It's time for another Pinball Profile. I'm your host, Jeff Teolst. You can find everything on PinballProfile.com. We have a great Facebook group as well. We're on Instagram at Pinball Profile. If you'd like to email, it's pinballprofile at gmail.com. And if you'd like to show your support, don't worry, the show is always free, but we thank everyone on our Patreon. Thanks to GME Law and Francis W., Fox Cities Pinball, Derek S., Jerry S., and more. That's patreon.com slash pinballprofile. It is the summer, but I already have this marked on my calendar, and in fact, I had it marked on my calendar last September. This September, the return of the UK Open, but as great as that tournament is, it just got a whole lot bigger with the addition of the European Pinball Championship. Yes, that is one of the five pinball majors in the IFPA, and the madman who's putting this all together and has done so well for so many years with the UK Open, like he doesn't have enough on his plate, Neil McCray joins us. Neil, how are you, buddy? I'm great, Jeff. I think Mad Mad is absolutely how I might position it. I'm great. Looking forward to a phenomenal tournament. Neil, you're well-traveled. There's probably not a handful of people more passionate about pinball than yourself in every aspect, but you certainly travel the world and see different pinball places, pinball tournaments, and have just really tried to bring a lot of that back to the UK, which you did with the UK Open. And I know when you first started this, you know, you were really influenced a lot by what Jim, Carl and Jay and everyone does at Indisc. So you kind of, in a way, introduced that card format to the UK. That was really the first time a lot of these players had ever seen that. Yeah, absolutely. Especially in the unlimited format. So there's a few little tournaments here that have done card but kind of limited and not in the style of kind of void and recue, void and recue and the prize pool and stuff like that. So the thing I want to do at a pinball event, Jeff, I want to play as much pinball as I possibly can. Literally from nine in the morning until they kick me out. You know, that is the goal. And, you know, there's some formats where that's great. There's some formats where it's not. But I really think that, you know, there's nothing better than card format for playing a lot of pinball. And actually last year we broke all the records on match play for the number of pinball matches in an event, which I'm very proud of actually. What you just said there is so true and I'm the same way. When I go to a pinball event, I want to play as much pinball. And sometimes you're capped because, oh, I'm out of entries or whatever. So you have the opportunity to go back. And by the way, let's point out at the UK Open, very affordable, only five pounds a card. You know, a lot of these bigger tournaments, especially Major S tournaments, are a lot more expensive and limited. So you're, you know, you've got two good things there, two feathers in your cap, if you will, that it's only £5 a card. So it's easier to void and requeue. And again, the unlimited aspect with the schedule. So I'm glad you've done that. Yeah. And also, if you want to buy 10, it's £45. So the way I look at it, Jeff, is if you go into any arcade here in the UK or in Europe, it's a euro or a pound to play a game. We kind of have it in that kind of fold. Of course, it's not quite the same, but in many of these trips that I've done and people coming to the UK Open, probably the cheapest part of it is actually the tournament cost. You've got to travel, you've got to stay in a hotel, you've got to eat, you've got to drink, you've got to buy merch, etc. You've got to nip into London and buy a signed autograph of King Charles or something like that. So quite often, this part of it is, you know, if you want to play, you can play all day or not. But also, you know, last year we had some players who qualified on their third card and then actually went on to try and beat their third cards and didn't. So, you know, there's a belief that if you spend more money, you'll do better. I think there's an element of that, especially for less good players like me, I take a while to adapt to harder games. But if you're a top player, then you're a top player, then you're a top player. Whether it's this format or another format, you're going to be in the finals or you're going to get one of the buys. And of course there's the odd freak thing where someone doesn't qualify, I'm like, wow, but that's Pinball, that's the excitement, that's the highlights. My God, last year at DPO, Vigo didn't qualify and everyone was like, oh my God, what happened? That's the excitement. And also, we're doing a different format here for UPC. Once in a while, mixing it up, I think is exciting. It doesn't mean you're playing the same format. This is the thing about formats, Jeff. People have got fans of every format. I love match play when you're playing against four players and you get a lot of pinball. I love card formats, you play a lot of pinball and it's tough to be consistent. Head-to-head I love as well, but what I'm less a fan of is how we run a lot of events here in Europe, It's kind of head-to-head league format that you play 10, 15 games and if you don't qualify it's kind of all over. Whereas for their event, if you arrive Thursday morning at 10 when we open, for the EPC you can be playing until 11 at night on the Saturday to qualify. Literally three solid days of playing pinball. Before we get into the tournaments, let's talk about the new location because this is now the fifth year of the UK Open. This will be five years in the world for myself. Jeff, and it's funny you mentioned getting the autograph of King Charles because I actually did do a tour of Buckingham Palace on one of these UK open trips. And the new location is pretty close to Buckingham Palace. Tell us about the new, is it pronounced Wandsworth or Wandsworth? Wandsworth. Wandsworth Civic Centre in central London. Wandsworth. Now everyone's going to call it Wandsworth. No, no. No, look, actually, when I first moved to London, I thought it was Wandsworth about 25 years ago. So yeah, we're in Wandsworth. We're in a kind of an amazing venue that's actually owned by the local council. It's a kind of more traditional kind of British location, an old building with chandeliers and wood, lots of wood panels and carpets. Is there a torture room like the Tower of London? There is a room that could be used as a torture room, should we require it, but I think the torture room will be some of the games if we set them up how we like to set them up. But yeah, this is quite a historic building and actually the company that runs it and the council, this is one of the things that appealed to us. They run it as a not-for-profit organization, so they literally give this building out to folks who want it and they don't make any money on it. They just want to return their costs. And UK Open is an organization in Pinball Republic, which supports the UK Open. We're very much in the same light. We don't make any money out of this. Everything that we do goes back into either the club or the games that we're using or the team that putting the team into hotels or the transportation. So there a real kind of alignment between them And actually I just mentioned we actually had two other venues Jeff And this is the challenge of operating in somewhere like London You one of the biggest cities in the world Millions of people live here mass transit systems The size of one of the bigger boroughs is as big as somewhere like Boston It just a huge location What we found out, there's another venue that we have, which is in Earl's Court, a place that's very famous, used to be a really amazing venue there for pop gigs. In fact, your favorite band led Zeppelin. Zeppelin Baby. It's even in the Pitbull machine. It is indeed, although sadly spelt wrongly, but we'll give them a pass on that. But yeah, we had a phenomenal venue there. But actually when they understood it was a competition, they bailed out of it, which is really disappointing because this venue was stunning. Not that the one that we've got isn't great, it's equally as good. And then we had a backup and that pulled out. So a lot of people were saying, hey Neil, why aren't you, we kind of announced the details maybe a little bit later than, so the guys in Sweden who are hosted next year, they've announced already before we even ran. But we wanted to make sure it was 100%, contracts signed, fees paid, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it took us a bit of time to get there. And we've got the core team of Pinball Republic have been down to have a look at it. And we're excited about it. The great thing about it is it's literally, as you say, literally a stone's throw from the West End of London. And there's lots of hotels around it. There's actually a kind of another venue across the road that's got a few pinball machines in it. There's a brewery just around the corner. There's hotels all around the venue. There's Airbnbs that are a bit easier here as well. Anybody who's been to London knows that you can get anywhere with the Tube. It's the absolute best transit. I mean, maybe you proper in London are frustrated at times, but when we see what's available in other cities, you know, the Tube is elite. It's kind of like the New York subway system. You can get anywhere. So it doesn't really matter where you stay. You can stay close by. You can Airbnb. You can get a hotel. And I'm excited that it's in a new place in central London. So that's going to be exciting for sure. So again, the EPC, for those that don't know, the European Pinball Championship, one of the five majors, it rotates to a different country every year. And last year, kudos to Stefan Riedler, who did an amazing job in Austria. Yeah. And I've been to three already and I've had great experiences. Germany was wonderful. I was in Denmark as well and they just seem to be getting better and better. So excited that it's going to be in central London as part of the UK Open. We should point out tickets go on sale in North America, at least in the Eastern time zone at 4 p.m. on July 1st. What is that in the UK? What is that in most parts of Europe? I guess it changes, doesn't it? Yeah. It's 8pm here in the UK and 9pm in Eastern Europe. And then as you go further, if you're in Greece, it'll be 10pm. So we wanted this to be during the day for most of the big pinball locations, even the West Coast. It's a reasonable time to make it as easy for people to get tickets as possible. Your website's great. It's playpinball.uk. Is that where we're going to be going to get the tickets? Yeah, playpinball.uk or even ukopen.net, both of them will take you to the website and you can get tickets from there. So we use Ticket Tailor, which if you've gone to Indisc or Yagpin or Jermaine's Northwest event, they all use Ticket Tailor. And actually, I was the first to try it because we were looking for an alternative to Eventbrite where the fees started to get a little bit challenging. So we've gone to TicketTaylor and their site's just phenomenal. And yeah, you can buy tickets there and you can buy up to four tickets. So if you've got a family, that makes it a little bit easier to chuck everything in the basket and hit the button. So excited about it. The ticket's going on sale. It's always a nerve-wracking moment because it's kind of the first sign of, you know, what kind of tournament is this going to be? We sold out twice on ticket sales day, but last year we kind of sold out, but then we were able to extend the number of places in association with the venue we were in. They had quite a tight, but they made some changes in that venue, so we were able to actually sell a lot more tickets last year than we'd normally done. And we sold out as well. So again, I'm excited about that, hoping that we get as many pinball players in to play. I always say this to the team, find a time when you can just stand and look at the event running because it's a tough thing to do this, it's hard work and just having a moment that you can remember. I remember the first time I ran this, I couldn't remember any of it, it was like a blur, Jeff. So just have that minute just to see how people with their smiles on their faces, people getting, you know, I always get amused when people go nuts because the games beat them slightly. But it's a great thing to watch people play and enjoy it. We should watch out on July 1st, by the way, the current number of tickets being sold is 300. You know, that's certainly a comfortable zone. Again, should there be a demand and possibility to expand, that could happen. But right now we're capping this at 300 people. So again, on July 1st at either playpinball.uk or you can go to ukopen.net and we'll post those on Pinball Profile, the socials for you. So the EPC, when you decided to take this on, you know, you've been to several. The fact that you're able to couple this with an already, in my mind, major tournament. I think the IFPA should really consider the UK Open as a major and I think there's been a lot of talk of that and Jagpin and some of these really massive shows. But you've now got two. One was great. One was enough to get me there. Two, it's a can't miss. Yeah, I mean, that's why I'm really excited about it. And we've extended the calendar by one day. So normally we would start on Friday, we start on Thursday. And yeah, two massive tournaments. I've been buying games, you know, literally when the last UK Open ends, I start buying games for the next one and talking to people about borrowing games. We've got a great community here that loan us games when we need them. Some of those games are a bit harder to find. But yeah, I'm super excited about it. And also watching the strategy as to how people play because you might want to focus on the EPC, you might want to focus on the UGO, but you might focus on classics depending on how the games play, how you feel. I'm probably more of a classics player, more so because the ball goes a bit slower and I'm a bit old and rubbish. So I tend to try and get a card in on that. One year I actually even managed to qualify when we did best of three rather than five. So yeah, I mean, it's just literally never ending pinball. We got some amazing games, people, and actually this year it's kind of funny. I had people actually, I don't really go out and look for a lot of sponsorship, Jeff, because it's a tough business, Pinball. But I've actually had a few organizations offer me stuff, which is really helpful, especially, we've got to move 120 games from one end of London to the other. Just the logistics of that through central London. Getting the games out of our club, I'll be bringing a bunch of games from my house, other people bringing games. We've got to get them on a tequila lorry, drive it through London and then unload. And you know, you've got this, like, at the other end there's a bunch of permits I've had to organize. You know, just the scale of London and the scale of the event means that this is a major feat. I think it a great deal to be a part of the UK Open I think it a great deal to be a part of the UK Open We the British don like to queue So we try and put as many games in so literally that you know you might have a player in front of you that playing the game but you not waiting long to play it And I think for me, that's a must do. So we'll have three huge banks for classics, UK Open and EPC with a great mixture of old and modern games, obviously just classics in the classics bank. But having a great collection of games for three massive tournaments, I'm super excited about Jeff. Congratulations to you, to your sponsors. I know there's a lot of people you mentioned, obviously, the club and that's the Pinball Republic is a big part. Matt Vince and so many others, Phil at Pinball Heaven, Pinshades is a big part of that too. So good on you. And of course, it's going to be streamed once again by Mark at Backhand Pinball, who does just a bang up job. And I know he looks forward to it just like the rest of us. So you're going to be able to see this, but you'll want to be there for sure. And again, this is happening September 24th to 27th, and it is at that new location, Wandsworth. I'm going to say, I'm going to screw it up on purpose. Get people saying it the wrong way. It's Wandsworth.