time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff tiolis you can find us on our facebook group also on twitter at pinball profile email us pinball profile at gmail.com tell us what you'd like to hear and please subscribe on itunes joining us right now a guy who's been in a lot of tournaments and run a few too bob matthews hey bob how are you hey great how you doing jeff Well, Bob, I can talk to you about a lot of things, and we're going to bring you back on Pinball Profile for some of these other things. But what I want to focus on right now is talking about maybe there are a bunch of leagues out there that maybe want to host their own tournament and bring people from outside like yourself and some of the other big wigs in the IFPA and some people challenging for some of the Papa Circuit events. What would you suggest for hosting a tournament? Maybe it's a two-day tournament and something that's obviously bigger than what you're running at your house, but not as big as, say, Pinburger Papa. The main thing you need to think about is who your customers are. Because really the players are your customers in a case of a pinball tournament. You need to think about things like how many people you're going to have. Do you have a location that's going to actually have an appropriate number of games for how many people you're expecting there? You need to consider difficulty settings. Whether you have a mixture of skill levels, it's different than if you have people that are at a similar skill level. When you've got a Papa-style tournament, you have people running the gamut from beginners to Keith Elwin and company, and they have multiple tiers to accommodate all the different skill levels. If it's kind of a casual group where the players are kind of similar in skill or the ones that don't worry about the differences, you can kind of approach that differently than if you've got a bigger range of skills and you may have a bunch of players that feel intimidated by the A players. One thing that we did for Indisc that we weren't the first to do it, but we were one of the earlier adopters to actually make it significant, is putting up the B division and actually having some decent prizes and or trophies for that. And with the B division, are people electing to join the B division, or are they restricted based on where the rankings are? Most tournaments that do divisions, you restrict it based on rankings. And also, they typically restrict it to if you won a division in a previous year, even if you're not ranked really high, you have to step up to the higher division the following year. So you only get one year of sandbagging. Yeah, but if you're going to have a mix of skill levels of people that you want to be there, you have to actually have something in it for the lower-level people, for them to want to pitch in their time and money to show up, because they know they're going to get stomped on by the better players in the area. There's no point in them showing up. So you've got to have something there to incentivize the low- to medium-quality players to actually be there at the event and to have fun at the event. And that's why a lot of tournaments have a novice division or a B division. when there's going to be a broad spectrum of players. If you had a modest-sized event and you kind of wanted to step it up the next level and apply for the circuit, you need to kind of keep things like that in mind because when you're going to get circuit-level players, they're going to beat up on the local casuals. And that's going to be a turnoff to the local casuals. If there's kind of nothing in it for them, they're not going to want to come back the following year. So, Bob, I guess the question is how many machines, what kind of formats you're going to be using for this, what different eras? Well, formats can be pretty wide open. There's, you know, the folks at the IFP website, they've got a nice listing of the different kind of formats you can use, match play or qualifying in different flavors. One thing you need to consider is how much time people are going to be spending on this compared to whatever else they might be doing. So, for instance, the Texas show recently adopted something that basically says, because we have this big show going on, we don't want people to feel like they have to give up seeing the show to play in the tournament. So what they and this past year California Extreme did is set up something that says you only get so many tries for qualifying, and then you're done. And that way people who want to get in, basically you don't feel compelled to like stand there in the line waiting to play your turn all weekend trying to get in and miss the show that's going on at the same time. You know there's some people that are going to want to see the show and not just play tournament all day. That's interesting Bob. I know that Texas did that and I didn't know that about California Extreme but I would imagine there some pros and cons to that when you limit it If you traveling a long distance to go to a big event and there going to be a lot of people there and some big prize money if you limited that kind of handcuffs you if you have a few bad games It does. That's why when you're going to do limited qualifying, what I recommend to people is that you give them typically, on average, about three tries per machine. One try per machine, in my mind, I know some of the European tournaments do this. I don't personally advocate it. Just as you say, if you're doing just one try, if you're not familiar with the kickouts on that game, or you don't completely know the rules, or the machine is playing differently than the one you're used to, you don't have enough time to find that out and put up a competitive score. So if you're in an event where you want to limit qualifying, I like to recommend to folks that they give people at least three tries at a game so that they actually have a chance to get a feel for the machine and have a decent opportunity to put up a good-for-them score. If you have more than maybe five tries per machine, it's not really limiting it in a meaningful way compared to what people are likely to do anyway. I'm not sure what's next on your checklist of how to run a tourney, but I would imagine figuring out the hours that you're going to have for qualifying, if there is a qualifying. And certainly there's the volunteer setup. You can't do this as a one-man show. Right. A large event is a lot more work than a lot of tournament directors realize. getting help in multiple aspects of the tournament is really important. A couple of things I'd see some shows have issues with, that they don't have enough tech support available to fix machines that develop issues during the tournament. Or if they do have a tech support, it's basically the tournament director, and then if there's another game in progress or somebody needs a ruling, the guy is too busy fixing the machine to come over and make the ruling, and that kind of slows the whole event down. So you need to basically make sure that you're not wearing six hats during the whole show, that things can manage themselves. You need to have scorekeepers. If you don't have enough scorekeepers, that's going to bottleneck things. If you're using some kind of software, you know, like Carl's or Brackalope or whatever, the people that are keeping score actually have to know how to use it. The whole thing about rulings is important. If you're participating in the tournament, normal protocol is that you are not supposed to make a ruling on a game you're playing in. So if you're a tournament director and you don't have somebody else in a responsible position, what happens if you're playing and something goes wrong in your game and somebody needs to make the call of what do you do? You need to have somebody else available to make a ruling so that it doesn't look like you're biasing it in your own favor. Getting the machines in and out of the place, getting all the machines in the first place, you know, is going to be a chore. Spacing is definitely going to be an issue too. You know, let's say you've got a venue, maybe it's a pool hall or something, there are 20 existing games. We've talked about you've got to preset, make sure you turn off all the extra balls and make the games maybe a little bit tougher, tighten the tilts, all those kind of things. But the spacing for queuing and having enough elbow room really to play and for people to sit and wait around, I mean, those are other issues too. Yeah, some locations are fine for casual play, but they make poor tournament venues. I know a certain venue in the Northwest I will not go back to for tournaments. People who know me will know which one I'm talking about because the lighting in there is too poor and the machines are too close together, people coming and going to play a game, basically you have to kind of elbow your way through people that are playing to get out from the games at the end of the row back to the beginning of the row. And it's just a very unpleasant experience with everybody bumping into each other. Sometimes you even end up with people bashing fingers. I like to tell people if you're going to set up an event, make sure there's a couple of inches of space between the heads of the games so that there's at least maybe eight inches between adjacent machines' flipper buttons so that you don't bash hands with the guy playing at the machine next to you. Sometimes more is less. Yeah, basically some locations like to cram in as many games as they can just because two more games is that much more money coming in to them when they're operating at the location. But that makes it less comfortable for the players in a tournament setting when you don't want to be all on top of each other. And then again, the lighting, like I say, some places have low lighting because, well, that's just the atmosphere of the place. but in a tournament situation, you know, you don't want a lot of noise in the background, and you don't want a lot of dim lights, because you want to actually be able to see the game, especially some of these newer games that have all the flashing LEDs and everything Something like Ghostbusters or a couple of the other games you know when they go into flash mode If you in a dark room it really hard to see what going on with the game You mentioned tournament settings and that's another thing that really depends on the skill level of people you're getting in. It also relates to how many machines you have, because one thing players hate is long lines. If you're expecting, like, 100 people, you probably ought to have at least 15 games there, because otherwise it's like the ratio of people to games is such that you're going to have a long wait. What is a good ratio? I figure you should probably try and have at least one game for every maybe six people you're expecting to participate. So pre-registration certainly would help with organizing, I would think. Yeah, it helps because that gives you an idea of what you're expecting. The other thing that relates to that is the long lines is related to the game setup. You don't want to make your machines too hard because then people get frustrated, especially the less skilled players. But by the same token, if you make them too easy, basically the length of time you wait to play a game is, okay, how many people are waiting in line, and how long does the game take? And if your games are set up too easy for tournament-caliber players, so that the game time is, you know, like 10 minutes, if there's like four or five people in line, then you're talking 40, 50 minutes before the guy at the end of the line gets to play their game. And they're not going to like that at all. All the stuff we're talking about, it's worst when it's unexpected. If you go to Papa, you know there are going to be long lines, you know you're going to have to wait at times. But if you're going to some tournament where you're not expecting long lines, it's going to tick you off even more than if you're going and kind of expecting, well, yeah, that thing that I don't like may happen to me, but that's just part of going to that event. Bob, let's talk a little bit about scheduling. A couple of things that have gotten tournaments kind of blacklisted temporarily from a circuit or from certain people going is when you screw up the schedule. I've been to some events where they were supposed to be done by midnight with the playoffs. Basically, the tournament directors kind of didn't anticipate how long the playoffs were going to take, and some of us were there until like five or six in the morning, and that never goes over well for obvious reasons. The two biggest causes of problems in playoffs are when the format is one where there's lots of matches and some of the game times can get long and the tournament directors didn't think ahead as far as, you know, okay, I want to have all these playoffs, how long is it actually going to take? And if you underestimate the game times, you know, the more rounds you have, the more being off magnifies. Running 30 minutes late per round is if you only run one or two rounds, no big deal. But if you're running, you know, if your playoffs are going to take six rounds, then suddenly you've blown it up. Another thing that's happened at a couple events is if you have more than one event going on, like you have a main event and a classics event, or you have main event and pin golf and some other things. One thing that we do at InDisc, and a lot of the other circuit events now do is they have the Classics playoff Saturday night and then the main event playoffs on Sunday. And one of the main reasons for that is that if you have a lot of the same people playing in the main event playoffs and the Classics playoffs, having them both scheduled to take place at the same time just doesn't work because then basically it's like my next opponent in Classics isn't available because they're playing it open. I've been to a couple tournaments where I actually had to wait, you know, like an hour and a half to two hours for my next match because my opponent was busy around in one of the other events. Luckily, I haven't seen too many of those where they've gone simultaneously, so hopefully that's a thing of the past. Yeah. Starting late is a bad idea, too, and some of that's related to just not preparing well enough or not having enough volunteer help. I mean, it's traditional for pinball events to start late. I mean, even ours did. Basically, a half hour late is sort of normal for a lot of events, but if you're starting an hour and a half or two hours late, That really annoys people, especially if you have like a limited period of qualifying where it's only so many hours to qualify. And if you're taking a chunk of that time away from people, that gets really annoying because it makes the lines longer and it stresses them out because they have basically they say, well, I have less time to actually qualify now than I expected to have. I've noticed that a lot of tournaments, and I really like this, to encourage volunteers have a special hour for just volunteers to qualify. I think that's a good idea. Yeah, that's one thing we do, and that's exactly why we do it, because it's easier to get volunteers if you give them something. And basically most of the people you going to want to be volunteers are going to be the players because well you know there not a whole lot of spectators But incentivizing people to be scorekeepers by giving them an extra hour that a real strong motivator We had plenty of scorekeepers at Indisc Having that extra hour to qualify at the end was a significant motivator for several of them. The last thing I can think of is certainly the prizing. And you mentioned maybe having different divisions and whatnot. Some good suggestions, Bob? Prizing really, again, it depends on the expectations of the people that are going to come to your event. If you've got a casual event, you don't even need to have prizes if people are just there to have fun. If you've got a bit more than a casual event that's going to have maybe 20 people, you might make it winner take all. How you distribute whatever you're giving out really depends in part on what the mixture of your participants is. If everybody kind of feels they have a decent shot to win, winner take all for a small event isn't that bad an idea, but if there's a kind of a broader range of skills, then that's where it's good to start paying out more positions. And the larger the event gets, in particular when there's going to be a wider range of skills, the more positions you want to pay out, because that just gives more people a chance to actually feel that they got something back out of coming to the tournament. There's no magic ratio. Again, it kind of depends on, you know, what your people's expectations are, But if you can, it's good to kind of pay out maybe one out of three or one out of four people at least cash in some fashion. The thing that's a tradeoff there is the more people who do cash, the smaller the top prizes can be because you're distributing the funds then over more people. So, again, you have to kind of keep in mind who your customers are, and you have to kind of figure it. The other thing is you scale it round by round. What about all the money that comes in if it's a straight entry? Does it all go back? What happens is that the tournament director will pay back pretty much everything that comes into the pot after they cover expenses. You may have to pay something to the venue to use the venue. That was our case this time at InDisc. Everyone had basically $20 of what everyone paid went to the facility that we were using. And then a chunk gets taken out for trophies or plaques or translights or basically whatever you're giving out to the winners that was not provided free by a sponsor. And then basically after you take out those, the normal protocol is to pay back everything in prize money. A lot of tournaments do that by basically saying, you know, you first place gets X percent of the pot and second place gets Y. And, you know, just make sure all those percentages add up to 100 and that the pot is defined as, you know, whatever people have paid minus trophies, plaques, prizes, whatever. Or charity. Or charity, yeah. Because a lot of times, you know, like Project Pinball and such, you know, you might do something for them and say, you know, 50% goes to them, and the other 50% is the prize fund that somebody is getting, you know, 40% of or whatever it is based on their finishing position. I think as long as you're transparent and let everyone know prior to it, I think you're safe. Yeah, yeah, be transparent. I generally suggest as a guideline that trophies be sort of 10% of the total, plus or minus, you know, 5, depending on how into hardware your particular customers are. The larger event you have, the more there's going to be some people who want something to stick on their desk or on their wall or whatever. Because, I mean, the money is temporary. But our trophies, especially our acrylic things, are really popular with folks. Bob, I prominently display all of my participation awards. Yeah, that's one thing. A long time ago, I remember the tournament back east handed out these participant things. They're like, no, no, no. Participant things, don't waste the money on it. If somebody actually, like, you know, won a prize, fine. But, you know, participant things is basically a waste of money, and you're better off getting, you know, decent trophies or plaques rather than these little participant things. You're breaking my heart, borderline bullying me right now, Bob, with your excellent play. Hey, thanks very much for doing this. I'm going to get you back on again soon because there's a lot I want to talk to you about. Okay, yeah, anytime, Jeff. Glad to talk to you. Yeah, always great. Bob Matthews, this is Pinball Profile. You can follow us on Facebook, also on Twitter at Pinball Profile, and subscribe to iTunes. I'm Jeff Teolis. 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