Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Aspiring Tournament Directors

Pintastic New England·video·59m 42s·analyzed·Feb 7, 2025
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Five experienced TDs discuss tournament directing challenges, venue selection, and player recruitment strategies.

Summary

A panel discussion featuring five experienced tournament directors (Brian O'Neill, Chris Burnett, Amber Dan Lee, Teresa Edwards, and Theatre of Magic MacArthur) sharing insights on starting and running pinball tournaments. Topics covered include personality management, rule knowledge, venue selection, player recruitment, and balancing casual and competitive play. The discussion emphasizes practical lessons learned, community building, and the importance of supporting locations and the broader pinball ecosystem.

Key Claims

  • Brian O'Neill has organized approximately 88 open tournaments since 2016, primarily in New Hampshire and California

    high confidence · Direct statement from panelist introducing himself

  • Chris Burnett has run approximately 50 tournaments from basement days to current ice cream arcade operation

    high confidence · Direct statement from panelist

  • Amber Dan Lee has run approximately 50 or more tournaments since starting in 2021 at Pizza J location in Rhode Island

    high confidence · Direct statement from panelist

  • Teresa Edwards has been a tournament director since the late 1990s and now focuses primarily on women's and children's pinball tournaments

    high confidence · Direct statement from panelist

  • Theatre of Magic MacArthur started the Fundy Flippers Pinball League in 2017 and has organized 50+ tournaments, and is currently the only registered TD in their entire province

    high confidence · Direct statement from panelist

  • Tournament directors should not play in their own tournaments due to personality management and operational challenges

    medium confidence · Chris Burnett emphasizes this strongly; Amber Dan Lee counters that it's possible with help and co-officials

  • IFPA tournament registration has no formal vetting process for becoming a tournament director

    high confidence · Panelist statement: 'The process itself is not easy. You basically just go on the IFPA page and follow through the links to get registered as a TD. There's no big vetting process or anything.'

  • Game variety and machine quality are the highest priorities when selecting a tournament venue

    high confidence · Multiple panelists emphasize mix of games as primary venue selection criterion

  • The post-pandemic period saw significant growth in tournament participation and interest in pinball

Notable Quotes

  • “At times running a pinball tournament can be as much about managing personalities as it is about managing the games and the gameplay.”

    Chris Burnett@ 6:35 — Highlights the human management aspect of tournament directing that new TDs often overlook

  • “You can't play in your own tournaments. Don't try.”

    Chris Burnett@ 7:23 — Strong statement of a core principle, though contested by other panelists

  • “Pinball players in a tournament situation can be the biggest drama queens on the planet.”

    Chris Burnett@ 7:35 — Candid observation about player behavior under competitive stress

  • “I blame JR...The way it's set up, the way he runs things was pretty much tournament perfection, especially for the time.”

    Chris Burnett@ 17:20 — Credits a mentor figure (JR in Maine) as inspiration for starting tournament directing

  • “Rando control...The business owner doesn't want you to run off the people who aren't just coming for the weekend to play in this big IFPA tournament.”

    Amber Dan Lee@ 12:18 — Introduces concept of managing non-tournament casual players at venue locations

  • “If I listen to everybody, I would have every game and I would sell every game because everyone has an opinion on every game. You're never going to satisfy everybody.”

    Chris Burnett@ 28:30 — Practical wisdom about making game selection decisions despite varied preferences

Entities

Brian O'NeillpersonChris BurnettpersonAmber Dan LeepersonTeresa EdwardspersonTheatre of Magic MacArthurpersonIce Ice ArcadevenuePizza JvenuePort CityvenueFun Spotvenue

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Location operators benefit economically from hosting pinball tournaments (food, beverage sales, foot traffic) creating mutual incentive with tournament organizers

    high · Multiple panelists note locations 'need to sell pizza, alcohol, everything' and tournaments drive business; Amber notes locations 'making money'

  • ?

    community_signal: Multiple tournament directors emphasize grassroots community building through direct outreach, venue partnerships, and social media to recruit and retain players

    high · Amber walking up to players at Pizza J to invite them; Chris Burnett's post-pandemic tournament growth; Teresa Edwards building Columbus women's community from zero

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Post-pandemic pinball tournament scene experienced significant growth in player participation and venue interest, though retention challenges persist

    high · Chris Burnett: 'the pandemic helped...Everyone was hungry to play pinball after COVID, and the tournaments just skyrocketed'; note about leagues not recovering to pre-pandemic levels

  • ?

    community_signal: Regional league infrastructure (NEPL) drives player recruitment and tournament attendance through multi-location seasonal play format

    high · Chris Burnett and Amber noting NEPL membership attracts traveling players and provides framework for regular tournament schedule

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Tournament game selection philosophy balances mix of eras (classics, 70s-80s, modern) and game types rather than pursuing only latest releases

    high · Chris Burnett and Amber emphasize variety over 'latest and greatest'; discussion of classic games like Whirlwind, Sea Witch, Jokers alongside new Jaws

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.179

0:00
This is an example of what happens when you say to Dave, hey, you know, you should have a panel on tournament directing. And he says, okay, what would you like to do? So, be careful what you wish for.
0:13
So, yes, we just wanted to talk about the art and the science of tournament directing, how we all got started, some of the things that we've looked at, some of the problems that we've had or whatever. and so it's just a basic discussion. As David pointed out, this could be an annual thing where we talk about, we have a tournament director session every year where we spitball different ideas. To start off, I'd want to get everybody on our esteemed panel to introduce themselves, just a quick word about where they're from, how long they've been doing tournaments and that sort of thing. Maybe we'll start down on the far end. Hey, I'm Brian O'Neill. I've been TDing since 2016 and done about 88 open events organized mostly in New Hampshire, but also in California as well. So, um...
1:27
Oh, am I all set? Don't pick it up. You're good. Don't twitch with it. I'm Chris Burnett. You might know me from Ice Ice Arcade up in Londonderry, New Hampshire. Home game room was an addition. We had a garage built separate from the house. Wife and kids don't mind. Host all night. I've done about 50 tournaments back from my basement days all the way to current.
1:57
And, you know, that's about it. Amber Lee, I'm from Rhode Island currently. Lived all over the place. But I run most of the time, if you've been to a tournament in Rhode Island, I've been the one running it. I run most of our tournaments out of a location, Pizza J's. And even though I only started in 2021, I think at this point I've run about 50, possibly more than 50 tournaments.

high confidence · Chris Burnett notes tournaments 'just skyrocketed' after COVID as people were hungry to play

  • “The only reason that we started doing tournaments was my husband and I are game operators...There was no one else in town that had any desire to play any competitive pinball.”

    Teresa Edwards@ 3:16 — Explains grassroots origin of Columbus pinball community from operator perspective

  • “We have built a pinball community there that is phenomenal, especially our women pinball players.”

    Teresa Edwards@ 3:33 — Highlights success in building women's pinball community from minimal starting point

  • “The IFPA makes it so that you're kind of in a little box as to how you do it. You can't do doubles, can't do split flippers, etc.”

    Chris Burnett@ 21:49 — Notes constraints of IFPA-sanctioned tournament rules vs. informal formats

  • “If you're playing pinball at Pizza J, I will walk up to you and be like, 'Hey, we have tournaments. Come to my tournaments.'”

    Amber Dan Lee@ 32:21 — Direct approach to player recruitment through personal outreach

    • IFPA
    organization
    WPPRproduct
    NEPLorganization
    Fundy Flippers Pinball Leagueorganization
    Bells and Chimesorganization
    Columbus, Ohiolocation
    JRperson
    Pintastic New Englandevent
  • $

    market_signal: Women's pinball tournaments and inclusive programming emerging as important community segment with dedicated organizers and growing participation

    high · Teresa Edwards focusing efforts on women's and children's tournaments; Bells and Chimes chapter charitable giving; recruitment success

  • ?

    venue_signal: Tension between tournament players and casual ('rando') venue customers requires deliberate management through roping off areas and balancing business needs with competition integrity

    high · Amber Dan Lee's extended discussion of 'rando control' and location business requirements; Chris Burnett on drunk customers threatening conflict

    • 2:24
    And then I'll pass it over to Tish. Tish, yeah. Hello. I'm Teresa Edwards. I am from Columbus, Ohio. I have been a tournament director since the late 90s.
    2:38
    The reason that we started doing tournaments was my husband and I are game operators. and we started out with locations in pizza joints and things like that. And we really liked to play games. So we started just doing little what I call mini tournaments. It wasn't anything where people had to come in and qualify or it was you come in, you play. Okay, since then, everything has gone crazy. The only reason I did it was there was no one else in town that had any games and had any desire to play any competitive pinball. So Columbus, Ohio, I don't know if any of you all have been there. It's famous for the Ohio State Buckeyes. But I've got to tell you, we have built a pinball community there that is phenomenal. especially our women pinball players. So as the sport, I call it a sport, it has balls, you have to be physical, you have to have stamina, you have to have guts and nerve and courage to be good at it. As the sport has continued in our area, there are many other people who want to do tournaments, to be tournament directors. and so I'm not needed anymore. There's other men, other people who can do it bigger, better than I because I just started scratching along doing what we could.
    4:23
    So I now basically do mostly women's pinball tournaments and kids' pinball tournaments. And usually, I don't know if you are going to do tournaments. maybe keep in mind they're a really good way to do charity donations if you're doing a huge tournament you have to come up with money so that you can get the good players to come and get the good whoppers and all of that but if you're just doing regular tournaments with regular people who just like to get together and play competitively keep in mind that it's a good way to gather a little bit of money for your favorite charity we started whoever won whatever tournament it was they picked the charity and so over the past few years our bells and chimes chapter has probably given two, three thousand dollars to Planned Parenthood Dog First Paws all kinds of charities and each one of them is always made in our name anyway that's who I am I'm a little guy in town and I stick with the women's and the kids, and I've been doing it for a long time.
    5:42
    Before there were flippers. And my name is Tom MacArthur. My wife and I started the Fundy Flippers Pinball League in St. John, New Brunswick in 2017,
    5:57
    and so I'm also in the 50-plus tournaments organized area now. When we were talking about this and spitballing about things that we wanted to address, there was an open question that kind of came up a few times, so we're going to start with that one.
    6:17
    Just if you could just say briefly, what's one thing that you wished you had known before you started as a tournament director? One thing that you didn't know was going to be part of it, but then you maybe wished that you had had a little bit of foresight on that. Anybody want to jump in? I can start. I think the one thing that I wasn't as aware of when I started was that at times running a pinball tournament can be as much about managing personalities as it is about managing the games and the gameplay. So, you know, every once in a while you might be put in an uncomfortable situation because of someone getting a little worked up about what's going on or a little too excited or perhaps a personality conflict within your group that's playing.
    7:09
    Just think ahead about that and be ready to deal with it. And it's pretty easy to diffuse. But just one thing that I was not expecting. Good point.
    7:21
    I can play off of that. Yeah, you can't play in your own tournaments. Don't try. One thing I thought was, oh, yeah, you know, I'm going to invite everybody over, throw it on IFPA, and I'm going to get points too, those precious WPPR points.
    7:35
    Going off what she said, pinball players in a tournament situation can be the biggest drama queens on the planet. A lot of people here know it. You've probably done it. They expect everything. They want everything running smoothly. it's your fault if a stern game breaks, but they don't. They don't. If something happens, I mean, I had a tournament, what, last Saturday, which he won, she won. It's like, who invited the O'Neills?
    8:04
    They didn't come to mine, that's fine. Yeah. But things break, and I mean little things. A sling stops working, a flipper gets stuck, balls get stuck. Like, if you're playing and you're on a game and someone across the room is like, Chris, Chris, we have a stuck ball. Guess what? You're draining. Not because you want to drain, but because now it's in the back of your mind. I got to get the tournament continued. I need to stop. You know, I know everyone's waiting, but your thought of, you know, frame of mind is you got to keep the tournament going. It's your job not to be playing in it. So I guess that's the one thing I learned the hard way. And, I mean, people have seen me go off the wall, upset, running around with a chicken with its head cut off. You can't play in your own tournaments as much as you want to. As much as people are like, oh, why do you host? You know, not playing. It's kind of for the love of it more than anything else.
    8:59
    I'm going to say the opposite. Thank you. I'm going to say that you can join in on your own tournaments that you're hosting as long as you get help. And so one of the things is getting a group of people together that also know the rules of the game, know the rules, the IFPA rules, the rules of the tournament, things like that, so that it's not just going to Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris. there's a number of people a lot of people in the back have helped me with tournaments in the past so just having a group of people that know how to make tough rulings but correct rulings one story I have is that I went to this tournament there was a ruling that was I needed a ruling made the tournament director said oh I don't know the rules of this game to give an appropriate ruling. So I'm like, well, can you get another tournament director? He's like, oh, he's at lunch. So I'm like, well, okay. So this is very frustrating for the player, for me. And so just know the rules of the game for the games that you're organizing, for the tournaments you're organizing. Know the IPA rule set and get help. You're allowed to have other people help you be just rules officials. You can have people just free stuck balls, anything that people are comfortable with. And that gets more people into tournament directing, more people into officiating, things like that.
    10:46
    I would say that the thing that I've had to kind of learn a bit, because it's changed a lot since when I started, and I call it crowd control or rando control.
    11:01
    Randos to me, and this is not an insult, randos to me are the people who come into the barcades to play the machines. They are not regulars. They did not come in for a league. They did not come in for a tournament. They came in to play some games, maybe have a drink, have a good time. As players, when we come in for a tournament, a lot of times we have to pay money to be there, just to even be in the tournament.
    11:29
    And some of us, myself sometimes, can be a little bit particular about people who are too close to them when they're playing an important game. And it can affect their game play because it draws their attention away from somebody who's talking next to them or some drunk who's trying to get his beer out of the thing. So random control is important, though, because the location where you have your tournament is not always going to be your own house. It's going to be a business. The business owner that has allowed you to put your games in there, or it's their games, they want you to come there so that they can sell alcohol, food, whatever it is they sell. and they don't want you to run off the people who aren't just coming for the weekend to play in this big IFPA tournament, and then you never see them again for another year. So rando control to me is you have to take a little bit of empathy for the person just coming in, the general public is what it is, and the location who has to make money to keep being able to open those doors so that when you want to have a tournament there, they're actually still in business. The one thing that I bought, and this makes me happy, is, you know those things at the bank, or at the fast food, the cow lines, whatever you call them, those velvet ropey things. So we now, most of our tournaments now are in a big enough location that we don't use every single pinball machine in there. In the beginning, it was tricky. We have every single pinball machine in use for a tournament, so these general public couldn't play when they came in. And I can't tell you how many drunks have threatened, or not threatened, have asked me if I would like to go outside with them to talk about it, because they're so mad because they can't play their pinball machine because they came in. So just think about it. If you're doing a tournament, a mini-tournament, doing league, just think about the it's really the business owner and then also presenting the pinball community in a good light be polite i'm you know these people they just played your game well maybe you should have been watching your game between balls so that somebody couldn't just wander up we we have to coexist with the other people I just want to tag on to that because my randos are three to ten years old. Right.
    14:20
    And that's like a whole other thing because toddlers are a lot like drunken adults. Right. But they might cry. They might be even more likely to cry if you tell them not to touch the game. So we have a lot of like stay at the game until the next person comes over at Pizza J because we have so many little kids with their parents in there who love to play. So yeah, I totally feel that because my randos are like this tall. We don't have to worry about that. Okay so we going to talk about just getting started in the as a TD The process itself is pretty easy You basically just go on the IFPA page and follow through the links to get registered as a TD There's no big vetting process or anything.
    15:07
    So we do want to talk about people's motivation and why they became a tournament director in the first place. Did they run into any obstacles along the way? for myself we just had never had organized pinball tournaments in our province before and we had had a couple of very disorganized ones and that we decided to I basically said somebody's got to do this so I guess it would be me I didn't I didn't know that seven years later I'd still be the only one in the whole province that's a tournament director as much as I've been pushing other people to learn and get registered at it.
    15:46
    So that was basically my reason was just so that we could actually have organized tournaments in the province.
    15:54
    Amber? I think part of mine was definitely because I wanted to play. I played my first competitive tournament at the end of 2021, December of 2021. My first competitive tournament ever. And then I started looking for competitive tournaments in Rhode Island, and I realized there were none. So I figured I better run some because that's how I do things. The biggest challenge for me was getting up to speed on the rules of the games, getting to know things, and learning how to run tournaments. So my first tournaments that I ran, I did not have a prize pot. I just asked people for the dollar for IFPA because I was learning. I was honest about the fact that I was learning to be a TD and that there might be bumps. And as I got more confident, I started doing, and we'll talk about formats more in a bit, but as I got more confident, I started doing more formats and started actually doing larger prize pots and things because there's a little less on the line. People tend to stress a little less if something comes up and you take a little time to deal with it. So that was how I dealt with it. But really, I wanted to play more pinball, so I made more pinball happen. I blame JR.
    17:10
    If anybody knows JR in Maine, I think 10, 15-plus years ago, JR was the only place around that did tournaments, and he did them well, and he had a killer collection. If you've been up to his place in Maine, the way it's set up, the way he runs things was pretty much tournament perfection, especially for the time. No IFPA, no PPRs. It was just fun tournaments with food and a whole lot of smoking up there. And that was how I got started. I was like, ooh, wow, people are getting together. They're playing in tournaments. Maybe I have my collection at the time in the basement. Let me start running tournaments. And this is still pre-IFPA, WPPRs. So I was like, okay, I'll have people over. We'll have mini fun tournaments, throw in five bucks, whatever, kind of what Amber was saying. less money, more fun. You get a different type of feeling back then. And that got the whole thing rolling. Then all of a sudden it was like, oh, I'm seeing tournaments that are this IFPA and everything. Signed up for that, started bringing that, built the game room that it is today, and now I've been hosting the bigger events. Same people, but you're bringing more people in. There's two types. You have your casuals and your competitors. And depending, and I'm sure we're going to touch base later on on how it is, but there's that fine line balancing. Do you want to go the fun route? Do you want to go the high-end player route?
    18:37
    Or is there a way to kind of combine it? And that was kind of, you know, I look at it as, I see it as more, and it goes back to my view that I can't play if I'm running. I'm in it more for the social aspect. You know, sharing my collection for the good of pinball, I'm not looking to be a good guy or anything, but kind of that corniness that, okay, I've got these games, invite people over, throw some drinks, league, you know, throw some pizza rolls, get everything in, have a good time. And that was kind of my motivation. And it's kind of built up to having multiple tournaments a year, big tournaments, smaller, weeknight tournaments, all IFPA certified, and then going from there. So that kind of was how I blamed JR, you know, in a good way. So, I mean, he's kind of the granddaddy of tourneys in New England. So my motivation was more about starting as a rules official more than a tournament director. So a lot of my stories have to do with poor rulings. So this is another one.
    19:38
    So I was competing against one of my nemesis at the time on Attack from Mars. And there was a malfunction that happened. The ball didn't lock and it didn't divert properly.
    19:54
    The player went up to the TD and was like, hey, there's something wrong with the game. The game's broken.
    20:00
    The TD threw the game out, and we had to play a new game. It didn't matter that I was destroying them on the game at the time, and I was winning, and it was ball three.
    20:10
    So I was pretty frustrated. After the tournament was over, I looked up the rule set on the IFPA website and said, oh, well, it seems like it was a minor malfunction. I talked to the tournament director afterwards. I'm like, hey, this seems like a minor malfunction. I was pretty frustrated that you threw the game out, and you probably should have ruled it this way.
    20:31
    Then immediately he asked me, do you want to start officiating for my tournaments? I'm like, okay. So it's one less thing for the TD to do. So this TD now could have more time to run the tournament, work with the tournament software, things like that. My job was to make the rulings and go from there. And then so as I got comfortable with rulings, I then started organizing my own tournaments and things like that. Formats that maybe weren't being played very often in the area or more highly competitive stuff because I wanted to see more highly competitive tournaments because I wanted to play in them. So that's how it started for me.
    21:18
    When I started doing tournaments, the only tournaments I really knew about were pool. So we just did double elimination or we did high score tournaments. As I started going around and getting to the Pinball Expo in Chicago and going to PAPO and going to other tournaments and learning more formats, I tend to like to try a lot of different formats The IFPA makes it so that you're kind of in a little box as to how you do it You can't do doubles, can't do split flippers, etc. And groups and all of that But really, the reason I started, like I said, was we had games but really it was just because we would meet people who liked games and they wanted to play but everything that we ever did was driven by somebody saying wow do you think we could do this i don't know why not if you got a game somewhere somebody let you play it then you want to compete it's as easy as let's play a game um and do dollar games i'm sure you guys know what dollar games are, right? Dollar games? You play, you play, you play. We put a dollar on there. Whoever wins gets all the dollars. We've competed. We didn't have any setup, any prize buy or anything. So just have fun. That's the whole key is don't get so tied into the box with what everybody else is doing. If you want to do something, go ahead and do it. That's the way things start. And then We did. We started it. There was nobody else doing anything, playing anybody on pinball anywhere in Columbus at the time, except in their houses.
    23:16
    So next up, we're going to talk a little bit about locations, where you're going to actually hold your tournaments. In some cases, it's somebody's house, like with Chris. but certainly when we started there was only one person that we knew in the province that had a personal collection big enough to actually host a tournament and then so we had to have locations and it started at a barcade in St. John is where we started having them first and then we ended up getting to the point where we're moving them so now we move them through the three major cities in New Brunswick, Moncton, St. John and Fredericton so we rotate them. I still organize them all but we have them in different locations. So I guess that when you were looking at a location to host a tournament in, what are some of the criteria that you look for? You know, the mix of the games that they have, you know, how the games are up kept, the accessibility of the place, you know, just some of the things that you look for when you're looking for a location for a tournament. Teresa, do you want to start this one? I would say that all of the above. All of the above. Generally, you've got to be able to first find a location with some machines that you like to play. I mean, that's a good start right there where you see people come in there who play.
    24:44
    It sounds simple, but all they can do is say no. Yeah, that's true. I'm going to use an example for the people in the front row.
    24:56
    So there's this location in New Hampshire that is world famous and had a ton of pinball machines, but they didn't really work that great. And so a lot of people knew this, a lot of pinball players knew this.
    25:13
    They decided to change that and started fixing up the games, inviting people to come and play on them and show them off. And so now it's sort of a top place to play for tournaments in New England. And so this is a fun spot I'm talking about. Yeah, so the most important thing to me is good playing games, a good variety of games. owners or operators that are reactive to feedback. So saying like, oh, this isn't really how it should play or maybe you should change this setting so that the game is either easier or harder or whatever.
    26:02
    And just having full access to those games. For the bigger tournaments, they've been roping things off, which is great so that we don't have the randos coming in and wandering on in. and they have enough games that they can have the randos go to a different spot to play for pinball and things like that. So just working with the locations and finding a good spot that works for you with games that you can work on, and I feel like it helps everybody. It helps the location drive more people.
    26:40
    You're also giving them feedback on how to make their games better, so things like that. and makes everybody happy.
    26:49
    Mix of games. That is your number one priority when choosing a location. I cannot tell you how many times I hear complaints about some locations and praises about other with mix of games. Prime example, Port City, Modern Stearns, Middle Valley Williams DMDs, classic early 80s. Fun Spot, we know you have everything from the 80s up all the way to the new Jaws. I'll toot my own horn here. IIA has an 80s corner, though I'm kind of getting the fake modern-like Pulp Fiction and Woe Nelly, which is a EM. But yeah, don't boo me. Don't boo me up there with Woe Nelly.
    27:31
    But Mix of Games is important, that everyone likes to play. They don't always want to play the latest and greatest for an entire tournament. I mean, yeah, everybody wants to play the new Jaws. Everybody wants to play Elton John. Everyone wants to play Labyrinth, but you also want to have a Sea Witch or maybe a Whirlwind or a Nineball or my favorite from the tournament a couple months ago. What was it? Joker, Poker or whatever. What was the one? Jokers. Jokers, yes. The one that I ended up winning on. So you want that alphanumeric as well, which is why I bought Brian and Brian's old Whirlwind and everything. But there's Brian up there, the other Brian. Um, so yeah, you want to have a mix of games. So if you're, if you have your own house, yeah, you're going to buy, you want to buy the games that you're going to play. 99% of the time, you're going to play your own games. I go up to my game room. I play, I have a tournament every now and then I'm not going to buy what everyone else wants. And it's kind of my famous thing to say to everybody. If I listen to everybody, I would have every game and I would sell every game because everyone has an opinion on every game. You're never going to satisfy everybody. But if you have a nice balanced mix, some classics, you know, if you really want to go the EM route, a couple of EMs, if you're comfortable with that. I know Dave and Steve have had EMs in the past, which, you know, everyone's like, ooh, let me gravitate over to that. You know, it's kind of nice. You know, we're so like pizza and not pizza. I'm not picking on pizza, Jay. But like a pizza, your mom and pop pizza probably has like one or two games. What are they going to have? They're going to have Venom. They're going to have Elton. You know, they're going to have whatever the latest and greatest is. you kind of want, if you have more than a couple of games, you want to have a nice mix of games. That's going to keep people happy. That's also going to bring more people in.
    29:16
    It'll also speed up the tournament, too, because you don't want to be playing on Godzilla for an hour plus or Guardians. Or if you're on Wonka and everyone's having a half-hour ball time, it's going to take forever. So you get those nasty short games everyone loves but hates to compete on. It makes for a great tournament.
    29:34
    No, definitely. I sadly missed kind of the heyday of pinball in Rhode Island, and I'm trying to bring it back. We previously had Flipside and we had Shelter and those all kind of succumbed to the pandemic Pizza J and of course EMP are the only really two places to play games or do tournaments right now When I sort of fell into the opportunity there were games being operated at Pizza J, which is literally a 10-minute walk from my house, and I knew the guy who operated them. He is a new game junkie. He buys everything shiny that comes out, and if you're lucky, he keeps it for a month before he sells it and buys something new. So my husband and I absolutely love to fix games, and I actually stick around after this because there's an amazing talk about EMs because I took an EM workshop earlier this week as well, so we can get an EM on location. So we brought in the classics. We have a bunch of 70s, 80s, older games that we brought in to give a better mix. So now we have new and old. We've got about 13 games in a pizza restaurant. It's a big restaurant. It's not like you walk in the front door, there's two games, there's a counter, that's it. It's a big place. We've got four games in the back, eight, 10, 12, whatever we can cram into the front. So the location fell in my lap. It was being ready to be a TD. That was really the challenge for me.
    31:11
    Okay, so now you've become a TD. You've found your location. The next thing you're going to need is players.
    31:19
    So I'll just have everybody maybe give a few notes about how they drew players in, whether it was already an active group of people that wanted to have tournaments or whether you had to recruit them. and one that's near and dear to my heart is retaining people or getting them back after the pandemic because I know our league has never recovered. We don't have as many people playing now as we did before the pandemic. So if anybody has notes on how they were able to get people to come back or just how they recruited people in the first place. Amber? Yeah, so we had a small group of people that really wanted to play and then I made sure to get on different social media venues to get information out. One of the most beneficial things about registering a tournament on the IFPA website for me isn't even about the Whoppers. It's about the fact that it's a place where anybody can go and search for tournaments in their area and find them. And that's another way that we found. And honestly, if you've met me, you know, like, if you're playing pinball at Pizza J, I will walk up to you and be like, hey, we have tournaments. come to my tournaments so uh i yeah i just like get i get up there and talk to people i'll tell people about it and i also did a really really traditional kind of silly thing i did those little sheets of paper with the little things you can rip off and i put them at all because i'm in rhode island i've got brown i've got risdy i put them over at the colleges and i've gotten a ton of students as well coming out to do my weekly leagues that we do and tournaments so that's the way I've kind of brought back population. I didn't get to experience it pre-pandemic. We were actually in Baltimore for a few years and moved back to Rhode Island. We had been there previously, but that's the way we're building things up now. The pandemic helped. Before, tournaments were smaller. There was some punch around. Everyone was hungry to play pinball after COVID, and the tournaments just skyrocketed, which is great. I mean, it's great. You're getting more people in, You're getting more locations. The locations are making money.
    33:25
    I mean, Pizza J needs to sell pizza, sell alcohol, sell everything. Fun Spot needs the money. You know, they're a business. They've got to pay their employees, whereas, you know, a home, not so much. It's more, you know, generic. But how do I recruit players? The NEPL helps. So if you're in an NEPL location, people are going to go try it out. a lot of things now, the last three or four seasons, is everyone is traveling. They don't have a home base for NEPL. They're going around hitting, oh, I'm going to hit all the New Hampshire locations. I'm going to hit Northern Mass. I'll maybe go to Chuck's. I'll go to Steve's. I'll go to Ice. I'll go to Brian's when you have the, you know. And I will be going to Brian's. And Fun Spot joined, what, two seasons ago? And you have the banner. So, I mean, that's going to bring people in. And now all of a sudden, oh, what are you doing, you know, Tuesday night? Oh, I'm going to Granite State Pinball, and there's a tournament. And not a tournament, not a league. And it's casual, and, you know, it's not much money. And word of mouth also helps.
    34:31
    Putting out, you know, just little, you know, I don't have the luxury of the colleges, which is a killer idea, by the way, and the pull tabs. But putting little things out on social media. Hey, I'm having league. hey I'm having a tournament things like that people see it make stupid looking trophies you'd be surprised how many people want to come and get a dumb looking trophy throw vanilla ice in a stupid picture with a big turkey leg and they will come I think I had 40 something people at that tournament do they want them oh you won $500 no I want the turkey leg trophy word of mouth, social media And, you know, I think league helps a big amount, too. Having a league location, you get those casual players.
    35:17
    Yeah, I think attracting casuals is a good thing. So one of the best ways to do it is sort of fun formats, so not having serious tournaments. There's a lot of people that are intimidated by just playing in their first tournaments. So, yeah, leagues is a good way.
    35:38
    Doing, like, you know, a flip frenzy is a good way. Or sort of we can talk more about casual versus serious formats later. But, yeah, attracting the casuals is the hard part. Because once they sort of graduate to become serious players, you need to keep getting more casuals in. So I like to run sort of some casual tournaments and some serious tournaments. And so the serious ones are sort of easier to get players. They will come out if the format is serious, and they'll be checking the IFPA website.
    36:23
    They'll know when you're having a big tournament. So, yeah, just think about the formats. And we'll get into that in a bit.
    36:36
    I have, when I started, I used these things called flyers, which were pieces of paper that you put information on and you left them in different locations. And people might just read them or they might take them with them. And nowadays I use social media pretty much only for our bells and chimes stuff. I don't really like it. It's a rabbit hole for me. But the thing that we get most of our players from comes from word of mouth. Our ladies, Bills and Chimes Columbus, has a really – we just keep getting better and better, and a lot of it is because we really like our league. And so most of us, we have like this pyramid scheme kind of league thing going. If you're in a bar and you see someone playing and maybe they win a free game and you hear that knocker or you're watching them and they're doing what they're supposed to do on a game to play well. So here's what we do. We go talk to them.
    37:46
    And you might have to talk to them more than once because they may not come the first time you talk to them. But you talk to them. And our ladies are, like, excited about talking to other ladies. We don't approach too many men saying, oh, wow, you look pretty good. You should come up and play on Monday nights with the Open. They can do that on their own. But we're really good about approaching other women and saying, you look like you like pinball. And most of the good pinball player, women playing ball players we have, this is what they go through. Oh, I'm not good enough to compete. I'm not good enough to play. So you've got a little hurdle there of getting them just to come in and hang, come, just watch, just be around us, we'll show you. And our league is all coaching. You don't know how to play a game, you ask, and we all tell you. We might not tell you the right thing, but we'll all tell you what it is.
    38:42
    So at Board of Mouth, all of the other things that people do to market things, that someone in our league tries to do that stuff. But we all are like, hey, hey you, hey girlfriend, you want to play with us? And most of the time, somehow they tend to come in and try us out. And then some of them don't leave. We just get better and better and better because we're building our little group of people that feel like this is a safe area where we can come, learn how to play better, and nobody's going to give us any crap. So talk, talk, talk, talk. I've done the approaching people that are playing on location and talk to them, and I'm happy to say most of the restraining orders are gone.
    39:33
    So now we've got some players in a location, and you're ready to be a TD. Next you have to decide what formats you're going to use.
    39:44
    And it may be, I know some people have talked about starting with one and then trying different ones. some guilty tend to use the same one all the time because it works for their group so anyway what are your feelings on formats what what do you like to use you change it up or do you use the same one for the same group you know is your priority on maximizing the wobbler points or is it more about building the pinball community and you know is there formats that you've used that you found have been effective one way or another.
    40:19
    Jason, you want to start? Yes. We do league, so we use regular kind of league software. We play five games each league night, and then we use, I think, IFPA way of grouping them. But the formats on the nights when you don't care whether there's whoppers or not, and whether it's IFPA or not, are some of the most fun formats. And I'm just going to name a few because I keep searching them out. Because we got, first we did double elimination and high score. Then my friend Bo and Curran said, I said, we need something else. I can't stand doing the same thing, plus it takes too long. So we started doing three strikes. So from there, we just expanded. We do Price is Right. We do conga or stall ball or zen or whatever you call that.
    41:19
    And now it's gone crazy. There's flip a frenzy. There's nine strikes. There's free strikes. There's this. There's that.
    41:28
    What I do know, though, is that the newer people, they like coming in and playing the regular way, you know, playing the league thing. but it really helps them to get a few evenings of just for fun, something for fun, even if it's the dollar games or the stall ball or whatever, something that gets their heart beating a little bit and going, boy, you guys are fun. So if you can make them think that they're having fun, then they'll come back.
    42:03
    If you haven't played stall ball, I highly suggest you go to the Southern New Hampshire Club and play, I don't know when the next stall ball is going to be, but it'll probably be this evening maybe. I was going to say I'll play you this evening. Yeah, so there's a game called Wildfire that Derek in the back rewrote the code for, and he built in a stall ball mode. So he yells at you when you have stalled. So basically you put a ball in a scoop or anywhere where a ball stalls. You get out of line. Someone comes in, and then they need to stall the ball. And then if you drain, you're out. If you tilt, you're out. So that's a very fun format. Other sort of casual ones, pin golf is a really good one. So that's either score or objective-based. You just need to play until you hit a target score. And however many balls it is, that's what your strokes are.
    42:59
    I like this other one that a lot of people don't do, but it's super casual. For people that don't know the games, you do goal-based. instead of score-based. So that is, you know, get three rooms on Adam's family or start the multi-ball on Attack from Mars. You don't have to worry about your score. You don't have to worry about anything else. You just have to do one thing. And that gets a lot of people to learn something new about the game. Maybe it's something that you don't necessarily go for all the time or something that you're not really familiar with. You become familiar with it, and that's a way to, like, learn the game. Another format, which is really fun, is called Critical Hit. So you get these cards, and they have certain powers, and you can be like, take your hands off the flippers. So you can throw it on someone. They have to take their hands off the flippers.
    43:53
    Or play an extra ball. Or cover up the score. Or switch scores. Or switch scores, yeah, switch players. That happens to me a lot, where I blow up the ball one, and then someone switches with me. So it's a really cool format. It was started by Carl D'Angelo, who did InDisc out in California.
    44:16
    And then there's always the more serious formats like target match play, regular match play. There's one here this weekend that's a card format. So you have to put up your best five games in a row on a card.
    44:31
    And each card is $20. So if you screw up your first game, there goes $20. So yeah those are some of the fun formats I try to mix it up You want to mix it up because you want to know your target audience You not going to always get the high players You're not always going to get the low-end players. And you've got to kind of accept the fact that you can't please everyone. So I'll start doing, you know, I'll do like a couple of weeks ago or last week, match play. Simple. Everyone knows it. It gives a good amount of WPPR points. You get a good crowd. It runs itself, which we'll talk about software, but I will drop in, you know, the match play. software. Another format that I started doing last year was Amazing Race. If you're familiar with the show, you can make that into a tournament, which is IFPA allowed. And after talking with good old Bowen about it, we did a test one with him and of course he won it. But you can really juice it up with having roadblocks, U-turns, things like that, where you have to play two games, you can get eliminated. You can send someone back. They can fast forward. So you have a qualifying where now you're taking the qualifiers and moving them in the later rounds, which also helps with speed because now you don't have those extra eight people running in the first few games where you have to wait for 20 or 30 people to play a game. And it's, you know, before someone gets eliminated, everyone has to play each game, lowest score, you're out. So some poor, you know, person is going to have to get eliminated on game one. But then you bundle it with a qualifier. Okay, now you play a two- or three-hour, maybe a max match play, since Flip Frenzy isn't really IFPA-friendly anymore. But then the downfall is you're cutting 50% of the crowd out, but they got to play three hours. So it's balancing your crowd. You know who's going to advance. You know who's not going to. You could always add a B division for those people that don't make Amazing Race and do like a two-strike or a one-strike knockout. Give them a little something. Throw them $30 or $40, a little trophy. Off they go. They're satisfied. Your high-enders are satisfied. They're building up the WPPR points going through Amazing Race, and you get that nice balance. So, yeah, match play, target match play. Amazing Race is, I think, my favorite one now. So I did love Flip Frenzy, but, yeah, that one just got destroyed by IFPA. But we'll always have Max Matchplay.
    47:08
    Max Matchplay is pretty close. Which is, yeah, unless you're running it, and then it's the biggest pain in the butt in the world. But anyway, I watch what all of these guys are doing, and I try to do as many different types of tournaments in Rhode Island as I can because I'm an army of one, and I want my players to get experience with different formats and feel comfortable actually going to other tournaments. That's really my goal with them. I can't give them 50 tournaments a month because it's just me. So I try to do an assortment of formats, be it in my Bells and Chimes tournaments, which are once a month, or in my Open tournaments, which are also monthly, and we do run leagues as well. Usually kind of the entry level, first one is free sort of thing, is the league. It's comfortable. You're social. You're in a group. It's not scary. So I get people playing in league, and then we do our open tournaments, our women's tournaments, and I try to just switch up that format so that people get really comfortable. Definitely use match play because I can't brain everything all the time. I do play in my tournaments because otherwise I wouldn't get whoppers at all. So, yeah, I like to switch it up. Also, mine are a lot smaller tournaments than Chris's, so I can play in them.
    48:29
    And I know we're getting short on time here. Maybe just a very quick word about what software you use, whether you like it or not. I already said I use MatchPlay, so that's it. MatchPlay.
    48:41
    Get in the beta. Use it and the money. Use MatchPlay. Fun fact, MatchPlay got its start out in San Francisco for our San Francisco League. So we got to, I've been using it since the beginning. It's awesome.
    48:55
    The guy that wrote it, Andreas, he's really receptive to feedback. He is really good at what he does. And everyone that wants to be a TD should pay to use MatchPlay. Get the pro account. It's totally worth it. And it integrates with Scorbit.
    49:17
    I knew that was coming. We use MatchPlay. We use Chalange sometimes. I have used Brackalope in the past. I do suggest that no matter what tournament software you use, you familiarize yourself enough that if you have to go to paper and pencil, you can do it.
    49:41
    Well, that's the items that we were going to cover. I guess we have time for a question or two. Three questions. So does anybody have a question for the panel? Yes. You were talking about attracting new players, but how about retaining new players? Because I've had, you know, running into teams that have been here. I never know why. Like, were they not having fun? Like, because they were getting their butts kicked by, you know, a really good player. and also try to balance that too with really good players.
    50:18
    Yeah, so the question was about not only attracting new players but retaining players. And as I mentioned, COVID really knocked that out of our league. We're a small population to start with. We're only three-quarters of a million people in a province three times the size of Massachusetts. So it's tough for us to get that many people. but yeah any tips on retaining players making sure that they always be communicating try to get them to sign up for the socials and things like that email them so Derek back there he has an email list and he emails out every time there's a new tournament and so just to remind people hey this is coming up and then oh you better get your tickets fast and all of his tournaments sell out in like one minute because he reminds people over and over again, this is going to sell out, this is coming up. Kind of gets the people wanting to register really fast. So he's really good at that. He's really good at the socials, so just get really good at social media, emailing, talking with them. Just say, you know, hey, I saw you came to our first tournament. You haven't come back. Is there anything we can do differently? Things like that. Asking for feedback, maybe sending out a survey. things like that. Yeah, Providence is really small.
    51:45
    If I don't run into you walking down the street, it's probably a weird month. We're a really tiny town. Yeah, so what I find a lot of the time is I really try to connect with people when they first come to my tournaments or leagues and just kind of say like, hey, this is all of our social media stuff. Social media really is it. It's a necessary evil. I'm sorry. If you want to be a TD and get people, at least Instagram.
    52:18
    Do the Instagram. A lot of people have left Facebook. They still do Instagram. I have a website. I have Instagram. I also have Facebook.
    52:26
    Anyway, but yeah, just really connect with people. Make sure they have all your social media stuff because you'll see them follow you, and then you'll have the opportunity to reach back out because it's that initial connection where, so you can do follow-up, that's the real challenge for sure.
    52:41
    Yeah. Any other questions? Yes. So we've been running tournaments for about six months now, and one thing that I've been struggling with is prizes for people, the winners. So in general, there's going to be stuff from Stern Art and other pinball-related stuff that they need to put together. We'll do it for the top players, but trying to expand out to maybe cash prizes or trophies and stuff like that, but ideas.
    53:19
    What other people have? Yeah, I'm jumping on this, and then Chris is going to jump on this, because Chris does amazing trophies, too. I have always been like a real artsy-craftsy person. I make most of my trophies. But I will say Stern Army has been totally awesome for providing prizes for stuff. If counting on your type of location, I partner with local breweries for, like, gift certificates and swag. I partner with the location I'm at. I don't own Pizza J. Pizza J doesn't own my machines. Like, we're separate entities that work closely together. So PCJs will actually, like, give me, if they have fancy glasses that they're doing that season or whatever, like, they give me swag.
    54:03
    I'll get swag from the manufacturers. And then, yeah, I try to make some fun trophies or have, like, little fun prizes sometimes. Sometimes I'll have, like, little door prizes or, like, last place prizes.
    54:14
    Love the last place prizes. Caboose. Bring them prizes. Yeah. Drawings. Yeah. Winners can get stuff, but if you award prizes at any of them, lesser skilled players won't feel discouraged. They'll want to come back. They'll say, you know, I have a chance to be a winner, even if I'm not the best football player. Yeah, random drawings. They do that a lot at Interium. Everybody comes in, and then they'll have a big pool of prizes that have been donated, and they'll do stuff. But really, it's starting to talk to local businesses and things that might have the same appeal to your players and try to start getting some donations, for sure. And Chris does awesome trophies. The trophies. I mean, and cash. I don't usually do prizes. I'll stick with cash and trophies. And you want to advertise what the cash is. So you're going to roughly know how many players you're going to get, give or take. And using the whole thing with social media, advertising word of mouth. Say, hey, maybe I'll get 40 people in at $30 a head at maybe the $1,000 cash prize. And then throw some ridiculously dumb trophies up there, which is how I advertise. The May 4th tournament, I ordered the trophies back in January. There's plenty of places. I get them from a place in Houston that makes them. I have a disco ball Death Star from May the 4th. It's ridiculous. Throw that up there and say, ooh, look what you can win, and the next thing you know you're getting people interested in signing up. And you want to have a lot of trophies. I try to have five or six. And that kind of goes to what I said earlier, having an A and a B division. if you give the people that don't make finals a chance to win a smaller amount of money and a small trophy for their efforts they're not feeling like oh i'm coming and that's the complaint i get oh i don't want to come here and pay so so and so my fee because i have zero chance of winning you know oh i can win the smaller trophy and i can get a little extra cash for the cause yeah they're not going to you know pay a house payment but it's a little something that motivates the lesser people that aren't playing in the finals, and kind of separates it from the WPPR players.
    56:21
    Just to add on to that, yeah, his last tournament he ran, it was the bottom eight players actually competed for the B division. It was April Fool. So it wasn't the top eight, and then the next eight, it was the top eight and then the bottom eight. So the people in the middle got screwed this time, but, you know. They needed to play better. play better or worse I don't know why he's complaining he was in the top 8 and his wife was in the bottom 8 A winner B winner and yeah she got like a little he got a taller trophy she got a little one and it was a little bumblebee with a gun because it was the shootout kind of play on words it's little things like that and then you see all the sad faces oh I really wanted that bumblebee trophy okay you know it was a $15 trophy It's a little piece of custom plastic. But, you know, it – They love it. Yeah, people love it. I mean, I know that would be what I would be going – I'm not a top 1,000 player. I'm going after the B trophy just because I like to have them with the little trophies.
    57:25
    And I guess we have time for one more quick question if anyone has one. Derek looks like he has one.
    57:32
    No, no, no. No, I guess that's it. So thank you, everybody. Oh, we got one. Oh, whoa. I did. It was on the slide right. I mentioned that I do all of my Swappers because I'm the only one doing mine. And actually, Tish called that out, too. She said she does formats that aren't, that are just fun and are. So we did try to cover it where we could. We weren't going to get into a huge heated debate about it because. Well, it's more a case of do you do Swappers to attract the higher end people usually? Yep. Yeah, I do about 95% Whoppers, even for the casual tournaments. For the critical hit one, you're allowed to do Whoppers, but I don't because it changes the feelings that people have towards the tournament.
    58:24
    I would be very pissed if someone swapped scores with me after two balls. Now it's like, now I'm screwed. So I think doing Whoppers attracts a lot of the higher-end players, especially like big Whopper events.
    58:43
    Bundle it with league. So I do a – you have NAPL, and then I do an IIA league, which is like a Herb scoring eight weeks, play whatever game, highest score, 100, 90, 85, if you look it up, if you're not familiar with the format. and you bundle that the same night as NEPL League, and you'd be surprised. I can get 20 up to 25 people. Maybe a dozen are doing NEPL, but the rest are coming for a casual, non-stressful, and they're still getting their WPPR points. So, yeah, if you bundle it with different things, too, it's a great way to people get their points, but at the same time without the high stress of, oh, I'm in a match play single event type thing. Thank you, everyone, for coming out, and thank you for everyone on the panel. I didn't get a Fun Spot trophy.