playing an extra ball when you earn it legally.
99:19
Oh, he had to flip away because it was just about to roll off the tip. What a dead bounce there. Yeah.
99:26
Oh, and he's did an interesting strategy there of actually flipping with the mini upper flipper. A lot of people will choose to use that to direct the ball safely down to the lower flippers. He only needs the P.
99:37
He has everything except the P up there for Paragon. I mean, it... That can be big. It will not... And also, it will like... Oh, he just... Okay, so also the drop targets, the inline drops are spotting letters for Paragon. So he had just lit in the flashing of the Paragon saucer, I believe, for a special, and special if it sets a point is 50,000 points.
100:03
Wow. All right, that's a quality game. So there's going to be an 80,000-point deficit to overcome here, and let's see if it can be done. I'm not sure he can do that. It's been playing tough this game so far. He's up to 5,000 bonus, and that didn't even get a chance. No. Didn't even get a chance. Paragon said what Paragon says, which is goodbye. And that is goodbye, unfortunately, for Luke in the match, because David was already up 3-1. So congratulations to David Barber. Yeah, congratulations to him. He has advanced to the second round, and let's see who will he be facing.
100:39
Let's get the mouse here and look over the first round. David Barber. I'm going to be facing him. So I'll be facing David for the – I guess the seeds got juggled around a little. I guess maybe some people didn't show up. It's a big tournament. They weren't here because there were some different seedings going into it. But I'll look forward to starting my match with David here shortly. The other matches we have completed so far, it looks like Daniel Roan has advanced against Joe Anthes, and Daniel will be facing the winner of Luke and Steve. Let's see if anybody else has finished yet. don't have any other ones. Oh, one in front, Garrison Garza. There we go. Vanquish Dwayne Smith, and he will play against Zach Sharp in round two. That's earning the privilege. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The rest of them are all still going.