Triple Drain debates In Disc finals game selection and first impressions of Stern's Rush pinball.
Summary
Triple Drain Podcast hosts Joel, Travis, and Tom invite Robert Byers to discuss the controversial finals of In Disc 2024, where outdated games (Stargate, Roller Games, Mystery Castle) were played instead of modern purchasable titles. The hosts debate tournament game selection strategy, sponsorship considerations, and marketing implications, then pivot to discussing the newly released Rush pinball machine with mixed initial impressions from all four participants.
Key Claims
In Disc 2024 finals featured non-modern, non-purchasable games (Stargate, Roller Games, Mystery Castle)
high confidence · Joel and Travis confirmed the specific games played in the finals after Zach Manny criticized the selection on The Pinball Show
Zach Manny criticized the finals game selection for poor marketing optics given Stern sponsorship and 800-1000 viewers
high confidence · Joel reported Zach's stance from The Pinball Show episode covering In Disc
Tournament players cannot hold games in reserve for finals due to no-repeat pick rules during earlier rounds
high confidence · Robert and Travis explained the competitive mechanics that led to outdated games being available
Travis proposes refreshing top seed picks when finals begin to allow best games to be selected
high confidence · Travis presented this as a solution he's considered since In Disc 2020
Joel suggests one of three final games should be a sponsor game (Stern premium) while top seed retains game/position pick advantage
high confidence · Joel presented a hybrid proposal combining Zach's and Travis's ideas with sponsorship incentives
Chicago Pinball Expo uses Tilt Amusements to provide all Stern games for tournaments; Stern Pro Circuit Championship is already geared toward marketing
high confidence · Tom cited existing tournament models that already achieve sponsorship/marketing goals
Robert Byers had negative first impression of Rush pinball after limited play at In Disc
high confidence · Robert described feeling the game was 'clunky' with worn cliffy's affecting shot quality
Joel and Tom both initially disliked Rush's shot layout, particularly the absence of a left ramp
high confidence · Joel described texting Travis about his negative impression before discussing with Tom; detailed specific shot frustrations
Notable Quotes
“Finally the Rob has come to the Triple Drain podcast. If you smell la what the rob is podcasting.”
Joel@ 2:13 — Comedic Rock impression establishing Robert Byers' persona as 'Champion' on the show; sets tone for entertainment-focused discussion
“Why in the world is the final round of the biggest tournament of this year played on such crappy games”
Joel (attributing to Zach Manny)@ 5:32 — Core criticism from Zach Manny about In Disc finals game selection; central tension of the episode
“You can't repeat picks and that's the biggest thing... when I'm in a tournament I'm not saving games to pick in the finals because I gotta get to the finals first”
Robert Byers@ 7:03 — Explains the structural reason outdated games ended up in finals; clarifies competitive incentive conflict
“My dumb ass was driving back to Oklahoma during this time... I was somewhere out in Arizona, New Mexico while this is happening”
Travis@ 21:26 — Reveals Travis was not physically at In Disc finals despite being referenced as attending; adds context to his perspective
“I don't think competitive play at a major tournament is the time to try to market pinball. The Stern Pro Circuit Championship is the perfect time.”
Tom@ 13:07 — Argues against using In Disc for marketing; points to dedicated sponsorship tournaments as appropriate venue
“I texted Travis because I didn't want Tom to know I didn't like this [Rush]... I know Tom is literally laying awake at night dreaming of this game”
competitive_signal: Significant discussion about no-repeat pick rule consequences and proposals for finals pick refresh; reveals structural issues in major tournament formats affecting game selection and perceived quality
high · Travis proposes finals pick refresh since In Disc 2020; Robert explains players use go-to games early rounds; Joel proposes hybrid sponsor game model maintaining top seed advantage
~
sentiment_shift: Community split on In Disc finals: competitive players accept adaptability, casual viewers/marketing advocates wanted modern games, some now interested in Mystery Castle due to visibility
high · Travis heard feedback half-and-half during tournament; Joel notes some may now want Mystery Castle after seeing it played; acknowledges all perspectives valid
?
product_concern: Rush pinball has significant cliffy wear/damage issues noted by Robert at In Disc, affecting shot quality and playability on tournament machines
high · Robert: 'the cliffys so they were bit and torn up... it's hard to make the shots'; implies this was a widespread issue on tournament machines
?
design_innovation: Rush's absence of traditional left ramp is intentional design choice causing adjustment friction for experienced players; creates unfamiliar shot hierarchy and risk/reward profile
high · Joel: 'there's nothing on the left side of the game that excites me... I'm so used to having a left ramp in a game and this game has no left ramp'; lists alternative shots (scoop, between pops, drops, dead end) as frustrating
?
code_update: Raymond Davidson (Rush coder) appeared on Flipping Out stream to explain game mechanics directly to players, addressing initial gameplay confusion
Topics
In Disc 2024 tournament controversyprimaryTournament game selection and competitive format designprimarySponsorship and marketing in competitive pinballprimaryStern Rush pinball release and receptionprimaryPlayfield design and shot mechanicssecondaryTournament streaming and viewer engagementsecondaryCode quality and game updatessecondaryCompetitive vs casual player preferencessecondary
Sentiment
mixed(0.35)— Hosts express frustration with In Disc finals game selection while praising tournament quality overall. Mixed opinions on Rush range from enthusiasm (Tom) to disappointment (Joel, Travis, Robert). Discussion is respectful but reveals underlying tensions between marketing goals, competitive integrity, and player preferences. Community sentiment is described as split (half appreciated innovation, half wanted different games).
Transcript
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[Music] the pinball network is online launching triple drain pinball podcast all right tom you ready uh-huh travis you ready hell yeah let's do it joel okay calm down here we go triple drain triple drink triple drains all right well um welcome everybody it's been quite a while since we've recorded one um a lot of stuff's been going on we usually shoot for every two weeks two to three weeks but um yeah what was it last weekend there was this slight i mean it's kind of a big deal i don't know it seemed like a big deal but in disc in disc was happening in california and travis and tom both went to that and so they needed like a week to mentally prepare then they needed uh you know to compete in it and then they needed a week to decompress and so yeah so here we are and and to be honest even scheduling this podcast was a challenge uh not because it's three of us but there's actually four of us and so we have an extra ball this week it's very fitting for the topics that we are gonna discuss we have the one the only robert byers from top rope uh yep there's tom blowing out our mics with our headphones with the applause sample sorry about that but robert hey i appreciate you being on here tonight um there's there's a lot more i could throw i mean you got a lot of personalities that that you i i don't know if we should call you rob all night or which whatever wrestler you are at the moment i mean you call him champion joel champion because he's a champion the people's champion brother and the classic swan champion now so congrats on that i gotta start out with my classic you know finally the rob has come to the triple drain podcast if you smell la la la la what the rob is podcasting see what's this is better than having the rock on it is oh look at that yeah f that guy but what's crazy is episode one tom came into this and said hey i want this to be my intro and literally did the exact same thing and we told them no tom that's just not you so rob i'm glad that that is that is your metro true we were like whoa whoa tone down the charisma come on man no i will say and and we've got a lot of stuff to discuss today but um and most of it is is tournament related but for everybody that just heard that that doesn't care about tournaments don't don't shut it off yet we're gonna save a lot of the in-depth tournament talk till the later part of the part of the podcast but exactly and and what's funny is i mean i've only been in this hobby a few years i don't personally play in tournaments so anytime any podcast talked about a tournament i just zoned out or i just i just never thought it applied to me but the more that i've gotten into this hobby and the more that i've played games i've really started to enjoy watching tournaments and respect the the level of play in tournament and um as being part of tpn it was awesome to see the three of you guys be so successful at in disc and then now recognizing other names and seeing people week in and week out you know that do these tournaments over and over again you start to recognize different players and their styles and um tournaments end up being very entertaining so we'll we'll dive more into that but um if if let's let's just start off with some controversy i know we're not going to talk about i don't want to talk about specifics of tournaments yet but zach zach manny on the pinball show zach manny on the pinball show last week on his episode kind of was covering in disc and he kind of interrupted his coverage of it and he said all right i just watched the finals any and he completely kind of tore him apart and and the reason he tore him apart was because the final three games were none of them were modern games none of them were games that you could buy none of those games are you know pretty with the moderate what were they they were um it was star wars was it cosmos whatever tom i swear i will end this podcast right now yeah robert thanks for coming out yeah so it was stargate yes it was roller games roller games rock and roller games and then what was it al allen what is it ali g's what's the cheese what is it cali g's mystery castle which i don't we don't have to go into the history but like alvin g is i mean they're like how many games did they make i mean it's just random manufacturer that's a one game obviously one yeah and mystery cat it's like a game nobody knows and that was the final game of the finals in this huge tournament that took days to build up to it and so basically zach's opinion is why in the world is the final round of the biggest tournament of this year played on such crappy games and i don't whoever wants to go first rob i mean feel free so when i'm was sitting in the car listening to that and you know it started out talking about you know tournaments and excitement and all that and then he got to that point when he went on his rant and at the very first as a high-level tournament player i was like all right zach where can i come strangle you at and then but i really started listening to his points and he he did make some good points um i i do give him credit for that and i do feel like there may be should be a little bit of tweaks i mean ie pimple i think had 800 to 1 000 viewers at that point and one of your biggest sponsors that's giving away a pinball is stern and we're playing stuff you can't buy and not displaying scores and so he he did make some valid points and i do feel like there maybe needs to be some adjustments where maybe one of the three final games has to be a sponsor game you know um and when the when the top seed picks that game he gets to pick position and he gets to pick when it's played and then he gets to pick the other two um but just to sum up there's two reasons why they played those games is because you can't repeat picks and that's the biggest thing the top seed players had already picked their go-to games because when i'm in a tournament i'm not saving games to pick in the finals i got to get to the finals first so you're picking your go-to's first and then you kind of got whatever is left over at the end and that's part of the problem yeah and so for once again for the people that don't know tournament play and by all means i'm the odd one out here so the three of you correct me if i'm wrong but the whole advantage of being in the lead is you're and you guys typically refer to it as you're driving the bus you're the person that gets to pick the game or is it it's is there option there's times where it's you either pick the game or you pick your position right yeah you can do that at both yeah and sometimes if it's a bank of games you get to pick both the bank and position of the first game it just it just really depends what the format is yeah and so if if you think about it if you're if you're number one if you've earned that right you're you're number one right now in the tournament you want some advantage to that you want you've earned that what do you get from that and so normally it's a you get to pick the game what are you most comfortable playing or you can pick your position and if you're going to pick your position you're going to pick last you want you know you want to know the scores that you're trying to beat um so that those are the perks and you earn those perks so that's why i think all the tournament players that were listening to zack say why you know why are we down to that point where we're just picking crappy games you know and zach wanted them to like force a game on a person well as soon as you force a game on a person you just took away that advantage that the first the first place person has been working towards that entire tournament so i don't travis what do you how do you work around that well pretty much my idea for this from the get-go and i was kind of thinking about this for the past couple of years after in disc 2020 to me it really comes down to what i would like to see is as soon as the finals start that whoever is the top seed i would just like to see their picks just refreshed just from scratch that way they can pick the games that they want to pick because you know tom and rob can attest this it's difficult qualifying for the open it's not it's not an easy thing because it's a papa card which means you got to play five games in a row and if you mess up on any of those games you're pretty much done for that card and you'll start back over so you gotta use five games to qualify so since it's so difficult to actually qualify for this tournament and it's a major championship tournament as well i would like to see the higher seeds be rewarded by the time the finals come like i'm talking the final four because at that point the way it's set up now we're always going to see in you know rob attested this earlier or alluded to it that basically if you are if you're driving the bus you want to get your best games out of the way because you want to get to the next round you can't take any chances i mean it's very difficult to hold a game in your back pocket some people try it but i don't know if the open is the place to do that because you're playing against other world-class players nearly every single round so that being said by the time you get to finals it basically guarantees that you're going to be playing three other world-class opponents and you're going to be playing it just basically rolling the dice on whatever games are left because at that point bare minimum you've already picked six games out of the bank and yeah like we just said there's only five games that go to your qualifying so that means you've already picked one game over so i'd like to see picks refreshed i want to see them go to their best games against the best people that's what i'd like to see yeah i agree i agree travis especially for the finals i mean the whole purpose of you not picking games is a little bit for the stream and it's a little bit for repetition because if the top guy's got three go-to games guess what you're going to see all the rounds all the time on the stream it's going to be three games out of 18 over and over and over so there's a good balance and some tournaments do you can't pick a game back-to-back rounds so you can repeat but i do like the idea of possibly no repeats but finals is finals is finals everything resets it should be on the top seeds favorite three games at that point they've earned that well what i find interesting though is if the top seed and maybe we're already getting into the the tournament talk here but the top seed may that's the thing if if you refresh it that that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to pick modern games or like they're not going to necessarily pick so of the bank there was godzilla and there was turtles right were those the only two games that you could buy today every every other game of that of the bank was that's currently being manufactured is that what you mean exactly yeah so if zack's looking at this from a marketing standpoint hey there's a chance that some somebody stumbled across this stream or somebody stumbled across this youtube video that has a slight interest in pinball well great here's an awesome marketing opportunity to sell a game what's up tom i don't know i was just going to say you got to remember that all these games are brought in by operators and collectors in the area the way to circumvent that is to have a sponsor that's actually going to bring the games to the tournament that's the only way you could do it like uh you know chicago pinball expo has tilt amusements they provide all those stern games you know uh for the tournament so you know but on the same token you know the open you don't want to have necessarily a sternum and either where all the games are are just by one manufacturer i mean that would be pretty crazy though if if next in disc spooky donates whatever they have game on the line stern donates their most recent game you know jjp throws whatever their recent game is you know if you have the brand new of each major manufacturer there then i mean that's cool but it also it comes back to the competitive advantage of the person in first because just because they're there are we now gonna force that person to pick those games or are we just having them be like an option i would say in competitive play at a major tournament then is not the time to try to market pinball i i don't think that that's the good time to to ever do it if you want to really try to market pinball and you want to market stern stern pro circuit championship is the perfect time to do it because it's guaranteed to be a tournament hell the name is literally the stern pro circuit championship so they usually have jack danger on there who's a designer now and a streamer with stern so i mean that's a way right there they can get more their product out there so i think there's already a tournament out there that's geared towards that perfectly and just even expo the same exact thing tilt amusements they specialize in stern products that's what you get so there's two tournaments out there for that already so i don't really see a need for that but that being said the open at in disc they already use games from every every manufacturer in 2020 alice cooper was there and i know in the past there's been a pirates a potc from uh jersey jack that's been there so they and dialed in was there too in 2020 so they they use different different companies i mean we saw that with them using the the ollie g mystery castle as joel talked about earlier so they use everybody anyways i just don't think in disc at a major tournament is the time to be doing that i think that's the time to focus on the players personally rob and i'm gonna go with what travis said but i'm gonna hybrid it with zach said there's three games stern's giving away a premium pinball machine one of those three games should be a stern premium pinball machine it could it could be but that's really to me that would be on stern themselves because they could easily tell these tournaments like hey we're sponsoring it we want x amount of our games in the bank and we want those games to be available to be on the stream i mean they could easily push that obviously they're not and i don't think that they're overlooking that but i do like the idea of potentially playing on a pin on your final game that that's the game you could own afterwards i like that idea maybe maybe stern pro circuits should do that because you what you win a game right and a wwe le yeah so there you go that's what they should do then perfect yeah and i think it's well that's what i always thought with um you guys always talk about the uh what is it it's like every time a new pinball machine comes out you know your league does like uh i don't what's the word it's like a party launch party for it and i always assumed at the launch party you were playing that game and on a previous episode you informed me that's not necessarily the case it depends on how the launch parties run but yeah if stern or somebody was sponsoring that and it got to the finals i would be okay i mean i i don't i don't think i have a stake in the game i'm not the tournament person but if if the three of you guys had made the final round in the open and you knew that one of those three games had to be godzilla premium i mean does that affect if you were number one and now you don't get that i mean does that offend you are you okay with that or i it's i mean because you get a pick choice so i get to go last on that game when it comes up okay so you know and that's what i was saying like the whoever's driving the bus that's the let's say godzilla premium is one of the games you have to pick you can pick it for game one or game two or game three and you get a pick to order so you can get it out of the way first and see how that plays out and then pick your other two games after that instead of saving it to last but just have that one of the three the guy still drives the bus of when you play it in what order you play it but it has to be one of the three that's kind of that hybrid model i was talking about it gives a little bit of travis it gives a little bit of zach it gives a little bit of sponsorship it gives a little bit of oh my gosh checked out this coolest thing i didn't even know there was pinball let alone a pinball tournament oh i can go buy that game right now that's the excitement in the chat for those 800 people maybe maybe you know seven of those 700 of those people are pinball people but if a hundred of them are not and not seeing it to you know they're going to search stargate you know it it kind of takes away from growing the hobby when it is so it kind of fills uh fuels that fire where it's they even make those things anymore well it looks like it when you're playing games from the 80s so good time so i could see maybe one downside with that um you know they picked their newest game and the the code isn't up to snuff you know there's a lot of bugs in it um still got to be fleshed out um there's potential for problems there but i guess you wouldn't have it in the bank but if you're talking about the brand new newest game uh you could have some potential issues right there so what purpose would it really serve to try to show off the newest game from stern right now in a big tournament i'm asking all three of you guys and i know what you're saying is because obviously to to say to show it means hey you could buy it but the reality is you can't buy it like if it would have been a godzilla premium how do you buy a godzilla premium these days it's it it's not a thing yep but we're not always going to be in covid um and so it's going to come back around and i agree with what tom said i wouldn't have if rush was in the lineup i would have been upset i don't have time to play i have time to learn the code so maybe it's not that one that just released and it's just one back that has some code updates and that's the one you go with raymond would have done well he would have done real well yeah right raymond yeah what i'm getting at too is you know even if there's a new game out there i don't think that there's new people watching pinball that find pinball through just a tournament i i think that that's very rare because to me it's like on the ground level you're finding out about pinball basically at your local arcade or you happen to come across something just seeing somebody play a pinball you don't necessarily understand that you're watching a tournament at that point in time so i think the people that start watching that they're already like well versed in the pinball world they may not be experts but they know what exists because they know to search that out on twitch because twitch's discovery is horrible terrible so everybody who's watching that already knew all this existed i guarantee it yeah i i agree except for this one was tied to the the fighting festival or whatever it was and at some point in time that group raided our group so they had you know five six seven hundred people watching the fight and then they raided into i.e pinball none of those people know pinball existed and also because i.e pinball is such a good streaming and carl does so well he had eight to 800 900 000 people on there that's going to start filtering in the you might like category so we you know the top rope stream with four people or five people online or even 20 people aren't lying are not going to get that coverage but in certain situations we are starting to feed into a market and people come across that might not know that this hobby exists at this level yeah i mean it's great points and i i understand zack's main thing and i know zach zack sells zach minnie he's a distributor he sells pinball machines for a living that's what he does and so he's looking at everything pinball as in how do we grow this hobby how do we bring more people into this and we just witnessed the best tournament that's probably been streamed in i don't know the last two three years because of covet i mean it's the best of the best are there they're all there oh yeah you hear that start super serious you hear that tom your stuff [ __ ] tom that's what joel's trying to say but man i mean carl's production and the the commentary the announcers the four days of it i mean it was so great it was incredibly well done and i get that if the finals is the culmination of that four days of this it's all building to this and it ends on mystery castle where you can't even see the scores i get it i understand how he can feel that letdown but yeah but the reality is it's from a competitive standpoint nobody's complaining like the tournament players it showed the level of skill that they have you need to adapt to whatever you're handed and it's great competition um so it's yeah well the thing is is i talked to a lot of people during this because my dumb ass was driving back to oklahoma during this time so i was somewhere out in arizona new mexico while this is you're the smart one yeah exactly oh you weren't you weren't in the finals joel i swear he drove to this thing because of the ice storm if i could punch you through this mic right now i would i totally would all right sorry listener sorry for my uh robert you're awesome tom joel eat [ __ ] okay i'm gonna interject right now so you know the joke was tom and travis are at the tournament and we're missing joel from the triple drain and so i was kind of filling in as joel but then i started playing really good and so i was actually playing as the anti joel yeah that's fire that's totally fine yeah it's it's true that's yeah i'm i'm just here to stir things up but travis so you're saying you're driving back you're talking a bunch of people thank you joey you're bringing us back on track so yeah i mean so there was a lot of people talking about that i heard it half and half and i was talking to zach during this time as well that i heard that there was several people that they were just like okay mystery castle is a terrible game to have in the finals i wish it was on something else like i heard that but then i heard the other half saying you know what this is pretty cool it's different we get to see players adapt and i mean that's the thing at the end of the day you're going to have some people that agree with the decision you're going to have other people that don't agree and you're going to have people that just don't care either way and i think that this situation pretty much is kind of that because we've heard it from every different angle from people that don't play in tournaments from people that do play in tournaments from people that are world-class players to players they're just weekend warriors so you're going to have all kinds of different ideas i mean the same things happened to pinburg over the years if there's a game in that finals bank sometimes they got shot on other times it became like the new darling and that's kind of what happened with something like doodlebug you know or even guardians of the galaxy when everybody saw andre massenkov hot hand yup is that no high hand right hand hand yeah so that's another one i mean it's that's typically what happens so we may and some of us may be talking about this and all of a sudden there's probably 50 people out there that suddenly want a mystery castle yeah i mean it's highly likely that that has happened exactly it's not a bad game to play i mean would it be the game i'd pump quarters into no but if somebody wanted to loan me one for free you know i i love the game then go ahead bring it down i'll play it i mean i understand the gameplay that we witnessed of mystery castle is not gonna you know bring people into the pinball hobby by drones you know like that's not it's not that and but the reality was if it would have been a modern game a modern lcd game i don't necessarily know if that would have made it that big of a of a difference but it's it is what it is i all i know is as a as a non-competitive player watching the stream all i'm basically relying on the commentators to tell me what the thing is you know on this game this is what they're trying to do and i i relied on that heavily in the classics tournament and we'll get more into that because all the classics game there was always like a thing you know do this thing in this order and that's how you get points and so once the commentator told me that that's all i'm watching for i'm like i get it the player's trying to get control because they're trying to rip the spinner and then do this so i'm just you know like it didn't matter at that point i just wanted to see the skill that it takes to do the thing and the truth is in a lot of these modern games godzilla you can attack that thing from so many different directions that the commentators may not know the thing they may not know the thing that the player's trying to do and so we're kind of sitting there waiting to see what happens while some of these older games is blatantly obvious what they're trying to do so i don't care but i i really respect who was it was jeff teolis and uh snow um and then um Steven Bowden were announcing at the time and they killed it they were incredible the three of them explaining it telling what was going on i mean everything was there but um i don't know tom you you had something no i was just gonna say you know i i think the idea of the tournament is to um basically take all games from all manufacturers different eras and bring them all together so you know i was just alluding to that but you you were talking too much joel that's okay you lost hey so we're trying to so listeners we're trying something new here where people are like raising their hands when when they have something to talk and um so far i i think we've honored it pretty well but i'm not going to lie tom rose's hand about halfway through that and i just kept going you know i was disappointed i was waiting for him to go uh i got nothing yeah oh yeah i'll be i'll be back in ten minutes yeah yeah well this is a good segue because we could always come back to end disc yeah yeah but we got to talk about what joel i don't know you're it is now time to talk about the newest pinball machine out from sterling yeah because joel out of all four of us joel's only one that actually has one in his house so joel go ahead let's start this segment we're talking about rush that was the worst transition we've had but you know nice job it's done rush pinball so what's interesting is there's four of us all four of us have played this game and what i'm finding is all four of us have different opinions so you know what let's go with the guest rob you're the extra ball rush pinball what's your what what is your experience with rush pinball bins oh boy okay so um i don't have a lot of time on it but i walked past a rush pinball a thousand times at indisc it was right there at the entrance for project pinball to stick in two dollars and play and donate and i walked by it a lot and i never played it and there wasn't very many people playing it and then us at a break i said okay let me throw two dollars in this game and then i walked away and it never came back um now that may have been the way it was set up the way it was playing um we already know the issues with the cliffy's so they were bit and torn up all the crap so it's hard to make the shots so my initial one game three ball impression was it was a little clunky and i just i just never got the feel for it so again i've said that about other games before and and then end up loving them we all have but right now i don't get it i don't get it so um i know interesting to hear you guys opinions that maybe had played it more and had more time on it um i think we're just gonna i'll go ahead and go next because we're just gonna increase is what we're gonna find here um i'm with you rob when i so zach swapped out godzilla and he dropped off rush here and i was like all right i'm not i'm not a rush fan it's not that i have anything against it i'm just not a rush fan so it's not like i was super excited about this theme um so my initial impression really has nothing to do with code it's just how does it shoot and um to be honest i didn't love it i did not like initially my first few games on playing it and that was once again nothing to do with the code it was just shooting the game and to be 100 honest tom doesn't know this i texted travis and i told travis i said i don't like this and i texted travis because i didn't want tom he went behind your back he was looking out for your feelings while he did i was i was like i know tom is like literally laying awake at night dreaming of this game and i don't want to you know poo poo on that but it's just like i'm not loving what i'm feeling and and one of the main reasons was i realized there's there's nothing on the left side of the game that excites me as in i'm so used to having a left ramp in a game and this game has no left ramp it i mean it has this kind of center-ish like you have to do with the upper flipper to kind of hit that but from the right flipper i'm like what do i have to shoot i have a scoop that's very hard to hit i have a between the pops shot that's a super crazy orbit and if you miss it you're hitting a pop so the game's the thing's coming flying back at you i have drop targets that are super close and if you hit those it's coming flying back at you and then on the pro i have a dead end shot where it just comes flying back at you so i felt like half the playfield i wasn't enjoying and um and that was my initial impression for like the first two days just trying to find shots i'm just like i don't know about this well on thursday night on the flipping out channel i actually did a stream and i had raymond davidson who's one of the coders of this game on the stream with me and he started to explain the game to me and i will tell you my opinion of this game has drastically changed because of the rules that rey and tim have built into this game and i'm gonna let you know travis and tom go more into that but i will tell you the ways that you can go about playing this game the risk reward that he is building into this game is insane and once he actually started explaining what they're doing with the different shots so much more made sense and so i understand yes my initial impressions of godzilla when i started playing was it felt amazing i mean every shot on that game just feels good and it doesn't matter like that's just looking at the way it shoots and i you know i got to give props Keith Elwin that i felt the same way when i first played avengers you know there are certain games where you step up to it and it just everything you're hitting feels good even without listening to it or looking at the display um and that's nothing against sean morgan it's just this is a hard game this is a hard game i felt the same way about turtles it's hard for me tom tom's shaking his head i felt it's hard um like turtles it's easier than turtles but turtles i know the first few games i was like this game's destroying me um but i will say as the stream went on i started to find the shots i started to get a little bit deeper in the game but i'm barely scratching the surface of this game so initial impressions for anybody like rob who steps up the game puts one game on it two games on it you may not like it but if you can keep going or if you're there with somebody that can explain what you're trying to do i think i think this game is going to end up getting a lot of love and so travis for tom feel free to i don't know which one of you likes it more at this point but um one of you guys could could take third tom do you want to answer joel even though he's gone behind your back i don't know i'm kind of offended but i was i was looking out for you man i was like i don't wanna i don't wanna crap on this game it's your dream theme i was like joel is tom okay with this he said yeah tom's fine with it don't worry about it go ahead tom tell us about your opinion yeah uh it is the greatest game ever made it is the best best john borg shooting game i don't know if it's the rush music or what but yeah uh actually i really like it uh i will say it's really heavy with the multiballs um i i felt like i was playing it and uh the the actually i was having really long ball times um and i took neil with me and he was having really long ball times and we had another friend with us but um we we thought the game was a little easy maybe that was just the way it was set up but it is super multiball heavy so um that would be my only complaint about the game i thought the shots were all findable um rules were good as far as you know songs and things but yeah i i enjoyed it okay and travis go awesome analysis there tom graph no so what i'm here for so this game is exactly what i thought it was going to be and i told you guys this as soon as we saw it debut that i think this is going to be a game that your great players are probably going to really enjoy once they really get into it and they figure out the rules and is another game i thought casuals would enjoy but they wouldn't be able to hit shots near as well because some of these shots are tight but it's not really a drainy game so what happens when those two elements come together there's a lot of brick shots there's a lot of watching the ball go horizontal and go vertical and hit off slings and head off targets and hit off post i think that's pretty much what you're going to see out of this game with your casual players but if you're an above average player or you're an elite player you're going to find shots fairly quickly and you're going to start yeah well you need more than one game because i'll even i can attest that my first two games on this after i fix the tilt bob issue you know my first two games they were just it was finding a lot of post and it was even missing the center shot because even on a pro it's not a gimme shot it is a tight shot and probably the easiest shot out of anything on the plate field is probably the dead in shot for a pro from the right flipper but that being said what you find well i'll come back to that just ending my thought here is it's hard to find shots early on but give it a few games and you start finding them you start jamming on it it's the type of game i think can grow on to people and knowing what the rules are in it right now and seeing what it could become this game definitely has a chance to go on elite level status for stern i think it really does have that chance and that doesn't come around too often for anyone outside of elwynn and this is the first time that i've played on a pin after getting about 15 20 games on it that i feel like this has a really good chance to be a solid game now keep in mind all my games have been on a pro but i'm able to tell what i'm missing and what would make this game a lot more enjoyable and i'm telling you compared to the pro and premium or ellie i think there's going to be a massive jump in the way that people enjoy this game simply because that shot we alluded to earlier that's a dead end shot and now it's going to have a vuck on there that's going to return back to your right flipper i think that'll shore up a lot of your left side because the left side is difficult to navigate because you got targets at a weird angle that guarantees that the ball is going to be in danger every time you got a tight orbit shot you got a scoop right there that if the scoop protector is in the way good luck doing that but if it's fixed it's not too bad it is a tight shot though it's what i thought the mando scoop was going to be like this is exactly what i thought it was going to be so the left side is all tough it really is and without that buck there it's you're basically guaranteeing your ball's going to be out of control anytime you take a shot the left-hand side of this play filled on a pro and i think that's that could be its biggest downside right now in terms of design but you get to a premium le i'm sure those issues go away awfully fast because of their return yeah and i i know when i see the ball coming down my right i don't have a trail so it's feeding my right flipper in my mind i'm like what i'm about to shoot and and the reality is the whole left side like none of it's safe and if i hit the if i hit the left orbit it's so fast that like it's safe if kind of safe if i hit it but it's just that's the thing that's the speed of the game and and i know my playing ability and the three of yours are drastically different and so you know getting control is is something that i need to get better at and i know you were talking to you know it took you a few games it takes me a lot more games to find shots than it does the three of you i i know my full my whole first two hours of streaming godzilla i was struggling hitting the scoop and that's like a you know integral part of the game but as my streams went on you know i could hit it when you know it's i i'll get there i will actually absolutely get there but that's the advantage of me having it here being able to put time on it play it versus you know a casual person walking up to it in a bar putting two games on it they're probably gonna be like dude that just kicked my butt and walk away go ahead tom i was gonna say uh everybody's uh experiences might be different i travis shut up uh yeah i'm not even looking at you anymore uh so the two games i played on location had did not have the scoop protectors on the front so it made uh made that shot a lot easier so i'm i'm thinking you know if that screw protector is there and it's causing rejects and you know everything else uh that that could certainly cause people to not like the game rob yeah so my my two cents i was going to jump in there on this actually the one time i did hit the ball through the pops and come around that orbit i think i remember holding up the right flipper and it bounced it right into that scoop i'm like well done gentlemen good design it's not the shadow where sometimes it goes in the con sometimes it doesn't you know but the one thing that i was going to bring up with the scoop protectors my personal opinion as a player no cliffies no scoop protectors on any game until you go sell it i want that wood finish i want that wood bevel i want that open scoop it's the way the game is designed it's gonna get wear and tear but you can put that cliffy on at the end and make it pretty and showy for the next person to buy it and they if they buy it with it war um worn out then you buy a cliffy and put it on there but my personal opinion is no cliffies on no games if i can avoid it yeah that's an interesting take i mean you know though any you go to any buyer thread on on pin side in the moment that there's a chip or a ware and they're like is this expected after 40 plays and they show a scoop i mean where they're gonna then assume a play field i mean i understand why stern's doing it but and the reality is if stern does it to protect their back it's up to the homeowner or the the whoever's routing the game if they want to take it off take it off but well what's fascinating about this if you look at this weekend pinball's pictures of it right the pro and i'm not even looking at the pre well this is actually the premium i'm looking at now it doesn't have those protectors on there huh correct that's what i'm looking at right now so obviously this was a later part at some point and i don't know if it was just a last-second decision it's clear that whatever part's on there now in the pro is not the correct part it's crystal clear because within three to five games it's just trashed out and it's really bizarre because you look at aerosmith most of those all came with some type of scoop protector and it doesn't have widespread problems with it but then if you look at guardians of the galaxy guess what that didn't come with a scoop protector and you don't hear about a bunch of issues either there so this situation is just kind of like uh i don't know scoop gate i don't know what they call it it's just it's just odd it just it just goes to show you something like this you know that this was not tested at stern you know it wasn't because otherwise they would know within five games on any model that something was up they would know after two games something was up so i kind of feel like that this is a very much last second part that came in very late to production and just happened to be the wrong type of part that i don't know that's just my theory i don't have that confirmed but it's not on the promo pictures i don't even know if it was on the one that they premiered the dead flip i i don't know if that one even had one so i don't know i i think you're right but i i mean i i'm looking at it right now and and between zach having this game he put some games on it and he recorded a whole video with it i've had i mean mine has easily less than 100 plays and the scoop still works but it's i it is banged up i it is one of those like i'm i will pull that until there is a fix so i don't know i'm curious i mean tom your le is being made right now with love and care and i hope that your uh the scoop protector they've even done a different one or that you know we'll have to wait and see on that um but i don't know with that aside i the main reason i wanted to to bring up rush was and i not to plug but the flipping out stream the flipping out stream it the video is now on youtube so check it out i you can see my level of play it's mediocre at best but ray day didn't ex you don't have to agree with that tom you're shaking you're shaking your head very vigorously you know to that comment but raymond did an amazing job explaining the rules and just hearing that i think could be extremely helpful for a lot of people and and i'm not going to get too deep into it but what excites me about this game and correct me if i'm wrong if if there's other games that do this but what this game gives you before you get in a mode like to start your first mode you have to hit two records with which in a record corresponds with the main shots so you basically just have to hit two of the main shots that's all you have to do to get into a mode but different records have different colors the colors represent different songs so if you're hitting the shots with the same color then all of those shots when you actually get into the mode are now worth two times what they normally are worth if you're hitting shots that aren't corresponding with the color of that mode those shots are bringing in 10 additional value to your mode for every single shot you hit if you happen to hit all of the main shots before you start your mode they all re-light so you can keep adding so as you're before you've even started a mode you can just start hitting all these shots and that's what raymond's saying he's like before you start the mode you could you could start your mode knowing that that mode is now worth 200 value of what it was going to be worth before and have certain shots that are now worth two times on top of that there's a whole bunch of combos in this game hitting certain combos hitting certain combos actually gives you like a smart missile or like a like a boom button a weapon a weapon is what their weapon and it's four only particular songs the ones that could rush onto an album and if the song you're playing happens to be on that album then you can use the weapon so there's a whole other level strategy there where before i start this certain mode i want to get it to this certain percentage i want to make sure i've hidden i've hit this particular combo so that i can use this weapon and boom i can get into that bam hit the button and just get a ridiculous amount of points what i say travis i see no you're saying everything perfect i'm just enjoying seeing rob's face just gradually just try to really focus in on what's being said and he's like taking all these notes down so well you know here's the thing i i grew up in the 80s and 90s watching a lot of basketball so if we play you know fast break i know the trivia questions but if i i don't know rush so i don't know what songs on what albums and when it was debuted and all that kind of stuff so that's that kind of obscure stuff that that's your problem they better have it up on the lcd screen on you know hey this song is part of this album it's worth more now if you do this i mean it's yeah it's pretty complex there but is it good or bad that they're forcing you to actually kind of get yourself involved with the theme because now you have to know the songs you have to know what goes together to get max amount of scoring i think that's a pretty genius way to do it myself although i don't know much about it either but it's forcing me to figure it out yes tom so so i think it was yesterday joel had asked us on our facebook you know do you know the colors to the songs right yeah and and each each song has a different color for the records but they're not distinguished on the middle of the playfield uh what color those songs are so you know to joel's credit uh he he had mentioned that and i think it would be a good idea to color those inserts as far as what the songs are so you know people like me i know i know the songs but other people don't so what like what about what about like uh sorry i wanted to talk over tom at least once during this episode everybody else could really feel like part of the group you know i'm quit talking i'm talking right now sorry about that tom tom please stop okay thanks um maybe maybe a flat a fast flashing insert like you could have it color-coded but have it do something different if it's part of the stacking you know a quicker flash or a double flash solid double flash solid you can you know morris code in some other cues that aren't tied to necessarily knowing songs knowing albums and still have the game be the same well the song color i think we actually have a fix for that and and i'm already working with pin monk pen monk makes some amazing he makes these like gel inserts they go under they go between your led in the game and then they like he made he's he's made some really good ones deadpool he did some turtles he did some maiden he's made some really cool ones and so i basically reached out to him because you know like the big money that's right now is just a white insert but that record is orange so it's super easy like just it's pink big money you are right yes pink yeah orange money big money is pink working man is orange but anyways you you once you i mean you do learn them but for a casual person has no idea yeah like throw an insert in there a gel insert boom now you have your color coordinated the albums and the weapons i don't know i don't know a good way to explain that but i'm just what i've found is like travis was not i don't think he was planning on buying this game but now that he's started to realize the code possibilities and the scoring possibilities and the risk reward of everything involved here um cause raymond raymond made a comment during the stream that kind of blew my mind which was you know i think it's kind of like law you don't start a multiball until you start a mode like that's kind of you know whatever 99 out of 100 times you don't want to do a multiball unless you have a mode going well raymond made the comment he goes he goes well you could start your mode and then a multiball or you could start your multiball and use that multiball to start racking up your records and start hitting your shots to increase the value of your mode and that that's a crazy concept in my mind now i agree with you tom and tom tom and rob are just doing charades of different wrestlers in the background so um joel you're to me you're absolutely correct so one of the things about this game and i didn't get around to this because i was just talking about what i felt was wrong with the game but that being said i personally think that this game has high end potential of being a home run when it's all said and done like i can see the elements there with this and it wasn't the same feeling that i was getting with turtles or mando it was just or even stranger things early on you know games like that it's just more or less you see the potential of this game you see what the rule set could be and what i really do love about this rule set is there's a lot of risk reward built in close to the start button and we don't see that too much and it's forcing you to explore the entire play field it's forcing you to say you know what that left side may be death but i'm going to have to hit that at some point because of the combo system because of trying to get songs matched up with albums and try to get your scoring higher and you know what if you're not into any one of those things if you could care less about all that and it's just too overwhelming but you're just a rush fan you're probably still going to enjoy it because the rush music on it is actually pretty good the call outs are pretty good on it i mean everything makes sense it feels like that this is a rush pin it doesn't feel like led zeppelin did to where you could just tell there was corners cut within that game you just knew it was and it took away from a lot of the game you don't get that from this at all you know and this this to me meshes perfectly we all want a concert in a box but we also all want a pinball machine in a box too and you know what this game does a good job at doing both yeah and i my my takeaway after now a week is i absolutely think rush fans will love this game um it it the the integ the the theme integration the lcd the call outs everything to hear the call outs from the two guys themselves is actually really really neat um especially when you get an expression light kit in there like the overall experience the rush experience is here and i think rush fans are gonna really love this game but i absolutely think competitive and tournament players are gonna really get a lot of like joy out of this game so rob it'll be exciting to talk to you in whatever three months six months once you put more time on it and wrap your head around some of these rules i think you're i think i'm not i don't want to put words in your mouth but i think you're really going to get a kick out of this game for sure well even even from a rule standpoint though if you haven't played this yet you're going to get elements of walking dead in this you're going to get elements of ac bc in this you're going to have an excellent combo system so those three things alone right there i think even elements of funhouse for instance when you're hitting the pop bumpers and that's adding on to time and that works your yourself to a multiball so they've i know that ray and tim just looking at this they've taken some things that are like greatest hits for a lot of tournament players that enjoy these certain just the way that the game goes from a rule set point of view and this is in there so even if you're not a rules person if you say you like lyman games this is as close as you're going to get right now because there's a few things that lyman had the concepts for and they are here in this game so i mean just from a rule standpoint i think it's going to turn out excellent because it's going to keep going keep going keep going and i think too once those premiums and leds come come out people are going to enjoy how those shots work a little bit more because you can do the combo system a little bit easier yeah as well so yeah well um yeah that's about all i can say i mean very initial impressions i've only had it a week rob's had a game on it tom doesn't have his yet but he blew it blew up one on location the other week i know travis has been enjoying it as well so we'll we'll definitely you know come back to it probably in a few weeks just to see where our pres impressions are at that point but um it's it's looking promising i would say it's definitely um i'm excited i'm excited to see you know where where this game's going to go and the love of it grow um transition to another thing here something that's actually been out for a while and i'm curious what you guys thoughts are insider connected insider connected kits i now have two i have two um i had one on godzilla rush obviously has this one i have one on turtles just initial impressions we can go around again you know it's been out long enough that we've all experienced it do you like it more less good experience bad experience we'll start again rob if you want to go first go for it sure um so my impression was it's long term it was a must-have so i had three games that it was available for i got uh iron maiden pro a deadpool pro and uh jurassic park premium so as soon as i heard uh pricing i called uh flipping out pinball zac minnie and uh put my order in for those three and uh got two initially um and then got the third one in i haven't installed two of them just hadn't got around to it so i like the idea of it i'm a gamer at heart i'm somebody that's a completionist um you know playing like games like legend of zelda final fantasy where i want to do all the things and all the side quests and all the all the stuff come on breath of the wild two where are you at baby where are you at so um having those achievement based i can see control in the younger crowd something to accomplish there's leaderboards who knows where they'll go with it so i think it's an exciting thing for pinball overall and i i do appreciate um with the cost of pinball not going to go down that road but the fact that they rolled these out at 200 a game even though it's adding 300 a game to the new game but they allowed everybody to retrofit for 200 a game i felt like that was fair probably made a little bit of money but they're not you know it's not a cash grab and it's allowing me to update my game so if i do go to sell it later on the down the road i've got a a fully functioning game so um overall i think it's uh a brilliant and i think it has a lot of potential it just depends on where they go with it i i do know that you know as as a young gamer i'm like all right older gamer but somebody's been gaming i i love the idea but as uh i turned 50 this year as an older pinball guy um i can see how the potential for dlc content is scaring a lot of people and could turn a lot of people off so i think they're going to have to tread lightly with that and that's just it's my two cents let you guys ad-Bob Libbe on that yeah i i'm with you um my entire uh insider connected experience has been just at home i have yet to play a game on location that has had a kit installed so i can't i can't talk to that but travis i know travis and tom definitely can but from a home experience i've really enjoyed it especially with streaming you know if i i streamed turtles the other day i knew i was going to play the game for two hours and to know like at my skill level you know reaching cowabunga not gonna happen you know reaching final battle on a single one-player game not gonna happen but there's a bunch of other little things there that i find really intriguing so as i'm playing it's like i'm gonna i'm gonna attack this game totally different than i than i normally will because i'm focusing on this achievement now to me i i love turtles i'm a huge fan of turtles i don't see this game going anywhere there will be a point where i will probably get all those achievements and and at that point do i have any interest in redoing them i i don't know i don't i don't know but i will say it's definitely going to prolong the wanting to own this game or playing this game go ahead rob i i agree with you that was the only thing i missed in my comments was because i'm a completionist a lot of times like you know once i get through all of them then what they need to be rolling out new challenges or can you do this times two i mean i'm excited about iron maiden i've made run to the hills on iron maiden i'm looking forward to going back and play and try to get there again i've made it to when uh dinos ruled the earth on jurassic park now i get to do it again and i get an award for it so it's exciting for me to go so it is adding that longevity to the game but they they can't let it be stagnant and i don't know how that works into there because you can't constantly update the games but you've got insider connected now so you can constantly update the games and do little patches for new achievements or new different things or you know achievement of the week or the month so good travis yeah just going off what rob was saying and this is my take with the insider connector right now the achievements are fun to do up front but the reality is is if you're an above average player you're going to get the achievements really really quickly and some of them may be within less than five games it just depends then you might have two to three achievements that you got to clean up afterwards so that's typically what everybody's been experiencing right now that's above average players but that being said what this is really lacking at this point is just the content and i think really the content needs to come into play through adding an additional challenges like rob was saying earlier whether it's weekly things whether it's getting xp that way and then you can unlock some type of badge or something like that it absolutely shocks me and floors me that this released without any badge system in place for all the users i mean they kind of did it with expo but to me it's just you just follow what peloton does they have badges just for playing x amount of games or doing certain certain tasks or so many miles or meeting so many milestones that something like that is needed because that keeps your community engaged and that keeps them coming back to that particular game so the fact that this released without that in place kind of shocks me i'm very surprised it's still not with the system right now so i play a game called asphalt 9. it's a racing simulator game they have it on computers they've had it on different systems and they finally came out with a switch and i play that thing all the time and there's individual modes that you play and achievements and you're building cars and all this kind of stuff but then there's multiplayer and that's where this has to go i've got to be able to get on my maiden and somebody else get on their maiden they're all connected to the internet and we say play a competitive game against insider connected five six four three three whatever your code is and that screen should be able to come up on the lcd display screen and have this person score and this year's score and you get that the the stern challenges that they've done where you like okay the first one to get this many points or this many shots or whatever those should be like a random number generator and and it flashes up there and it goes three two one and both people start playing at the same time they don't have to be like synced to the second because it's synced to the game and displays that back and forth and and you can build that so you can have a multiplayer version and that's where it needs to go to be engaging if it's just earning rewards by yourself on your game at your house over time you're going to just not enjoy it there needs to be that inner connectivity with with other people but don't you find it interesting though right now that pinball is trying to figure out ways to get people together right online but yet right now gaming has been doing that for so long that it's already came all the way back around to the first player experience or sing solo player experience that's the hilarious part about this like with god of war games like that so it's kind of curious to see how stern tries to try to do this i think it is smart to try to have something just like you talked about rob and i think something like that would be a lot more fun you could even get a group together of i wish they would do it eight 12 16 people however you know private rooms whatever give a password you're in the tournament they do this with chess all the time so i don't see why they can't do this with something about pinball and to me that would be a lot of fun just it's not even having to talk to each other it's just knowing that you showed up for this or there's open lobbies or whatever and you can get connected with other people and be able to play in open lobbies against people i wish that that was something that existed tom what do you think would you do something like that yeah nice so i i just i'll be honest i got joe no i wanted you to go i know your opinion yeah um first of all joel um thanks to you zack sent me a few uh premium uh insider connects that i didn't need so thanks for that um well because you tell everybody that i'm the ellie elitist even though i have a bunch of pro machines oh and zach just assumed that i had all premium in l.a so so thank you for that which pro kit do you have now what's it for they're all the same iron maiden probably uh iron maiden deadpool stranger things uh see i just wanted him to start listing out his games okay all right so bad for you you got the wrong version yeah yeah yeah anyways uh honestly i'm i'm not real impressed with the whole uh stern insider connect i can see that feel free to elaborate you know i don't want to no okay you spend you spend two hundred dollars they're raising the price of the games 300 uh and you just get a bunch of achievements hi future joel here at this point we saw tom's call drop off and we thought he disconnected for comedic effect later we learned it was actually technical difficulties please bear with us for the next few minutes as travis rob and i try our best to do a podcast without tom oh he just clocked out where's he at he was cracking me up yeah i liked what he was saying to you there well i know one of his frustrations was he's voiced a few different frustrations in our in our facebook chat and um and a lot of you rightfully so deal with uh like location play so he's he's basically saying he's he's tried to play a few insider connected games on location and they're like not they're not uh they'll be active but they don't count what's the what's the word i'm looking for here certified certified verified verified terrified yep verified so it's like hey i'm doing this on location but i'm not getting my you know i'm not getting full credit here or um and i know that travis you said like that's that's the operator that responsibility to go that extra mile and make it verified but there's like a cost associated to it yeah i'm not quite sure i know that there's some type of location like a commercial operator thing but i don't know exactly what it is that's why i need to find out myself we need to figure out where tom went yeah i'm texting right now you coming back he just checked out i don't know if he took us uh i think the three of us are positive on like i still look at insider connected as like potential this this is a this is a platform that they can do a lot with but they've only done a little so far and i i don't know i mean for it sounds like rob you ordered you had three games you ordered three kids um correct tom ordered a bunch of kits for his game so i don't know if he's like regretting that like hey maybe i shouldn't have ordered all these kits or i know i think it's good to have on games that you're retrofitting though because those games they're going to go up in value yeah either way and having something like that to where somebody gets to avoid having to get the product and install it themselves to me that's the one modification that actually provides value to a game yeah i don't i don't think i mean i do think it is comical i've already seen it once where um there was somebody who bought a godzilla and sold the insider connected kit they pulled the kit out and sold it took it off and sold it and so what i think's comical is somebody posted they said i just bought a godzilla used and the previous buyer had sold the key like sold the insider connected kit and he was trying to find because he had replaced the apron too so he was like how do i go about buying this stuff to build it like put it back um so i don't know i my view is i i just i there are things about it that i'm really that i'm already enjoying and we've talked a lot we've talked multiple times before about um you know the potential of insider connected and i you know if they can i i hope i hope they're working towards some of that stuff so what else we have we had that on there i just i know tom was worked up about it because yeah he had played a few games on location that you know he's like here i'm trying to give it a shot and i'm not even getting all my points and do operators you know they've marketed this heavily towards operators or operators not even doing this are they not taking it seriously and maybe i don't know well that's why i'm wondering too is that they need to have operator support a little bit more at some point too because originally they had said that the operator operators would be able to say this is our promotion that we're doing you get x amount of points or you get some type of achievement with them you could get a badge or you could get something connected to whatever their business is money off something or something like that so i don't know i would i would expect something like that would show up maybe this summer i would hope because it had been out for several months by then so to me other options have to be coming coming pretty soon yeah hopefully i mean just an app just just a dedicated app yeah that would help as well yeah but well um i don't know tom's not tom disconnected so i think we just keep going maybe he might be mad about uh about his placing when we played each other classics one i don't know because he's gonna be here and talk about that yeah that's the next topic is is at this point okay at this point if anybody just really can't stand tournament talk and and you made it this far appreciate you and you must stay we'll we'll talk to you next episode but the reality is there's value here and what i mean by that is um there is there's entertainment to competitive pinball that i think novice players are missing out on and you don't have to actually be the person competing it's just seeing the skill seeing the abilities that they have and like man it's i mean i i compare it maybe to like golf you know there's plenty of people that go out there every once in a while and hack away on on a golf and have a good time but when you actually watch professional golf players play and they the consistency that they have and the shots that they have you know you can look at that and be in awe or be like man i wish i could do like that's how i felt watching you guys play just like the control that you have the patience that you have some of the flipper skills the nudging skills that you have um you know really really impressive and then and i i got a big kick out of that but rob go for it it reminds me of some of the the old classic commercials and even some of the new ones with the you know the golf you know these guys are good making these crazy shots back when uh jordan and byrd did these you know nothing but net commercials do you remember that yeah and it's just like there's no way they did that no yeah they're they they're doing some of that stuff is a fabricated of course but some of the stuff that high level athletes can do are pretty impressive and even even at my level i sit there and i watch keith and i watch kaylee and i watch these younger kids and and i watch some of the things they're doing and i'm like man i still got a lot to learn and a lot to to get better at because that's some of it's just crazy yeah when and one quick aside there is one person that kind of blew me away and is his name's walt what's his what's his last name uh wood walt wood he's he's a he's a secret superhero walt williams yeah i'm not gonna lie um it's watching him play like watching him play not only was what i mean i'm not gonna discredit his actual ability his actual flipper ability and and he can hit shots i mean the guy is a good player there's no denying that but the the movement that he he adds to every single one of his shots i mean he's just you got to watch him look it up i he he made uh he was in the final open not that he didn't make it all the way to the finals but he was he was playing in the open um i don't know hopefully somebody clipped it but man what a character i mean he brought personality to uh to the game which was pretty great well it was amazing to me how much he could move and still hit his shots like there's no way i could do something like that i have to remain steady and he was able to move his entire body his entire field of vision everything and then he was still just deadly accurate i mean it was it was highly entertaining to watch yeah i mean for sure i can do that on streams for fun especially when i'm doing drinking streams jumping around being all crazy and i will get animated sometimes even in in tournament plays and stuff like that but the the it's entertaining to watch but i i saw him fumble one ball that he could have saved because he wasn't at the flippers and so it's entertaining for sure but there's something to say about not having your hand on the game and your your fingers on the flippers at all times to pre-nudge or or be ready but yeah the the the guy's awesome and it's intense to watch and it's it's it's it's entertaining for sure and he can play he can play some people yeah well i it really comes down to like um i mean keith had one if keith ellen's the best tournament player that's ever played what does he do he is as calm and as collected as you could ever ask for so if it's like if that if that's the recipe for success then then yeah maybe playing a little more controlled is is probably the better way to go but i'll tell you what i i enjoyed the heck out of it i if that's how he's playing i mean i like watching i mean at the end of the day he came up with his style he was using his style and he had some success with it he i think he finished top 15 if not top ten he made semifinals right yeah and i'm drawing the blank who was who was the guy from back in the day that jumped all over the place uh rick stetta stetta yeah right he was he was down there's precedent for this just not on games that weren't very much older than what even walt was playing on there so it's you know i can't i can't really say it enough how impressive that truly was because just like you talked about a second ago rob if you miss a shot and you're not at the flipper it's coming back fast enough that you're not gonna be ready to nudge you're not gonna be ready to save it and the fact that walt was able to do this and not really be in that position too many times except for maybe just a handful or once speaks to volumes of how accurate his shots truly were which is even more amazing to me because those games did play tough and you've got to be accurate to have success and he was doing a great job of that yeah for sure all right i think we're back here um we had to step away yeah so tom is back we got tom here to to really like let's let's dive in here on this tournament so the reality was this was we had thursday friday saturday sunday there was actually was is it four there were four main tournaments played no there was five five five five and the women's wimp and the youth seven hi it's future joel again just here to correct you know all the mistakes we make on a podcast um when we said four or five major tournaments what were what i was actually trying to refer to were the tournaments that i know that rob travis and tom actively participated in those were the ones that i was tracking and watching from afar i absolutely did not want to discredit how important the women's tournament or youth or any of the other tournaments were so just wanted to correct that to make sure nobody was offended and here we go so i know every single night there was always there was excitement every single night um doing that and then in the background you know travis had alluded to this earlier this there's this is a ticket format so in the background people are playing trying to build their ticket trying to get to the main the open which is sunday which was sunday's big event um but yeah let's so let's just go chronologically so thursday night thursday night that was what game was that was what what tournament happened on thursday it was the targeted match play and the next match started thursday afternoon at noon i believe gotcha and i remember i i caught just a tiny bit of that because the streaming was just at the end but um travis you actually did you ended up doing the best in that right because you got well i got i got a little bit lucky i have this thing to where i never play in the top group and i just hang out in the bottom groups and just buy the dip and eventually just pop my way up yeah but it never it never works out because it's always a top five finish but never a top two finish so yeah and that the way that tournament played was it's the first person to get 30 points right and so i remember seeing the final status number one has 30 what was it like number two had i don't know 28 it's like or 29 and 28 and then number four travis happened to have 27 and then there was like 20 people that all had 26. so travis it seems like you just you just happened to hit i'm assuming in your your last game something went right to get well that my last seventh point my last game was actually hilarious because i played this with tom and neal right there and i was on uh dolly parton against zach sharp zach mccarthy now world champion zach mccarthy and who else was with the uh um tim sexton and yeah so the hilarious part about this game so if you knock down the first inline drop target it lights your spinner for a thousand right well that spinner by far was probably the shittiest spinner i've ever seen in my life my pinball machine i had it lit i ripped it you know how many points i got out of it joel two i don't know close three thousand he got three spins i was just like oh this is not gonna work so yeah i figured out the meta after ball one i'm like well i'm not going to tell these three guys maybe they don't they don't realize this is happening but yeah so i ended up just switching up my uh my strategy and just kept going back up top trying to get dolly letters and i just ignore the spinner completely i mean if if i had on the flipper i was just trying to send it back up top anyway so i got lucky then i think i got zach mccarthy by maybe like 10 000 points on that game it wasn't much but that was enough to uh to get me over and get me in uh fourth place at the end of the day fourth so yeah so i remember seeing that and i was like awesome i'm glad people are having success and it was cool watching the standards like the open qualifying stuff because seeing you know seeing the three of your guys name and neil and ray and all these others like where they're at are they even qualified in top 40 yet and seeing that day-to-day i mean it was constantly changing and fluctuating which was really cool but i know the the the real exciting thing started the next day which was friday which is classics one and so classic games are anything before dmd it counts as a classic so what was the in the classics bank what was the most modern quote-unquote modern game that was being played in the classics bank tom might know this one tom what do you think i was trying to think about it um big game maybe genesis maybe yeah i'm looking through the games right now yeah but that was on day two wasn't it no big game was in both days oh it was [ __ ] but genesis was a stage but we're talking i mean these are yeah so anything before dmd so alphanumeric so it's there's some really cool it was i mean these are the games that yeah typically have a thing you know it may only be one thing to do and there are some games on there i'd never heard of never seen before but i'm gonna kind of let you guys take this because all three of you guys did very well and it was really cool to watch that tournament because you know to see you guys you know do so well in it um was really neat so i don't know i mean you you have the memory rob if you want to kind of take it away go for it we're just going to real quick it won't take that long so here here uh that much time here's here's the lineup for foursquare which is an em abracadabra argosy big game el dorado firepower future spa heavy metal meltdown jax open jungle princess magic mars trek meteor mystic nine ball paragon skateball stargazer stars and strikes and spares so that kind of gives you an overview of what it is it's a lot of like you said joel it's a lot of know the thing do the thing is it light the spinner and rip the spinner is it uh inline drops for bonus x is it you know a lot of these games are either bonus heavy or they're spinner heavy so what's interesting about the classics is it's only a four game ticket so it makes it actually a little harder because on the five game ticket you can have a medium game you can even have a zero game there's some people that qualify for the open with a zero game but with four games you've got to have four fairly solid games and that's one of the keys the classic to get to make the cut tom were you you were you had something there oh i was just gonna say rob rob said heavy metal meltdown which which it is listed here but there's no scores so it must have died yep yeah i never saw that streamed there was i think the only uh like the newest game in that bank on day one was uh el dorado it's the only one with like yeah that i can think of what was the game though and i know all three of you and and we don't have a ton of time to like go through game by game and all that stuff but there was the what what is the it starts with an a you guys all played it multiple times robert yeah argus argus right arc is that i saw that streamed multiple times and that game was i mean it's very much a do the thing and just keep going and i i remember really being impressed by that watching the because it got pretty near the phone like all three of you guys were playing that um at the same time but i don't know i i what was the fun the end result was uh rob you you were number one um and then what was two and how did it work well i finished first paragon paragon was the first game and uh that was interesting because rob really uh he really blew it up in the finals uh my game had i i didn't flip the first two balls and then my third ball i got in a groove and uh got some points but then uh travis and it had a chance to pass me to take third on that game and ended up tilting out oh i tilt it i think thirty thousand bonus away yeah oh boy yeah and notice nobody said collusion though so that was that was nice of him nobody nobody claimed that but yeah so it was weird it's like i knew where i was at on bonus but yet somehow even after telling myself don't tilt no matter what i still did and i don't think i made that big of a move because if you watch back i flipped one last time with my right flipper just out of frustration because the ball had drained and then it tilted right afterwards so i got a feeling somehow my frustration flip might have induced it and looking back at i'm just kind of like that's why i was standing there just so shocked that it actually tilted because i was like i did not make any type of move on it and you're in qualifying you could make moves on it i mean you couldn't throw it across the room and pulling the horny act on it but you could do some stuff with it and i didn't feel like i did that at all because it's a wide body and it wasn't the situation to do it but yeah i ended up being the idiot in front of several hundred people tilting a weight bonus it take fourth place too joel so i got uh no points well yeah so for that oh yeah well yeah and then i don't know tom what was your what was your memorable moment then from that or the haunted maybe it's feel free if you have a good one go for it but if you have something to haunt you like what travis just said then the whole game of strikes and spares uh though i i didn't play very well on that and it was funny because i had a couple previous rounds i had taken first on it uh but yeah just dumb luck kind of thing just didn't didn't pan out yeah so our final three games was paragon future spa and strikes and spares and so you know you have a paragon which is it's a combo game you know you want the drops for the bonus x but the spinner can also build your bonus to get to 20 x or 20 to carry over from ball to ball so there's a little bit of different strategies on that game and then future balls spa is kind of similar you're you're hitting the drops to build a bonus and then strikes and spares it's kind of interesting you know typically you like the spinner rip the spinner but the spinner wasn't the best spinner on that game either um and the bonus was building if you could clear abc up top so i switched gears and stopped trying to rip the spinner and i went went with the left flipper i went uh to the right side trying to catch that uh scoop for a 3 3x 3k bonus buildup and then get it back up top so it was a it was interesting finals and it wasn't my favorite games i was driving the bus i qualified 13th but everybody else got knocked out but it's the same situation we talked about in the open couldn't repeat games so i couldn't pick argosy i couldn't pick big game i couldn't pick um meteor or some of the games that i would have liked to go to so i picked the best of what was left and that's what you had for finals yeah and you you did it you performed well and yeah it was really cool to see that so i mean congrats rob on that win i mean that's that's fantastic um so travis you ended up placing fourth and then tom where were you at in that do you remember i'm which game i'm sorry just in the overall on no i i was uh we were travis and i were tied for third and we had to have a playoff and uh travis forgot travis beat me on meteor i mean i tried to distract him when he was having a good ball screaming at the top of my lungs but it didn't work i'm sorry i was the airport you ended second though i appreciated that uh david real real yeah so it was the top view three and david for the four with that that was really cool that was really neat to see um that was awesome that was awesome to see so that was classics one so then you go into the next day and once again i'm just kind of watching from afar the stream hasn't started yet but you can kind of see who's qualifying where and uh travis did you even like were you just burnt like how are how were you just burnt out on that or you were i mean i was assuming you you were trying to get into classics too oh you oh are you talking about how i qualified basically last second that wasn't it because i was just like is travis what's going on so well one travis needed sleep so i slept in the morning i missed the first couple hours but i was basically just using my cards just to kind of test out games because it was a new bank this time around too at least some of it there was some overlap but other than that a lot of the games were newer and i hadn't played them before so i wanted to kind of get the fill kind of see where tilts are try to see what game i want to include because just like we talked about before with only four games you have to really manage your time but you have to make sure that those four games you're going to score well on so you can qualify because if one you do very very bad on you're basically sol so that was kind of my thing too as i was just kind of waiting to see how different games were going to fill and the hilarious part was is a couple people started talking about sinbad towards the end that it was actually manageable that the bounces weren't crazy and that's kind of the word that started getting around and it was like five ball yeah and yeah and the fact it was on five balls so word started getting around on that and as soon as i heard the third person tell me that i was like you know what i'm going to go over there and look at it because typically i don't play it at all it usually eats my lunch and when i went to play it the first time that's when i pretty much figured out okay the bounces are where you think it's going to be the tilts where you think it is the shots are where you think it is so it turned into one of those games that just happened to be on my card when i'd even wake up that morning expecting it to be on and i think it turned out pretty well because i think i ended up getting the number three or number four ranked overall score on it but that being said then i don't even pick it in the finals when i could have twice so yeah so there you go yeah there was so there was 18 games in both classics banks there was nine repeats so there was nine games that were in classic one that carried over to classics too and that's just because i mean there's a lot of games there so to have complete turnover of 18 games is is asking a lot previous previous ones have been on the same 18 both rounds so this actually was a little different and uh i i enjoyed that better having some new choices so how do you i mean for the three of you guys to all make the final four the night before i like how do you show up the next day and think like all right time to do it again you know like is it is it motivating like i i i had great success the night before like let's let's do it again or is it almost like all right here we go you know um how's the mentality the second day um good rob so you know being lucky enough and and it's a combination to win these things it's it's definitely skill you've got to be on you got to be making your shots but you also got to get some inlanes you've got to get some bounces you know these games are are set up that if they go out they go out and you know tom had the perfect thing on strikes and spares he never even got to play i mean the ball was just gone so you've got to have some little love on top of that but i came in the next day with me personally with no pressure i came to the event in 2020 i didn't make the cut for anything i just won the first big event it's all gravy at this i was just hoping to make the cut in one of the four tournaments so i came in pretty loose and sure enough first ticket boom argosy boom paragon i just and then i think mars trek and then i think sinbad was my last game and i just for one ticket one ticket and done i put up like four scores that were in the top ten early on no bleeders and uh went to go play open tickets so that that was my experience uh how about you tom my experience was classics one and that was about it yeah it was kind of what you were alluding to before you were thinking of uh you know getting into one thing i i honestly thought i would get into the open which i didn't uh but uh getting into classics was uh definitely special especially getting into finals but uh yeah the the thing about the ticket format i mean when you play in a herb style or a bus game it's easy to just keep going back and get a you can eventually get a higher score if you're a really good player but uh when when you're doing the ticket format and you're doing it on four or five games it's it's tough yeah yeah so at the end of the at classics two i mean travis you did get in yeah and then i promptly blew it in the first round i think i was uh so i took second and big game and then i took second on genesis which gave me four points which made the scores eight four two zero so basically all i needed to do was and jermaine got out of the way since he was through to the next round so he took position and all i needed to do was just pick a game that i could take third or higher on so i was like okay yeah i'll just do paragon i feel fine enough with this i'm not going to tilt it'll be fine and what ended up happening was that jermaine he finished up he he picked player one like i said he got out of the way he finished up with about 37 900 points so that's all i had to beat that was it and somehow i magically ended up with 21 780 points on paragon my worst score ever on a paragon in competition by far so i was i went into this positive i'll get at least 100 000. and i came out of it like oh my god i can't believe i just did that on a game i just picked and what ended up happening was is the player that was in last place with zero points they took first on paragon with 131.7 so it wasn't even like it was a big score anyways but it was good enough that everything got set in position where since that player got a four and i took a zero right and then the player that had two took second so now all of a sudden that created a three-way tie so the scores ended up being nine four four four after three games so i got another pick and i'm like crap this sucks i'm gonna go ahead and pick a game that i feel highly confident on again so i pick stars and lo and behold i end up doing the same thing pretty much to where i i just can't get a ball and a flipper it's everywhere the even my bailout shots aren't working and i end up taking second and it's just just a ball of flames like a michael bay movie explosion happened and that was that and i realized right then there i was just like i looked at my wife and i said i'm so tired right now i just want to go to bed i want to go to sleep so i didn't even do qualifying for the open anymore i didn't put in any tickets i was just like wherever i end up at i don't care about getting a buy we'll just hopefully i don't bleed too much i was just so dead tired and mentally done that i just went to sleep and yeah i fell asleep around nine o'clock that night i think so yeah so it was nice so you're the one that let richie through to beat me and take me out in the quarterfinals so i'm blessing you yes so i basically caused the butterfly effect because richie terry he got all the way to finals after that so he started off i mean with two zeros in a row just he needed i think even on the statistics that tim sexton was providing on that worksheet or whatever it was the spreadsheet i think he had like a three percent chance of going through at that point and i had some like 80 some odd percent or whatever it was and i proceeded to show you never bet on me when the odds are in my favor so i know what was it uh so that was the second day i keith did because i was watching keith ellen like this was a big deal the fact that keith ellen was was really competing in a tournament again you know you kind of see him come in it's like well how far is keith going to go how far is escher going to go how far is ray day going to go you know those types of names now you got zach mccarthy you know you got these names that are just really taking over and um keith i remember made it further the second day right am i wrong on that or yeah he finished second in classics too escher won and raymond finished third the three people you just mentioned yeah exactly so joel you're talking to the man that eliminated elwynn on the first day yes on the first day elwynn was my wingman round one and tom was just like no he's like you're not getting between us buddy i did no such thing but so robert you made it the furthest then so uh classics how to classics two how did classics two in for you or yeah i got into my my uh second group i got through the first round was uh elwyn uh levy neyman who's really strong classic players and richie terry who travis let through and we played um we played big game and i got a set third and then we played argosy and i got a second i should have came back to beat l1 but i choked because i was player four and then uh cheetah was not nice to me so um i went out in 10th so after a win i'll take that all day long so yeah yeah which is great so i mean another i don't know it was yeah i i underst i just don't know the stamina that you got like how how you come in the next day ready to perform as well as you did the day i don't know it just with that level of play so watch once again watching from afar i saw that i was like all right you know that's fine but i here we are that was saturday so here we are looking forward to sunday so sunday was the oh i mean that's the am i missing something here we're just you go right into the saturday was playoff classics two so the qualifying started at nine ended at 4 30 playoffs at five same same format for classics one um but the whole time this is going on you can put in tickets for the open and for the high stakes that's right high stakes that's what i was forgetting so while we were playing classics finals there other people was playing the opens and putting in tickets for the main event so as soon as classics as soon as i got knocked out of classics i went and started putting more open tickets in because i was i was in like 28th and i was steadily bleeding unfortunately i never needed to put in another ticket i finished 39th and made the cut but i probably put in you know four or five more tickets trying to improve that score because i didn't think it was going to make it yeah so you made it i know you made it travis you you made it as well right what yes do you remember getting in like what was the combo of getting five games do you remember what it was what got you in so well what happened with me i think i only did two cards total for the open because i actually ended up going to bed with two more cards that i could have used but i was just too damn tired at that point but i didn't even realize i did this till after the fact but all five of my games i qualified on were from different different manufacturers so i had frontier ninja turtles laser q mystery castle and alien star and it was just one of those things that i just i played consistent across all of them and just i mean the the ninja turtle scores were really muted though at this and a large part of that is because the ball saves for multiball were turned way down and so that took a lot of the meta out of the game in terms of building up your hurry ups or building up to a 2x play field just because just without those ball saves you're basically hitting a target with a solo ball the whole time and that's going to take a long time to build up so i mean it just really helped that those scores were muted for me because i think with 11 i'm looking at right now with 11.1 million it was good enough for 26th rank the whole time and i thought that was going to be a bad game so it turned out you know really wasn't that bad and frontier i had ranked 14th at 1.6 million mystery castle just got to 290 had really no idea what i was doing on it just timing out modes just hitting some shots looking at some dancing skeletons and hope for the best so got a 73rd on that and then alien star i was a little disappointed with this one i got 2.3 million for 26 rank and yet it was playing super easy because there's no pop bumper working on it at the time yeah what's up bro yeah so i had similar ticket um just alien star was 38th ranked godzilla was 64 ranked sorcerer 53 ranked batman 35th ranked and mystery castle ranked 117. so if you can see there was only only two scores above the 40th best score but because they were consistent it hops you up in the standings so this really comes around to don't have a tank game and have you know a couple of really good games a couple meteor game mediocre games and don't don't tank anything huh that's really interesting because i really thought to qualify you would have to be like you would have had to have had you know one of your five games maybe be a top 20 finish you know like a really good game maybe one or two of those and then three that just aren't terrible but you're saying i mean the numbers that you listed there rob were a lot lower than i would expect to get in but that's just me guessing here from the out i mean yeah um trying to find another ticket so here's example uh david rowell real ral real um his ticket was just kind of polar opposite his batman score was fourth dirty harry 38th mystery castle 23rd stargate 12th sounds really good right nope his tm uh teenage mutant ninja turtle scores was 225th so he got zero points for that but his other games were good enough to carry him through and so there's there's different ways to approach this um i don't like bleeder games and what bleeder games are is a game that's so bad that it's gonna go to zero you know you're going to have zero points for that because the top scores 200 195 190 and then it goes down one point per game well there's enough people playing that there's going to be 200 to 300 games played on these and so if you have a stinker it's going to go zero yeah it may look good early in the standings but it's going to go to zero yeah and i'm not this is not purposeful but so tom you're you did not qualify but what was your overall experience or scores or i mean what was yeah yeah i just couldn't really get anything going together um i really struggled on uh teenage mutant ninja turtles which is usually a strong game for me i felt really really good on royal rumble and robocop oh yeah brother uh and a couple more but i yeah i just couldn't couldn't put a ticket together and you got to do that so how do you like when do you so turtle so you're saying you made it so it sounds like you played turtles a few times were you starting with turtles or was that like you were trying to yeah no not necessarily but it was usually my like second or third game going into ticket okay um so yeah and i i was i was getting just a couple million on the game which really wasn't gonna do it for me so at that point i mean you finish out the ticket right or do you just like uh as as the tournament goes on so so in the beginning yeah you finish your ticket because you're kind of practicing your games but then after that uh once you get to saturday you you start yeah this isn't gonna work let's toss it out and just start over yeah because there's no point in playing it anymore it'd be interesting to see a uh graph curve of when the cards were voided because the first couple days like tom was saying if i had a crap game game number one perfect now i'm gonna go play some games that i'm haven't played that you know maybe maybe for whatever reason i figured out how to dead bounce trap up easier or save the ball so i want to get every games also i'm anticipating making the finals i never go in going i'm not going to make it so i also try to put at least one game on every game because you never know what somebody else is going to pick oh certain point so just to get experience yeah so it's it's it's practice then once you get to saturday at five o'clock and there's six hours left you know game one ah that's not bad game two uh that was crap void re-cue start over um and dump the ticket because it's it's it's volume at that point if i don't get in it doesn't matter if i practice on these games so early on i don't skip any of that money it's four dollars a game i'm gonna i'm gonna get my money's worth and and and practice i i i played the best uh sunday night while high stakes was going on yeah what um so 20 bucks a ticket do you guys know how many tickets because like i was watching you guys which was cool you could see it all online but it's i only saw submitted tickets so i never saw it's like i have no idea how many tickets you guys are avoiding in the background i'm trying to look i played a pretty late ticket um travis do you know yeah i can actually answer that so i had um classics one i think i might have had one void it ticket for that and i might have put in two tickets total or one ticket for the uh i know for classics i think i put in four oh i didn't avoid anything never mind i have three i think he's talking about total number of tickets over the weekend forever yeah that's what i'm trying to go through i think i probably did i did three open tickets uh two high stakes i think seven classics i think it's somewhere right around there they're really working it wasn't three so you three three open tickets so that means you only played 12 uh what is it 15 games right well no i did it twice never mind two open tickets i think i think that's what i did i can't remember i might avoid it one because i shotgunned through one really really fast just to test out some things but i do know just like rob alluded to just a second ago i did not play my other tickets that i could have to test out other games because i went i decided i need to get some rest need to get some sleep and lo and behold that being in the in the ass because the very next day all three games were on games that i didn't have any significant time on like i played dark knight once with my initial card and that game just shat all over me i think i got 1.2 million which is the worst in the whole tournament and i was legitimately trying to get a ball and a flipper just because i wanted to flip and just see but i don't think i even did but one flip on it just a panic flip and yeah just tilted all three balls so just i found the tilt at least but yeah that's all i knew because then i played godzilla le knew the rules didn't know the bounces to that game and that kind of burned me and then a sorcerer same thing knew the rules knew how it was and just wasn't prepped i remember when we talked about free play florida though like you bought a ton of tickets so that's what i was thinking yeah i was i was thinking you were like you know you had like 40 plus tickets that you were doing and you only submitted two of them no so i did the exact opposite where i tried to buy less but i got the combo which gave me a high stakes and like 20 off so with high stakes i did accidentally submit my first card i was supposed to avoid it and i wasn't even thinking i just kind of just went with the flow and then lo and behold i noticed earlier that i'm down to like 135th in the tournament i'm like i don't even have a card in now look and to my amazement yeah my uh my horrible card was indeed in and so but yeah i was just so tired and i was ready to drive back that i just i had to uh i did not finish out a couple of cards anyways what about you tom yeah you plenty yeah i was done after classic swan yeah that's fair i i just don't the stamina these these multi-day tournaments i mean i just nothing but respect for you guys you know participating in trying to keep mentally in the game there but i just that that idea that pressure of multiple days trying to play games in the background especially when you guys are doing so well in tournaments on thursday you know are you even thinking about sunday while other people are back there cranking away games oh yeah preparing for sunday um but well there was people that dropped out i think walt did it i think escher did it and i don't know if anybody else did i'm sure there was that there was multiple people that dropped out of the target match play the first day when they realized that they were going to start off way behind everybody else and spend the rest afternoon and evening just trying to climb up a lot of them just decided to duck out and they went over and started doing their qualifying and that's the way that they chose to manage the clock so yeah there's there's a lot of pressure in terms of putting games together managing your time and really realizing where you're at because if you have any bleeders i i knew several people in the past other tournaments they thought they were good they let up off the gas they go to dinner break they come back all of a sudden they're outside the cut line and there's nothing they can do about it because they run out of time because the queues get so long the final hour to two hours they get so long so yeah it's all about time management i felt bad for uh ryan spindler because he was he was up there for a while and then uh he kept dropping and finally he just he took that 41st spot and he got he got knocked out by jason wardrick who was still qualified you know they at 11 o'clock they're like okay everybody you know no more qualifying well jason was still playing on his like last game on his ticket and he ended up doing well and knocking knocking ryan uh out of the playoffs literally last minute yeah but so neil neil was did neil make it yeah neil made the open yeah so neil made it travis made it and rob you made it in so real quick here i know we're running low on time but real quick what was how did the open go for the three of i mean feel free to speak for neil if you want tom but how did that open happen for the three of you guys um yeah neil had a tough group uh he had uh first round he had jason wardrick adam mckinney and uh richie terry and he ended up surviving that and uh then he got knocked out in the second round so he he finished what place uh 24th i think it was and then travis you sounds like dark knight handed it to you well i was with uh bill mason Josh Sharpe and adam lefkoff and we played godzilla le early on i got really lucky taken second with that we none of us really played it all that well and i had 53 million on that got lucky because josh had two locks and with the next one lit and ended up draining out otherwise they would have put him over the top but yeah then we played a batman dark knight i just got annihilated on that had 4.7 million i think adam ended up with 63 million because he had a great scarecrow and joker stack going on there but all the settings were set to hard and the tilt was just super tight as well i mean there was a couple of times i watched bill who picked the game i watched him actually get a danger while just flipping on an in-lane return so this is i mean from a ramp return he was getting a danger of flipping i'm like man this is just way too tight so yeah it's just every single one of my balls i had something that i had to take a danger or two dangers early on then i was just pins and needles so that didn't work out well and then i went over to sorcerer to where i just i couldn't score anything i think i ended up with 300 000 even with my locks lit i just could not find that left ramp i probably missed it at least eight or nine times and that just goes to you need to be able to play all the games at least once to get a feel for where they're at otherwise you're putting yourself in bad positions so i mean lesson learned there maybe i'm just going to skip to sleep next time so that way i don't get my ass kicked yeah so what was your final place uh 33rd i believe 33rd nice and then rob how did how did how'd it go for you um i'll keep it brief i was bleeding all day and i was lucky to not not be ryan and get bumped off i finished 39th i was sweating the last minute tickets i kept refreshing like i was back in the room two hours later going to bed hitting refresh making sure it wasn't a fluke somebody else didn't uh get past me and but i got um in a pretty tough group with um andre massinkov david real and and roland um nadeau that went pretty fail i think that's how you pronounce his last name can't be sure but they um this is the disadvantage of being the lowest guy i didn't get to drive the bus and i went second every game and they picked shadow dirty harry and then doctor who and doctor who wasn't even in the tournament got brought in later so i had zero time on it and all three of those games i don't have a lot of time on in general um honestly this whole open bank was tough for me i didn't have a lot of go too strong i know this game um and i like this game um so it was a tough bank and i got knocked out and finished 30 38 but again i'm riding a high there like i said first 10th 38th yeah in 2020 i made zero cuts and this year i made all four cuts so i it didn't even matter at that point but yeah i was i was tired like i don't know yeah tired but that was the open so the open finishes and it was zach mccarthy who won it right so it was awesome we we already kind of talked about the finals the final three games and all that um you know shout out to to rayday another tpm guy and grade was crushing it all week as well radio did very well in that um but then there's this other thing called high stakes high stakes was the last tournament of all of it it's the same what is it it's the same games as the open it's the same concept as the open it's just the tickets were more expensive or what it's the same concept as five games but it was there was only eight games in the bank and it was a completely separate bank okay um same format same everything except for instead of twenty dollars a ticket it's fifty dollars a ticket yeah um they still had over 160 people put in an entry so nice i think first prize got up to seven grand for first so um it's pretty significant i got i got really lucky there i when they when i got um i knocked out a target match plan went right over and and just had one of those tickets i couldn't do no wrong and so i managed to qualify my first ticket there i was number one for quite a while and bled down to fifth um but um it was one of those no bleeder tickets so um save some money there for sure nice and then travis you you were driving home so you didn't you didn't qualify i assume correct yeah and tom as well he didn't qualify did neil that is correct so high high stake uh spoiler keith ellwood won the whole thing so you rob you said one and done you had a great ticket you submitted it done you're in right correct yes keith how any idea how was he similar uh he's always similar i don't think he puts in more than two tickets i'd have to look but he's usually that that's the thing that amazes about me and greatest of all time of course you know just it's the consistency he just doesn't have any bad games i mean everybody has a bad game but just not that open often so a format like this is just geared for him for sure to destroy yeah well i mean he does he does lose tom beat him in one round just uh yeah you know it never happened joel it didn't happen yeah yeah i remember that message it reminded them because travis was like tom took out my wingman tom took out my wingman but but rob so you made it to high stakes so how did high stakes go for you um the same as the open i actually played better uh my group was raymond me ryan spindler and johnny monica um we raymond was driving he picked tron then pinball magic and taxi and i had my chances i finished third on tron i had my chance to come back and take the win on pinball magic i just didn't know the game that well and i don't think my strategy was very good um and then came up to taxi it was a win or get done and um i actually got a jackpot in 12 seconds no lie i got the jackpot in 12 seconds um so that was kind of cool because i was player 4 nobody did good but then uh monica ended up uh johnny monica monica ended up throwing up nine million so wow but uh it was just it was this crazy sequence i mean you'll never see it again but i plunged the skill shot and got a spot passenger the person in front of me left me a lock the ball comes down i hit the lock the ball comes out of the lock comes down i hit dracula the the ball comes around the um the ramp to the left flipper and i sweep pmbot and then the other ball comes back around to the right flipper i hit santa claus and then joyride sparks me my fifth character ball kicks out of santa claus dead bounces lays up on the left flipper and i drilled the jackpot shot it was it was it was amazing like 12 seconds and i had 1.5 million fix jackpot so you just sped run it it was crazy even raymond was like oh my gosh what just happened it was awesome so taxi if taxi's in pen Slash three then now we know yeah exactly hopefully somebody clipped that i'm like no we weren't on video unfortunately i'm like man what a time to not be on the stream yeah i think that is another thing i mean i respect the heck out of carl everything he stream that was amazing but there are definitely times that i'm looking at the tournament and i'm looking at the bracket and it's like i mean this is a good group but man i wish i could see this group and i know it's not possible i know you can't stream everybody but um they're definitely i mean the level of play that was there there were definitely games that i know missed like obviously rob that would have been awesome to see on stream so what i'm hearing joel is you're calling up carl that he needs to have two rigs running at all times so he can be at least two games pinball two yeah maybe an ie pinball three and that way you can switch between straight yeah no big deal carl just just throw that in what's interesting story the the first time we streamed texas pinball festival we had cameras on every single game 12 games we had cameras on every single game coming to a central computer with lines everywhere where we could just click a button and switch to different games oh wow but i mean let's check in on taxi and see what's going on no i mean if you finished the game you just swapped over to the new game you didn't have to stop anybody you didn't have to roll the rig or whatever it was great from that standpoint but the cost is just prohibitive at that point to have that many cameras and and lined up so so high stakes where did you end up with rob i finished i don't know 12th so i'll take it 12 at 160. um pretty big whopper haul for the weekend i think i finished seventh overall whopper hall uh travis finished ninth i think because he had some solid even though uh because he's got his two fourths in uh yeah that's one thing that was really cool is i i mean all you guys came home with hardware so congrats on that it seemed like it was an amazing event it was awesome to watch from afar the level of play was was fantastic but i did see there was an update in rank um i don't know i can't make fun of travis anymore he's he's he's high enough that i can't make fun of him for it um uh but what are you travis go and say it 23rd 23rd 23rd okay front page and uh and robert you you popped up a good bit now you're where are you at i was 68 70th coming in and popped up to 29th 29th well done and then tom where where are you and neil uh let's see neil is at 22nd so he's one ahead of travis though just i that's fantastic i hope that stays it's a given and i am 26. that's awesome one off of all you guys all you guys are in the 20s is that what i just heard yeah yes yeah that's impressive guys well i will say though i was looking at the ranking and i mean congrats to the three of you plus neo i mean fantastic job but you look right there at the number one spot ray raymond has almost a thousand points and and out number one and here you guys are in the 20s and you're like where are you in the 600s i mean it's like that gap yeah he started running yeah he started running away with it with all these uh high-end certified finishes it just goes to show you because what people may not realize when it comes to whoppers if it's a major it gets a 50 boost but if it's a certified tournament which is 64 players or more qualifying in two different days finals you get a 20 boost so effectively the open at 170 boost on both the high stakes and the main tournament and ray got 105 with a fourth place finish at the uh the main and then at the high stakes with the second place he got 85. so that's that's a lot of points it's a ton yeah yeah yeah well overall i don't know if you guys have any final thoughts on it on indis incredibly incredibly entertaining to watch that's all i can say and i think there's a whole bunch of people that watch the stream that you know applaud not only the level of play from all you guys but also carl in the production that he put on but um yeah i mean i looked at that i mean this uh today is the super bowl we're recording this on on sunday the 13th but that that to me was like that was the super bowl of of pinball streaming i mean now that pinburg's out uh to me it's like i i look forward i now know look forward to in disc and look forward to super series because that's that's where you know those are those are the weekends that i need to make sure i'm not doing family stuff i need to i need to save time to watch that i think in 2020 they had 350 people ish um this year i think there was 250 people ish enter the open so you know that's definitely a couple things coved restrictions people didn't want to come wear masks all weekend there's also some Carl Weathers that went through the company country that slowed things down but i i expect easily over 300 next year and at some point in time they're gonna get themselves in trouble there's gonna be four to five hundred people coming um so it's it's it's gonna continue to be challenging to for game and game and time management and um but if anybody can do it it's it's uh carl and and jim belcedo and and bob matthews helps out quite a bit as well so and enough sure there's a group of other people that support them i just don't know everybody's name but they're always there they're always your job there's everything cheers to all the in-desk people yeah 100 but well i think that's about it um yeah i i we covered a good bit here there's always more to talk about but we'll have to get get to that later on but um yeah real quick we'll just go around the circle and do some plugs we usually start with a guess so rob plug away um so you can find me on uh tpn uh stream on the tpn channel on wednesday just before joel at 6 30 to 8 30 and then he comes on after me at nine o'clock on the flipping out stream i believe um and that's a cool place we we've created um but i also stream on my own channel top rope pinball it's a little crazy it's a lot of pinball it's a lot of high-end pinball but it's uh i focus on the entertainment and and you just never know what you're gonna get you might not be a wrestling fan but if you watch top rope pinball you might become a wrestling fan so you know you can follow me on twitch facebook instagram all the pinball profile you can find me on all the places because i'm just cheerless you know so just search topworldpinball in any any streaming or any media social place you're at and you will probably find me yeah your stream is way more than just pinball that's for sure and uh and it's impressive that you can put on that type of entertainment but also play at the level that you play thanks um so well done um yeah travis go ahead well first off i'd like to thank my camera for making it through this yeah i think my microphone for holding up and i'd like to thank my headset for staying charged the whole time now that the is uh it's out of the way you can find me at the uh triple drain podcast right here and i'm also on youtube at marv loco yeah well done thank you well done to you and your equipment i'm glad thank you this is big this is big it took me 14 tries but we got it right yeah tom go ahead uh you can find me at Fox Cities Pinball um actually we're going to be doing a very big uh tournament this weekend at district 82 called the winter 2x it's actually going to start on friday with a with a knockout there's a lot of players signed up and then on saturday two tournaments so if you're interested in competitive pinball please check it out travis will be there yeah and even if you're not interested in competitive pinball but you like pinball watch it because i'm telling you even if you don't know what they're trying to do these the the quality of these streams are is so high that when you have commentators that are they're telling you they're telling you about the game they're telling you kind of what the players trying to do it's it's it's very very entertaining so i would i would i highly support that and um yeah good luck good luck not only to the the competition also the stream um as well and then yeah i'm joel i do um i do this obviously triple drain podcast and then i stream yeah after rob on the the pinball network on wednesdays and then every other thursday on flipping out um i will tell you that on flipping out well i just did i mentioned it earlier an awesome stream with ray day if you want to know anything about rush rules check that out it's on youtube and then i actually have a cool stream coming up um with a uh a whole um a homebrew game which should be really pretty cool in a few weeks and then i am lastly asked to do just another pinball podcast and i have a uh an interview coming up which should be pretty exciting so um stay keep your eyes open for that or yeah but yeah go ahead rob well just want to say thank you guys for uh hosting and bringing me on if you ever need an extra ball i'm always uh ready and willing to bring the the comedy and who who knows when i show up this has actually been a very calm podcast for me believe it or not yeah we had a lot to get through and um yeah but rob absolutely thank you for being on here we knew you had great success at ndisk we knew we were going to be talking a lot about competitive pinball and uh your your pin was definitely um uh it was great it was great to have but yeah travis tom appreciate you guys appreciate the content you create and the time we uh we get to share here and to the listeners if there's anything we can do for you feel free to email us at triple drain gmail.com otherwise hopefully um yeah hit us up on any of our streams or our emails and um hopefully you'll hear again from us in a few weeks so uh like always tom you get the last words goodbye everybody
Raymond Davidson is a coder on Rush pinball and appeared on Flipping Out stream to explain the game
high confidence · Joel mentioned Raymond appeared Thursday night on the flipping out channel to explain Rush mechanics
Joel@ 28:56 — Reveals interpersonal dynamic and Tom's known enthusiasm for Rush; establishes different opinions among hosts
“There's nothing on the left side of the game that excites me... I'm so used to having a left ramp in a game and this game has no left ramp”
Joel@ 29:09 — Specific playfield design criticism of Rush; articulates shot layout frustration shared by multiple players
high · Joel: 'Raymond Davidson who's one of the coders of this game on the stream with me and he started to explain the game to me'
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market_signal: Debate over whether In Disc finals should feature purchasable sponsor games for marketing visibility; Stern sponsorship creates expectation for modern game inclusion but competitive format undermines this
high · Zach criticized playing 'stuff you can't buy' with Stern as top sponsor; Joel/Travis/Tom debate whether forcing sponsor games violates competitive integrity of top seed advantages
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product_strategy: Zach Manny (distributor) emphasizes growth/marketing opportunity missed; argues 800-1000 stream viewers represent potential new audience but were shown outdated unmemorable games instead of modern purchasable machines
high · Joel reports Zach's criticism; hosts acknowledge his distributor perspective affects views on marketing vs competition
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gameplay_signal: Rush requires explanation from designer to players to understand code/rules; initial impressions negative until mechanics explained, suggesting code clarity or intuitiveness may be an issue
medium · Joel mentions needing Raymond to explain game; implies initial gameplay feel was confusing or unintuitive despite code quality
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tournament_format: Core tension: no-repeat pick rule ensures game variety during qualifying but exhausts modern games before finals, forcing creative/vintage choices; top seed advantage (game selection) conflicts with audience/marketing expectations
high · Robert: can't hold games in reserve; Travis: must use 5 games to qualify then at least 1 more = 6 games before finals; only 2 modern games (Godzilla, Turtles) mentioned in full bank
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event_signal: In Disc 2024 received significant streaming coverage and viewership (800-1000+); fighting festival raid brought 500-700+ new viewers from adjacent community; successful production but game selection controversial
high · Joel notes Carl's production quality highly praised; fighting festival raid brought outside audience; suggests this exposure level rare for pinball but demonstrates cross-community growth potential