Another great thing about Indy is we had a wonderful youth tournament. There were several people that are playing, and these are the future players of pinball. Who knows? Maybe even a world champion. Maybe even like this guy right here. Liam Bradley was the winner of the youth tournament. He won this lovely Translight. What else did you win? Challenge token thing. A big challenge token. So you're from North Carolina. A lot of great pinball players. there. How long have you been playing, Liam? Five to three years. I don't really know. And what about competitive pinball? Because this is a really big tournament. How long have you been doing that? Competitively, we've been playing for around a year. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, he not only won the youth tournament, but yesterday in the classics playoffs, there were 190 plus players and only 32 made the playoffs. This kid right here was blowing it up. I saw you play and you were awesome. Yeah, thank you. I got 19th. 19th. So you were in the top 10%. That's pretty impressive. Thank you. You see all these great players around here. What is it that you like about pinball and competitions? About competitions, I like that I get to know a lot of people better, and I get to know more newer and older games that I haven't heard about. Well, that was what was neat because I see a lot of the younger players like yourself into the newer games, but you were doing so well in the classic games, so it doesn't matter whether it's old or new, you like them all? Yeah, I'm pretty good at classics, but I also feel good on the newer games because they've got the ramps and they're flowing. All right, what's your favorite game ever? It's either Godzilla or Joker Poker. Joker Poker, that's a fun one. You know the guy who made Godzilla's here? Have you met him yet? Maybe. I'm going to get you to meet Keith Elwin. He's not only one of the greatest players ever, one of the greatest designers. He's here. We'll get a picture of you and Keith because that's pretty impressive. And your brother Miles is playing too. Yeah. Is he a good player? Yeah, he's pretty good. You're a good kid. Good as far as pinball players, and you're a very nice young man as well, you and your family. Thank you very much. Congratulations. Thank you. when we talk about people come from all over the world here's a good example from belgium carl birkins how you doing carl i'm doing so great this is one of the best moments in my life that's very nice uh you get a lot of great uh wonderful people in belgium i think is timber one of the yes timber is the number one player in belgium yes i played him at the uk open he's spectacular so you've got a lot of pinball there what does this like compared to back home The setting here is for me is ideal, ideal for me because you have all the screens next to the machines where you can follow the action of the other players. Then you have it's very spacious, it's open, it's very light so you can see all the things that you have to do on the game, on the playfields. So that's very important for me. The way you cue is also very important to me, because if you play in a smaller venue and the people are breathing in your neck, I don't mind, but this is, I think, more relaxing. For sure. Carl, thank you very much for coming. I hope you have safe travels. I know you're enjoying your time here, but would you recommend people from Europe and other places coming to Indus? Definitely. And I'm sure my friends in Belgium, because we have a lot of players there, Good players. They are really, really, really eager to come here. Thanks very much, Carl. You're welcome. Bye, Jeff. This is Brian O'Neill. He's with Scorbit, and Scorbit's been powering Indisc for many years. And big news for Scorbit for everyone in the world because Scorbit is available on more titles. Yeah, so right now we're on over 430 titles, and we're pleased to announce that we're working with American Pinball. Right now it's working on Hot Wheels and soon Legends of Valhalla and then working on some of the other games. Very exciting, too. You connect people all over the world and a free app as well. And some big things maybe this week. Yeah, so it's great to be here at InDisc and work on almost all of the open games here, including Spike 2. And it integrates directly into the Scorekeeper's app. And so it makes things a lot faster and easier for people at the tournament here. Brian, to you, to Jay, and everybody at Scorbit, thank you for what you do. Check out scorbit.io and check out that free app. Thanks for powering in this. Thank you, Seth. Well, we're back. We've got Tracy joining us. I'm Dave Stewart from Seattle. Introduce yourself. I'm Tracy Lindberg from Phoenix, Arizona, and I run the Bells and Chimes thing. I'm Kim Sexton. How are you? Oh, there I'm back. I'm Tim Sexton, and I'm from Chicago, Illinois. I work at Stern Pinball, representing the company as well as my projections website, trying to give some more narrative to this broadcast, who's got a chance to win here. And things are very interesting. Oh, we're starting the next round already with Keith Elwin. But we just lost Jason Zoller last round, one of the favorites to win. so uh not to you know just full disclosure keith is my co-worker at stern and uh you know i friends with him of course and we work together and i will try to be as objective as possible in the booth i will not try to root openly for players and just talk about keith's impressive resume tracy you know much about keith have you ever seen this guy play pinball before More than once, yes. What have you learned from watching Keith? Has anything stuck out to you? You know, all the top players watching, I watch a lot of pinball videos and a lot of streams because I feel like my flipper skills get better watching their flipper skills. Like really getting control and catching the ball. Like what about that? Just like letting it bounce from the very end of the flipper? I mean, I don't know how he trusts stuff like that. I may not have quite as much guts as he has. So Keith has not played yet because he had a double buy. All the players are now in the tournament, and this is his very first ball. But pretty good. He got all his lights completed, so he's ready for multiball and ball two. So what is your strategy on this game? You think like getaway. I play getaway a lot. I don't play this high speed much. And it seems like you don't have the same modes. So similar layout, but not at all the same strategy or rules. I played this one a lot in qualifying, and what I really liked about this game was I was very consistent with the upper flipper to the ramp. And when I have a feed like that, I may want to just post pass over to the right flipper and then shoot the left orbit and shoot the ramp over and over again because it progresses you to multiball and gives you 50,000 points per ramp plus another about 25,000 just for the spinner, and it can be even more when your orbits are low. You said you post-pass. What about from the left flipper shooting the spinner, the scoop, which feeds the upper flipper? I just was way more comfortable with the right flipper on this game. Oh, Jim's out right away. Another thing, though, that's really important is your kickbacks. Super important, especially when it's lit on the number four like that. on a top one or a number three like Andre has here, if his kickback on the left is not lit, just hitting that one lit target is all you need. Yeah, the ball does go down there often. I believe once your inlanes are lit, you can also relight the kickback through the inlanes. But that takes a couple freeways or something to get there. I think. I'm not 100% sure. Tracy, did you play this game at all? I did not play it in qualifying, and I was just noticing how active those slings were. The attempt at a catch coming down from the right was dangerous and led to the use of the kickback and the drain. That is one tournament trick, which, you know, not all tournament directors are always looking for ways to make games more challenging. Making your slings sensitive. You can adjust them so that they are as sensitive as possible. That does increase the difficulty of the games. And, you know, here we have the best players in the world, so they're doing what they can, you know, to truly make the games play as hard as they could. Andre takes a tilt warning there already. Just trying to get it under control. He didn't have the shots. He was very close, but didn't really get the orifice he wanted. This game did seem to be set up a little bit more sensitive than some others on the bank. so Travis Meary comes as kind of the rookie of this group I mean he's been playing pinball for a long time but he has veterans of competitive pinball 10 year veterans all in his group he's only been playing competitively for a few years although interestingly if you just look at their IFPA rank he's the highest ranked player in this group That's true. He spent a lot of time up at the farm at District 82 grabbing his Whopper haul. Wow, we are getting some great data handed off to us. Nine current or former world champions remain in this tournament. Two in each of the other groups and three in this one. Wow. That's more than half because there's only 16 players left in this tournament. This is an impressive field of players. and Travis did not get much credit on that ball. So Keith, coming in cold, is in a commanding lead here, and he's already got his multiball ready. So this is where, you know, game one, he's picking a game he's comfortable with, he played it in qualifying, and he's showing, you know, from the driver's seat of game choice exactly what you need to do, which is put the pressure on because you're going to be player one. So in multiball, I believe you're going for the ramp. Is that it? Right. It's 750,000 hideout jackpot. And it will keep the ball parked in there for a while if you get it. So he shoots the saucer, and there it is. Okay, so now what? Now you just kind of have fun. You shoot your Orbit. You can shoot the ramp again for a little extra bonus. Can you get three ways while you are in multiple? Yes, I believe you can. You can also hit your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 targets for some points. Does anyone other than Splingshots aim for those targets? I think Keith might because he just used his kickback. Could be Ron. Just going for the Orbit. Oh, that ball will escape the hideout now. And he has to do the same thing all over again, which is either hit his targets or shoot the side ramp to advance the wood. Certainly accuracy on that ramp shot goes a long way in this game. Wow, he's just shooting the inlanes to relight his kickback there. That was impressive. Alley passes are not something I have been able to execute consistently yet. But you had asked about learning stuff. That's definitely one of those things that's on my list to learn after watching these top players play. And even, like, the top of the top players, I know I see Raymond Davidson do it more than anyone, who I believe is another one of your colleagues now. Yes. Does them on the fly. so that's definitely watching these videos if you're looking for how you can improve your game, look for what they do that you don't and that's what you want to practice on and at this level that was a little odd that it came off the in lane guide there he looked surprised as well but at this level each of the players still have their own styles and they do different things to achieve the same results. They get more comfortable in different ways. Wow, Jim, a limber man, doing a little bit of stretching before his ball. Jim's style, he will always flip the flippers before his ball. He loves the dead bounce, like just letting the ball bounce off one flipper to another. Jim is probably the master of the dead bounce. There it is, see? Just those really short ones where he does a little up nudge with them. That's how he gets the ball under control more than most other players I've seen. Players are struggling. And, Dave, I was talking about how I didn't really go for the right orbit much. That feed isn't really coming around to the left orbit, So it's getting stuck in the pop bumpers when players shoot it. When I was asking for the ramp, I wasn't saying the right orb, but I was saying the right saucer, which feeds the upper flipper, as opposed to taking the risk on the post pass, and then that left shot, if you missed it, is pretty dangerous because you catch the corner if you don't hit around the left, and it's flying towards one of the outlays. Right. So I think looking at this game, you're right. On the left flipper, shooting that hole is a much safer option than shooting the right orbit because the ball is just getting stuck in the pops, and we've seen several players just drain from the left side of the pop straight down the middle. I have also seen, not here today, but I've seen this game played by someone who can shats three ways all day. You shats from right to left, never left to right, because if it goes up and over, you've got your kickback. Right. But even if you use up your kickback, the next shafts will relight it for you. I'm a fan of the freeways because I played one locally where you couldn't hit the ramp. And so the freeways were everything. That was a strategy. And it's coming off that same top pop bumper into those targets and straight down the middle. There's nothing you can do. there's no nudging unless get it out of that pop bumper area but that's extreme danger up there Travis has a good chance here even with the four ball one to put some points on the board and he shot the slingshot there and he looks like he's going for the strategy David just mentioned of shooting the inlanes but didn't work out for him. Now Keith is the winningest player of all time. We have nine major champions, but no one's won more than Keith Ellin. And I think second is like many wins behind that, which would be Jorian, I believe. And Keith has been a little less active in the competitive scene compared to years in the past. He's been working very hard designing pinball machines lately, but he really came focused to this tournament. He just won Classics 2 last night. Took one of the top four seeds for a double buy. And he's looking at us. He's looking for Jim. Or maybe Carl doesn't have his headphones on. I don't know what he's looking for. Thought he was looking for maybe some assistance or something broken he noticed. But, no. Play on, I guess. Left orbit and just didn't quite get up the ramp. Left orbit again. Still goes to the ramp again. One of the things that you... They end up making it look so easy. It's just like every shot he takes to that left orbit just goes up the left orbit. The difference between most every other player, including myself, is that I might be decent. Two out of three will go there. The problem is that third one that doesn't, I'm fighting for my life, whereas he's got more points, another 100,000. And just being able to, like, slightly increase your accuracy and aim can go a long way to increasing your scores. And that's one of the things that we see. Actually, with all the top players, but especially Keith as he's showing it, we'll see, I'm sure we'll see Zach on the screen at some point, Zach McCarthy. Their accuracy is just incredible. Zach McCarthy being last year's champion of this tournament. And he was the first seed this year. So Keith has another 3X bonus and 43. So let's put some 2.7, 2.76 million. That would have been about a top 30 score in qualifying. Well, right now it's really anybody's game for second place. And probably, you know, thinking get some distance first. Remember top two in each group move on. So you don't have to win to come out of this with a good challenge. If you can at least pull away from the crowd, try to guarantee yourself second place. And if you are having a good ball, then maybe that 2.7 becomes in the distance. But right now, it's like, you know, just where are your points? It's probably try and get to multiball once, get one jackpot. Right. Tim's got his yellow lights completed now. Yeah, and every time you hit the ramp, it also spots one of the lights for you. You don't have to actually hit all those stand-ups for you. You're in the right orbit. Oh, you survived it. No. Oh, what a tilt warning. Will anything else spot you lights or just the ramp? I mean, obviously. Just hitting them and the ramp, yeah. Oh, a second tilt warning. Yeah, and if you're not sure, if you see the red, yellow, green lights, there's three banks. You have to get the green ones first, then the yellow ones, then the three red ones. And while you can hit them directly, actually, that looked like the ramp spotted two, not just one. He may have ricocheted off the target. Maybe not. That looked like, and that might explain why they're getting the multiball quick. And it could be also like first multiball versus second. but yeah it looked like it's clock two but that's the idea by hitting the ramp you avoid having to hit those depth targets that would tee it up for him so he really needs up the ramp to start that multiball got some good recovery he's trying to come back down and he's been playing without his left kickback and with these slingshots it could be really scary If the ball doesn't go there, then it doesn't matter, right? Right. And good thing he lit it because he needed it right away. He lit it again with the in lane, but drains off the end of the flipper down the middle. And it's always painful when it hits the end of the flipper and goes down the middle because it's like, you know, did I, we had those two tilt warnings. Did he have enough left in the tilt bob to save it? I'll have to wonder about it forever. But 800,000 was a good ball for him. He doubled his score from the first two balls. And he basically had a similar game to Keith, except he had trouble hitting that ramp one more time. Right. And that makes that much difference. Andre who's an incredible come from behind player having experienced him coming from behind the most recent I was at a tournament recently at Lin's Arcade and he came back something like 2 billion on Dracula on a compensation ball there was something similar in one of the European tournaments where I think it was Maybe Yurian came back? It was Johannes. Johannes, that's it. On Daniele. At the IFPA Championship. So he's capable of doing the same thing. And now let's see. He's having some fantastic saves. The ball is trying to leave the playfield. Okay, so every player that's been missing the ramp is usually missing room. This ball is really whipping around the orbit fast. Not there, but... Oh, man. Isn't it funny how when the shot is lit for big points, that it's twice as hard to hit? They, like, get smaller. I liked Andre's... He yelled with glee there. Did you hear that? Now he's in good shape to pass ahead of Jim. He looks like he's really psyching himself up for this tournament in general. He has a whole pre-launch routine of testing out each flipper, kind of lining up the aim. There it is. There's a jackpot. Nice. Oh. It's okay. You just got to get back to the next multiball like Keith was doing. He got the big points he needed on that one. He just didn't get to play with some safety of having a ball to play with while the other ball was being held. Hmm. So he knows he has at least a point, and it's your first, well, it's not his first game, it's your first game of the round, and you just want any points. You don't want to start with a zero. So Travis was really on ball two, going for shooting the in-lanes as his strategy, and with this hole I'm going to that point season I'm going to see if you think what do you think Tracy? You think he'll change it up? He'll go for the ramp like everyone else? I think he should. Wait, but the inlanes what are the inlanes doing for you? Lighting freeway. Lighting freeway. Just being such a being so grainy at the bottom. Yeah, he did switch to go for the ramp at that point. And I think getting that one ramp shot is going to give him more confidence to do that. But he didn't have time to catch it. He kind of went for a wide catch, but he just did not commit to it. He went way early. And the ball just kind of bounced off and right down the middle. So that's the end of that group for round one. Let's see how else they're going. So every other group is still playing. Zach McCarthy's group is playing Tron. Eric Stone's group. Eric Stone's group is on Deadpool, and it looks like Jason Zahler is currently playing there. And Escher Lefkopf's group, he picked Revenge from Mars, which Escher was trying to convince me to play. He's an expert at Revenge from Mars. They've had one for many years that he was playing since he was on a stepstool. And he knows every in and out of that game. And everyone's still... I'm guessing he did not convince you. Locked in. He did not convince me, no. But I also didn't qualify, so maybe I should have listened. He is number one in the world, after all. I did play it, not because I planned on playing it. It wasn't one of my favorite games. But on a dead ticket, you know, basically I didn't like voiding tickets because you're paying, like, four bucks a game. You might as well get it worth. But I would pick the short line. Any time I had a ticket I knew, like, even if I got number one score, I still wouldn't be a good enough ticket. I will use those to practice the machines that I'm avoiding because, one, you never know if you do qualify, if you'll play them. But sometimes you find a surprise machine. And I did that with Revenge from Mars. I went and I played it. It's like, oh, lousy game, just 100 million. Because I know I've seen that. I've seen like 400 or 500 million scores. And it turned out it was like number 10 score at the time. I said, oh, wait, maybe I should play this. The scores are not that high on it. The key difference compared to location play is it had lightning flippers. But other than that, it was playing reasonably well. And so I ended up having it as one of the games on my ticket where I qualified. I played it in qualifying, but it did not go well for me. I just found a bug in my code. I accidentally had Jason Zoller getting eliminated in round one. He did not get eliminated in round one. He's one of the favorites of this tournament. He's currently playing on Deadpool in Eric Stone's group. and some B Division games are going on here as well. We've got, where is the rig headed? Nowhere yet, I think. Carl's grabbing it. And he's moving. Oh, it's going to come into frame. There it is. The rig. This way, yeah, it's going. Bye-bye. He's lined up on Revenge from Mars. One of the most difficult games to put on a camera rig because it has an entire CRT monitor in the backbox that reflects down onto the play field to create a Pepper's Ghost effect. What do you think about the Pinball 2000 technology of Revenge for Mars, Tracy? Are you a pinball purist, or does it have its place, or what do you think? I think it has its place, but it's not my favorite. I've played two of them. There's three, right? There's two. Two, the Star Trek one, or Star Wars. Star Wars, yeah. Okay, so I played them both. Not my favorite. Not my favorite. It made the play field a lot tighter. There's not as much space to work with. But I definitely think they have their place. They can be fun. Yeah, there's very funny animations. I think if you're playing it just for the novelty of, hey, this is pretty cool. High tech, right? It's a funny game. It's got a lot of humor. Star Wars Episode I is kind of the same way. You kind of bash the Jedi Council around and stuff. It's got some odd modes in there. The question is, nowadays, since you don't need CRT monitors, can you do an LED display and have something similar? And I know there's one company that's making kind of LEDs in the play field. I thought you were setting me up for something, Dan. Well, no, I could be. It's like you could potentially have LEDs that you're smashing the screen and doing different effects as you hit it. I thought you were mentioning the cool Mandalorian pinball topper we just put out that has a reflected holographic cockpit view on the topper. At Stern Pinball's store, sternpinball.com, if you want to check it out. I know I'm just plugging stuff. It's Carl's dream. IE Pinball, we're here at the Open. Let's talk about what we're really here for. Is Stern the sponsor? Stern is the sponsor. It is the Stern Pro Circuit event. The trophy, beautiful trophy is right here. And there's also top prize includes a brand new Stern pinball machine. Brand new Stern pinball machine. What is it? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Is that one you've worked on or no? I have not worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That's a fun game, though. Not a choice. I'm learning this today, just now, coming over the intercom. But, yeah, that's a great game. We're waiting on, looks like we're waiting on Kaylee George playing Revenge from Mars. Kaylee, you can see Carl behind us, behind him. Kaylee's wearing his UNSV hoodie. That's because he is a developer at 343 Studios, which has done the new Halo Infinite video game. He is the lead multiplayer level designer there. So he brings his pinball experience into gaming, maybe some of his gaming experience into pinball, but it's a lot of game development-related people here at this tournament with the skills, of course, in all aspects of Divine. We just saw Keith Owen, Kaylee, also a game developer. So Bowen's in the finals. He's working at P3 developing games. We just mentioned Raymond, number two in the world. Escher, he's done some work for us. So it's a lot of the top talent here in the competitive side. Raymond did not make it. I have not seen him. No, I'm not sure what happened. Oh, we're moving on to Revenge for Mars. It's been a good thing for pinball that pinball players who love the game have been designing because we're getting creative new things. Well, I think pinball players have always been designing. The difference is it's competitive players. So we are seeing, hey, how do you make things even more interesting for competition? How do you make that, you know, especially now that they're streaming and people can watch it, it's becoming a spectator sport, how can you start making things in such a way that people really want to see what's going on and, you know, encourage them, you know, want to play it. And a lot of these have such long stories that you won't necessarily see during a competition unless it's a pinball expo and they leave it on factory settings. but otherwise you in competition it's like there might be some specific strategies you go after but there's so much depth ending up in these machines that you know the streaming, the video, now that everyone can stream people stream tutorials, they stream game plays and it's like wow, the amount of different things that go into one of these machines these days. It's a nice new era Yeah We see about 40 years of pinball history represented here in the open but um last night the night before we were showing classics games that go all the way back to uh the late 60s at the earliest on some of them and it's just pinball has got its ups and downs and now things are doing well i think everyone's pretty happy with the state of you know the tournaments this is amazing production this is an amazing competition, giant projector screen behind us, huge bank of games, hundreds of players here. It all feels really great right now, I think, to be involved in pinball. Yeah, I know. I've personally been playing since, like, I was two years old. So people are, how long have you been playing? So it's like, usually, I can tell, and they say, well, probably longer than you've been born, for many people. So, and the way I started was my dad used to hang out at bowling alleys, and it turns out that her mama, she was a great babysitter. And it's cheaper, you know, a few nickels here and there than, you know, cheaper than the babysitter. So, apparently, I don't remember this at all, but I was told I'm just plopped out of the machine for time. I'm just curious, Tracy, what got you started? I think if it was 15 or 16, we would, oh, we're coming back. We'll save that for the next moment. Okay, we've got some creative camera work. Except there's one score we can't see, so that will be mystery score. Player four will have mystery score. So Escher has $259 million, which is, I think, ahead of the number one score in qualifying all weekend. Already. Jared here is one shot away from starting his multiball. He shoots by shooting the green flashing circles. That's the only ball we're on. Yeah, that was a question I was about to ask, too. Here we go. So this game, it's got some similarities to Attack from Mars. You just started multiball. You basically shoot that. Right now, it's the middle arrow. That shot is going to be a light lock and lock ball shot. And he shot it six times to get to this multiball. So I think it's interesting that Escher picked this game. I think this game was probably one where the top players were some of the least comfortable because it had a very tight tilt. It's a very heavy machine. It's very difficult to get control of the ball. How free of his balls drained will Bell table down, but I think he only got two bats. And he's out of multiball now. And it did not really give him a lot of points because he only has 24 million. Well, he didn't really hit any jackpots. He had to destroy ten ships. He still had nine left. So he basically got one shot in. And now he's got a lot of work. He's got six shots to get back to that multiball. Six shots, but they're fairly safe if he makes a shot because the light lock is going to come back down to left orbit, which you can live catch, and the lock is going to feed, when you do lock the ball, it's going to feed the right flipper. Looks like he may have pivoted over to shooting mode shots now. Three modes will give another multiball, right? Right, yes. And that's multiball that could be more valuable than your main multiball. But he still only looks like he's on his first mode. So there's a big middle zone in all these Pinball 2000 games with this effect on the display, on the playfield. And eventually a ramp pops up that lets you shoot into a little trough in the back, and that ends the mode there. So he's got two more modes to get to his bonus wave, which is where Escher most likely got to to get 259 million points. You have two options when you start Revenge from Mars, two sets of three modes. Have you found that one is better than the other? So, I'm not an expert on this game. The advice I got from Escher Lefkoff was start with the middle one on the left, and then use your ball save time to complete it, then shoot the Lincoln one with his four shots to the right orbit, and then time out the last one and get to the bonus wave. And he said that's the way to do it, and everyone else starts on the right, and they're giving up that opportunity by playing on the right side. Now, trying to quickly summarize, it's a little difficult to explain this game because it's so hard to see anything. This might be an improvement. It looks like Carl is trying to adjust the... Okay, so this play field he's trying to capture is actually, zooming out helps a little bit. It's actually hidden under a giant box, and it creates a shadow that reflects back to the players, and it's much easier for the players to see than a camera. You're seeing kind of like half of an alien in the middle of a bar there. But this is the one that Escher recommended starting with, and he says just use your ball save time to get it done. We might be seeing history being made, first time streaming a Revenge from Mars. I don't know that I've ever seen one on screen before. Not saying it hasn't been, but I've not personally seen that. Tim took four bounces there to get the ball under control. That was amazing. And he's got his mode done. Puts him at 41 million now. So that's his first mode, 41 million. He probably has done a multiball because it clearly wasn't in modes at that point. And this is four shots to complete. Four right orbits. Looks like Tim knows the thing I was just mentioning that Escher told me, which mode to play first. And if he can get through this mode, you can time out the last mode to get to the bonus mode. Falls into the mystery saucer there. So on these tournament settings, it looked like the mystery saucer was just alternating between 1 million and plus five on the sacks. So I actually saw it while Tim's trapped up here. I saw him at the airport. Hadn't met him before, but we chatted. He said his son is 10 years old, but he's really started getting into pinball a lot more. And he's kind of gotten to the level where he can take him to leagues, and he's not bored. He's able to hang in by himself and play the games and stuff. So that's what's helped him get back into the competitive scene. Actually, the same thing had happened to me. I, like, had not played much pinball. It was when my daughter was 10 that I took her back to her first, I think it was Papa, not Pembert yet. But, yeah, I was at 10 because that's also the age where you can start leaving, not having to watch over them all the time. And, yeah, more, you know, guess who might, you know, three years from now, you know, 13, 14 is what we're seeing. Like, you know, after when he first got on the scene and, you know, what is the Albert? Arvid. Arvid. He's 14 now. He's 14. He's from Europe, isn't he? Yeah, Lund, Sweden. It's right across the bridge from Copenhagen, Denmark. It right on the little channel border between the two nations So yeah it possible that within a couple years we back here That must have been the end of the game We didn't know if it was ball two or ball three. Ended fairly quickly there. And Escher put in Dean Grover's initials, who was a beloved tournament player from Colorado, and he passed away just a few weeks ago. he's a cancer survivor and for 11 years he had known that his body would never quite be the same but he hung around, he was always the sweetest guy in the world, he was a contractor at Stern as well, did some code for us, worked on the games like the Beatles he helped with Led Zeppelin, he did all sorts of pinball machines and he was just always such a pleasant guy to be around and we miss him a lot but Dean had a great life and made a huge impact on the pinball scene and the pinball community. He actually did software development on Congo when he worked at Williams in the late 90s. And then he took some time working at other jobs and came back to Stern in about 2016. Started working there. He's had a career in pinball, career in the tournament scene. Was always a papa. Would have been at tournaments like this when he could. And he was just a great guy, so it's nice to see people put his initials in the game. It's a nice tribute. Thank you. So let's get back to our last question. What got you into pinball? So I think I was a teenager, and there was a mini golf place that had about 20, 25 machines. And my parents, we would go there, and we'd play mini golf. And then everybody else my age was playing the new games, the newfangled things. There were lots of lights and things like that. And I just gravitated toward pinball. And I would spend, they'd give me some tokens, and I would spend all my tokens on pinball and had a blast. And then I didn't see pinball for quite a few years after I graduated high school, went to college, didn't really see pinball, didn't really think about it. But when I met my husband, he said, oh, I like pinball. Do you like pinball? And I said, yeah, I love pinball. Because in my head, I'm like, yeah, I gravitated toward that. And so we went out and started playing some pinball together and just been playing pinball, me and my husband, ever since. And what about your first tournament? First tournament was ZapCon 2014. And I don't know how, because we would be, we went out to locations all the time. We would, we'd go to Vegas once a year to play. Somehow did not know about competitive pinball until the end of 2013. And once we found out about it, we're like, we need a tournament. And there weren't very many in Arizona at the time. And now it is exploded. But so ZAPCON 2014 was my first tournament. And I even made the B Division finals in my first tournament. Say my first tournament, Papa 3 made the B Division final. Last time ever in B Division. But, yeah, it literally changed my life because before that, it's like pinball was a hobby. After that, you know, meeting Steve Epstein, Wentz started the leagues in Pittsburgh. Wentz started the leagues in Maryland. And it's like it was just that I became involved completely in the competitive community. And it's had that much of an effect. Tim, you're next on the next break to find out how you got started in this. All right. We are on Deadpool. This game has been really eating people up this weekend. You know, sometimes at Deadpool you see massive scores of a couple hundred million. but this game can really, right away, you're in danger. It's playing very fast. You know, you can't blink. You know, you miss a shot, you've got to be ready because it's coming back to you really fast. And the sixth target is disabled, right? Right. So you can still hit it, get up the ramp, but you're not going to get any playfield multiplier advances from it. And it takes away one of your super skill shots, and it takes away a special ninja apocalypse roll, But that's all you lose from getting rid of it, and it's probably for tournaments a decent compromise because, you know, just getting up there can totally change the game for, you know, just a little bit of luck. Especially when most people get it up there through luck shots, not because they were actually intentionally going after it. Now, I do think it's a great rule on location. It's a lot of fun to just have someone hit a shot up there and get a multiplier. I might say that because I came up with that rule. George Gomez designed this game, and he also designed Revenge from Mars. So he's been designing games for a very long time. And he and Keith Ellin came up with the idea to have a target that could deflect the ball up a spine ramp like that. A really cool shot. I have a tendency to just go straight to a mode when I start this game and not attempt to get team up to it. How do you see people play it normally? That's the beginning of the game here. Yeah, I see people often go for either Juggernaut or Sabretooth right away, and then after that they try to get their multiball going. Their little Deadpool multiball. So not taking time to get a team up lit. maybe for their second mode, but I think people just want to get some points right away when they usually play it. Okay, so I'm not losing my edge by jumping right into a mode. The only team up that really gives you extra points is Colossus because it's the double scoring one. Yeah, but the other ones, too, they help you complete modes, especially like Mystique. I find that mode, if you have two or three team ups going, You can complete the mode really quick. If you have no team up, it seems to take forever for that mode to complete it. They do all give you more points, but the double points is really the big one. Jason's out of his little Deadpool multiball. Just a few points. That can really be big if you get to the Super Jackpot round. two-day new thing. Yeah, I saw a location and someone got like, you know, all they did is they started that little Deadpool, came out with like 300 million and I think that's what happened. It's like, you got that on that boat? Didn't know that was possible. Okay, so here's Mystique. I'm not sure if he has any team-ups. He has Wolverine going with So the center shot will spot two shots. Okay. And now if he completes this mode, he's got that Sauron multiball. Right, which isn't a ton of points, but it's good to have another multiball to help you with your weapons and stuff like that. Yeah, the weapons, those are combos, correct? Correct. And the real key to combos are the awards you get, I think, at 50 or at 45. You have your mech suit multiball, which is one of the more valuable multiballs. And I guess you could still get 2x playfield if you hit 100. Right, 100 weapons, permanent 2x for the rest of the game. Right. And it's the same 2x you would have gone with the Snicket target. I'm sure that one was not disabled because that one's well earned if you get 100 weapons there is no way to disable that so that's the end of the mode final shot 10,000 I know I've tried playing some of these with all of the team ups going I'd be able to get a final shot about 70 or 80 million if I had all the team ups going and I played a mode with it so they are worth more I can tell you. The value is based on how much time you have remaining in the mode, which is represented by Deadpool's health, as well as how many times you've attempted to play the mode, and it takes into account all team-up multipliers. And all play-full multipliers, obviously. So he is in Sauron multiball. The goal here is to complete your shot, and then shoot that turnaround shot, the Colossus shot, into the target for the Super Jackpot. There you got it. Wow. $17 million. That is, okay, usually people don't get to that Super Jackpot, but Chase is making it look easy. That's because a lot of people are going for it. They're just going for combos. and StarMultiBall 70 million very quickly out of that that's great Tracy here in the booth reacted to that I love it when I jump in my chair and all of a sudden probably within the ball bonus he's taken he's taken a point from player one which was Eric he's not there yet But I think end of ball bonus probably gets him there as long as he doesn't tilt. So interesting. My projections had Jason with the lowest chance out of everyone to move through. I think it's because he has the most likely date with these three very dangerous players here. Bowen Kerins, multiple-time world champion. Eric Stone, multiple-time world champion. And Jason Zoller, who has not won a world championship yet, but he is due for one. I would say, based on how he's been playing. And he also was our Classics 1 champion on Friday night. There's another good multiball to play. Disco multiball. So I know this one was started with a lot of left orbits, correct? Right, and you can't progress it when other features are running in the game. What is your goal in this one? I don't usually shoot for disco. Yeah, you're shooting the arrows, and there's an alternating phase to it between the super being lit and it not being lit. So right now he's in the first phase of just taking out the jackpot shots, and then left orbit will become lit for his super, which is a value that's based on actually how many spins you hit. And he's only one weapon away from letting mech suit coming out of it. That is exciting. I don't know if you know this, but then that would be, you know, should he be going for one more combo? Can you get combos in this mode? Yes, because he just picks them up by hitting the scoop there. So it's really, it would be ready if he collects one more weapon. So he should, if he were to shoot the scoop now, then he would be, as soon as he's done with this multiball, it would be lit. He'd have to shoot the scoop after getting a combo. But, I mean, this multiball is still worth playing for jackpots as well. He's getting about 4 million a jackpot. Now he has the scoop lit, so he'll have to collect his weapons, come out of it, and then collect one more time. And he's likely going to cancel this next mode by holding the top button down. If he knows how. Maybe he's not. because I would not have known about canceling the mode until I saw someone else do it. And even then, I tried once, and I'm not. So what are you doing, pressing and holding the button? Right, it says it on the display in that selection. Okay. But interestingly, he did go for his Wolverine mode. This is the quickest. Typically, you get a lot of progress by shooting the top lanes and top bumpers. no mech suit for this one so I think Jason made a strategy mistake there in not cancelling the mode and going back for mech suit multiball because he hit the scoop again did he know that mech suit multiball was lit or might not he have been aware of that because sometimes you don't realize sometimes you're very conscious, you're trying to count how many weapons, how close you are but if you're focused on the planned strategy yeah, you don't realize that you were there So here's Jason Zahler, who is in a very comfortable position. He's got the lead by a lot over Bo and his player four. And you will get a chance to see, as he starts shooting things, what he's done so far in the game. So he's likely played already one Ninja Multiball, but he has at least a lock lit. he has completed Megalodon, Mystique, and Wolverine so this is the last mode he needs to play before his Sauron Multiball Jason's shooting right for the targets right now he's really great on his wiggle saves and moving the game around to get control of the ball that's his first lock for Ninja multiball, he'll need to spell pool two more times to let his other two locks so he's like progressed a little bit through the game, I know the locks start off all three lit after that your second multiball, you have to spell pool once for each lock is that also the case for a third multiball? Is it always just one pool, or does it progressively get harder beyond that? It may get harder. It may be you have to spell it and then lock it, and then you have to you can't stack the locks up anymore. Okay. I don't know every rule in this game. I was not the lead developer. That would be a guy named Tanya Kleist, great guy I work with, who did the software lead development of this game. And Jason goes into mech suit multiball. Oh, no, sorry. Star on multiball. My mistake. And you got a super skill shot. Yeah. That was a multiball. I didn't know you could do that during the multiball. And Saron shooting the arrow shots lights that really explosive super jackpot that Jason Werdrick collected. It's about 13 million. So now it's lit. He hits that shot. Not always easy to get that shot to go around and hit that target. Did he collect it there with the boom? No, you can't collect. With the weapon, you cannot collect targets. He's got a second lock lit on Ninja Multiball. Okay, and 91 more Disco Swords, so he's already played a Disco Multiball as well. So other things Jason could go for besides ninja multiball, he could spell dead to relight his modes. He'll play his level two modes with the Sauron team up. He could shoot the right orbit to get his chimichanga truck going in light T-Rex mode. He could shoot little Deadpool for what's likely little Deadpool frenzy, 100K per switch hit, which is a good point. And you said Sauron team up. What does that give you? So just having played Sauron? It's like the second version of doing all the battle modes again. And it creates more shots with the hit. So he was at 75. He's played mech suit already. Right. Right. That's the L left in the pool. And he's definitely aiming for you, right, Tracy? Down the right side. but I mean Jason Zoller got a little deeper in the game than certainly most games in this tournament have where you're going for things a second time usually people are just happy to get through those four multiballs Mech Street, Disco, Little Deadpool, Ninja and he was going Sauron and then even to the next ones and Bowen okay so Bowen's completed Sabertooth He's started Mystique but not completed Mystique. And he has his chimichanga arrows lit around the play field, which means he can play a mode like T-Rex or Megalodon, which are a little higher scoring, and they have potential to be very high scoring. And I believe to get those, you need to get, what is it, three chimichangas or whatever you call them? Yeah, enough to fill your punch card that pops on the screen. Now, that's another one where, and strategy-wise, I'm a little bit weaker on this one, but if I have one of those modes ready, I will choose that over the top three modes. I'm not sure if it's a better strategy to try to finish the top three and get the Sauron, or just the fact that those are more lucrative, it's worth going for the Chimichanga modes. I don't think there is. I think it's just very situational to how you like to play the game and what you feel comfortable with. Nice super skill shot. Now, any of these modes could be stacked with multiball. He got the super skill shot straight to multiball, so he doesn't have a stacked mode. But I believe you could stack any mode with multiball. Is that correct? You can. If you start any of the battle modes first, and I guess also the quest modes, which are the bottom two, you can bring them in. But I don't mind playing them one at a time either. People really like stacking the modes together. Oh, he gets the add-a-ball from the mystery. But there's good points in every multiball if you get to the super jackpot rounds. The jackpots start relatively low in Deadpool, but they grow considerably to the super jackpots. And there's a super jackpot there, 3.38 million. This also, every ninja jackpot you get also builds your bonus by a lot. It increases the number of ninjas earned in bonus. and shooting top lanes for bonus multiplier is another thing people will do in multiball to just build up their score. I often like doing that just to get balls out of the way, send them up to the top lanes. Nice live catch on that transfer there. Three flashing shots are all jackpots, or is the right ramp a super jackpot? The right ramp is a super jackpot. 16 weapons, a little ways to go. And what lights Super Jackpot? Is it like... Just hitting enough regular ninja jackpots does. Hey, he's going top lane. So that doubled his bonus there. And Bowen is doing what he does. Bowen plays very deliberately with all his moves. He likes to keep balls under control, isn't going to jailbreak and knock all the balls into play. He's going to play with one flipper as much as he can and just keep going as long as possible. And for those of you who don't know Bowen for the longest time, he has created an entire library of tutorials in conjunction with Papa. So if you want to learn how to play a lot of the machines, not so much the more recent sterns, but especially machines from, like, the Williams Valley era and some of the older sterns, check out his videos, his tutorials, all really good tutorials. That's a rough double drain. And it's amazing when he has one of those tutorials. Like, he just tells you what to do and does it. and we'll get all the way to Wizard and Mole on his first game in a tutorial. Does that wrap up this round? I was not watching if all the other matches were done. So we had Jason Zoller won that game. Jason Wurtschek came in second. Eric Stone came in third on that game of Deadpool. I'm putting it all in my spreadsheet so I can rerun the projections because now it's interesting, there's 16 players left in the tournament, and anyone could be eliminated. So all the buys have run out. All the top four players who had a double buy are now leading each of the four groups, and they have game picks. But the Indus rules is you can only pick a game once per tournament. So if you use your best three games right away, great, you move on to the next round, but you cannot pick those games again. So the winners that round, first of all, You can check up all the results yourself on neverdrains.com slash 2023. And so if you go there, you can look at all the results. The live scoring is always there. But we basically have Neil Graff, who had one on Tron. With a huge score, 125 million or something? Yeah, Daniele, 111 million, came in second with 111 on Tron. Keith Elwin, we saw that. That was the high-speed game with his 2.7 million. And Escher with the 259 million on Revenge for Mars, we saw a snippet of that. So those are your, you know, those who have that great head start. Now, just winning one game does not guarantee you moving on to the next round because if you don't follow it up with a decent finish, you could end up with three people winning each one game and only two of them move on. So you really need to go on, but it certainly keeps you likely out of last place in your group. And even if you don't win the round, it does put you in a much better position that you're not going to be out of it after game two. Get all the way in game three. You still have a chance, regardless of what game two is. You really have two chances to get another second or first, which will move you forward. So of those bye players, Zach McCarthy only now has a 24% chance to move on to the next round. Oh, because he lost his first game. Right, and that was his pick. And he was top speed overall, so he's in that driver's seat position. Top speed overall and last year's champion. Right, last year's champion. But coming in, he didn't have any competitive games he's played today. It came in cold, right, because it's his first game. and some of these players have played six games already. They're nice and warm. They're ready to go. But I won't count them out yet. He's got two games to go. Keith really helped himself there with the win. He's up to 11% to win the tournament, according to the match play ratings and my website, pinballstatistics.com. Escher Lefkoff, 24% chance to win the tournament. That puts him in the most likely to win ahead of Eric Stone with a 19% chance. And Eric Stone is also a former The Open champion from 2020. Jason Zahler with that big win also improves his odds a lot. He's got an 89% chance to move on to the next round and a 16% chance to win. So I am just looking to see where the rig is ending up. They are in the process of picking the next game. And I hear Congo. Yeah, that looks like Congo is where we're headed. I do enjoy Congo. We don't have one locally, so I did put that on the qualifying card. It's just a joy to play it. We're back to watching Keith Ellen's group. The three world champion, formal world champion group, as opposed to the others, which only have two in each. Right. We also had, I was just looking, eight of the top ten IFCA-ranked players are here in this tournament. And many of them still in this final. It's a new IFCA rule, making them, starting off the year with a tremendously large set of Whopper points available. Right, so this is one of five major championships in the sport of pinball. Three are scheduled to take place this year, and this is the first in 2023. The new rules give this a dramatically outsized impact on the world rankings. Winning a major is considered the best thing you can do in the sport of pinball right now for your competitive standing. and of course the money and the brand new pinball machine don't hurt to go along with it but so tracy you said you don't have one of these uh games locally but you know how to play it what would you what would you go after and is that what keeps us doing my my strategy is one i love the skill shot the 25 million in the z and i love the fact that it's still available We'll see you in competition mode. And then diamonds, locks, and multiball. Diamond hunts after. Usually I can get my first lock before starting diamond hunts. Yeah. So it takes four diamonds to light your first lock. Then I believe it's like five. I forget how many for second and third. But, yeah, with all the diamonds lit, it seems to make sense. Go after your first lock with those diamonds. But there are several different ways to get, like, bulk diamonds. As you mentioned, there's diamond multiball. There's the gray. You could get gray. You could get Amy. The mystery award. We're in competition play, so the first mystery award will be diamond hunt multiball, where you can get a bunch. And then the second one is light block. So when I was playing this, I was doing four diamonds for the first block. diamond hunt to get me enough diamonds for the second lock, and light lock to get me my third one. So pretty quickly you can get into multiball when you've got the tournament settings. This is a strange thing that without tournament settings, you can't trust that strategy because you don't know what the mystery awards are, because they truly are mystery. Well, you also have the option to go for gray for the next multiball, which makes that second multiball a little closer to get to you than the first one was. If you use gray as your way to get diamonds, because the first one gives you five diamonds. So Jim needs one more diamond to light his block, I think. Can you stack the locks? Can you get all the diamonds and locks? No. You have to. Yeah, it doesn't help you to get more diamonds when you have a lock lit if you're trying to go for multiple. And, in fact, I find that to be a waste. If you get something like the gray diamonds or the Amy diamond and your lock was lit when you did that, it seems like a waste because they don't add to the next lock. Right. So if you lock two balls and you get your multiball from gray, you also lose all your progress. So it is really important to be aware of how many diamonds you have left and what path you want to take to multiball. So this is diamond on multiball on day 22. You get two diamonds for starting the multiball, and then I believe it's two diamonds per shot. Yeah, that sounds right. And you almost always come out of diamond on multiball with a lock lit. The gym took this on purpose after scoring his first lock. Keith Elwin was aiming for the mystery scoop and ran on his first ball. So the players playing the same strategic choices. And he did get the lock, we didn't really see it because so quickly as diamond multiball entered, he hit that left orbit, which I think he was going for a diamond, but since the other ball drained, it gave him the lock instead. And this gives him his third lock here, so he got spray for his third ball lock, spreading multiball. Your jackpots are either ramp or you can get a super jackpot if you shoot the ball to the left orbit, and as it comes back to the upper flipper you shoot. I'm not sure what that like U-turn the mineshaft shot is actually called but. Did not know about that back part. So Jim had six drag clocks so far, all from the left ramp. Sevens there. Jim is playing a very on the fly multiball here too. He's not getting fancy with holding the flipper up and passing the ball over. He's just taking all the jackpots of points, keeping all the balls alive. Now, he's down just two balls now. And, nope, still keeping all the balls at play. It's a super jackpot for 53 million. And one for the road. Can I stop that? And now, rinse and repeat, just back into multiball, or would you go for something else once you've completed that? I'm looking the same way Jim was looking at why that ball bounced clear off the top of that sling. It's just so extensive. It's fired. It stopped the momentum. It hit the slingshot a little bit lower than you probably expected. Yeah. But to answer your question, I think after your first multiball, almost everyone's going to go right to gray and just get a second multiball right away. So this is the pre-ball launch ritual that Andre will go through on every ball. Check the alignment of the flippers. Whether or not, for me, it's like, okay, something like that doesn't work, but he's such a great player. Whatever works for you. If you've got your pre-ball ritual, it doesn't matter what it is. If it works for you, use it. There's nothing that stops you and it can make you unique. He's lucky at the ball saver there, but that usually bounces nicely on the left flipper. He took a big bounce off the top of that right fling and it bounced so far it went out the right alley, just off the bottom of the skill shot target. yeah he just never had control over that never got started Travis once again is coming up as player 4 and starting with 0 points you know you're looking for a first in this position just getting yeah you see the 81 million you see the 32 million But you've seen that Jim got $570 million, and you know you have to keep pace with him at the very least. But he's also coming up and looking at scores and saying that's achievable. He's put $1 billion, $2 billion on this. He knows that that's achievable as opposed to sometimes it's like you come up and a player has already twice or three times the highest score of the tournament on ball one. That's where it's a little bit more discouraging. This is probably an encouraging set of scores for him to walk up to. Yeah, and probably not even as high as he would have expected, even for the highest one. Like this, he's almost caught himself up to second. That's one lock. So, if he gets diamonds here, this is where you can almost be your own enemy on Congo. The ball didn't catch in the lock, so his lock is still lit. And he had enough diamonds to light two locks, but he hasn't scored any yet. I think it did lock the system. It played the animation, but it didn't catch the ball, so it keeps the lock light lit and it plays the animation again. It's a very weird trick the game does. I've seen it actually lock the ball sometimes. Maybe it says how far it went. If it goes up there and falls in the top lane, it does give you the lock. But if the insert stays on, then you didn't get the lock. You're right. The insert would have gone off. But he can do the same as the other players and go for diamond hunt for his second one, which I think he will here. He's going for a backhand today. Or he's going for gray. Oh, he goes for black. We were both wrong, Dave. Yeah. I thought he was going to pass the right guy. He can't, too. All three of us are wrong. Well, actually, I have heard of some players playing map strategy. Yeah. Which I guess if you just keep going after maps that there are Some for I know there's the jungle multiball that you'll get to there's skill fire which is so there are some valuable modes there too, but is it enough to To basically, you know keep up to those game multiball, but It looks like he's doing a combination of both yeah, he's just taking what what he likes on the place over right now And this could be, so he's got the two locks now, this could be a time to get your diamond hunt multiball as well. Doesn't really matter if you get it on first block two or three. In fact, what's nice if you do it on block three is you still have your right lock as the next mystery for the next multiball. Or he could just go gray here and get a multiball that way and then use diamond hunt for the next multiball. Travis is having quite a bit of trouble with the one there. Yeah. Yeah. We see some players just handling that very easily, but Travis has just not really dialed in on it yet. But, hey, take diamond hunt multi-goal when you have it. Is this sometimes also a good mode to get a little bit of heel for some of the shots? Yes. You know, you want to get at least like the three shots to light your lock, but that's really the most value is lighting the lock, at least in my opinion. If it's a chance to try out, you know, hey, I'm having trouble with the part-fickler's shot, You could also use this multiball because it still gives you the awards if you hit the shot. It's only two balls, and if you miss a shot, you still have one left over. And Travis has gotten a bunch of diamonds out of this right now. Now the question is, has anyone ever made it all the way to super multiball? How many diamonds does that require? 100 total in your game. Now, this is only his ball one, so he's not there yet, but he's making progress. But that would be 50 in that mode. Right. And probably a little less, because he started with about 10. Maybe he'll demonstrate it. I wish there was a count on how many diamonds you actually collected in that particular mode. Yeah, it only, well, it shows you for the total. but it's hard to see how many he has now. This is one of the new turns that would probably be a diamond hunt champion. It would probably be part of the UI. And we would know what that extra is. 37 diamonds. 67 total. Travis drained a lot like Steven Bowden did on the last group we just watched. It came out of the pop bumpers and it hit the left flipper, but either people aren't flipping that flipper at the right time or they're not nudging quite enough to get it over. And it's just interesting to see almost the same drain from two different players. He's going for the short punch. Very short punch. And going for diamond hunt multiple right away. Tracy, I don't think you were in the booth yet, But we watched this game, it was the previous round, right? Right. Where they were doing this skill shot, the gray skill shot. Have you seen them do that gray skill shot? No. We haven't seen it yet in this one. What is the method? You basically hit one gray shot, let the ball drain. Hit one gray shot, let the ball drain, and apparently it keeps giving it back to you. You can do it eight times and get multiball without validating the play field. That is impressive. So you're going to need to sort funds so you have any new switches. Four times he back-hitted that ball halfway up the ramp, came back to the flipper, re-fired it, just did not want to go up that ramp. That was very funny. All right, he's exhausted his non-diverting jackpot ramp. Oh, he's into video mode already. So, there's... This is like there's no strategy. He's getting incredibly lucky. It's like getting all the points awards. Finally runs into Sasquatch. I guess it's like... I don't know. I haven't seen the movie. So, I don't know if that's the character. I don't know about Sasquatch, but there's a movie called Bigfoot, which is... It's like a bee movie. one of the worst best movies filmed in a park right next door to us which is so funny to see it because it like it just not right but we come from Sasquatch territory up in Seattle And how many locks did Keith get on bow one? Just one, but in a second. And he puts his hands in his pockets. I don't know. Wow. Wow. Nice ricochet there. And he can get diamonds out of this. If he does, that lights his third lock. And this is the pre-multiball music with the synth choir. This game has great music. Very percussive with the driver. His hands look cold. Yeah, he's like a ball player coughing into his hand to warm him up. So he looks like he's going to be playing a lot more controlled in this multiball than Jim was. Oh, no. Out of it already. And that's, unfortunately, though, sometimes when you try and get controlled, you actually end up losing one of your ball. and, you know, that's one of the arguments, you play controlled or not. Right. I've often seen, you know, once you get control, yeah, you might be able to, like, keep going longer, but is it all necessarily the best case? So now four gray shots will bring him to his next multiball. Mystery will, I don't know what the second mystery award is, but maybe. Light lock. Light lock, okay. He could try to get another, I don't know how you call it, like a multiball the hard way with the diamonds or the gray kind of shortcut way. Or he could go for another strategy like map or finish his video mode. That looks like he took a shot at the ramp. He's like he was a little confused on what the flipper was doing. Okay, he's going for a map and Jungle Jackpot is coming up for him. That's interesting that he did it twice in a row where he did maps and gray. He didn't go straight for gray. and well that timing was straight for grace I'm not sure what he was doing unless part of the diversion remember we have that question when does it start diverting during the multiball unless if you start the math at a certain area it diverts more or less depending on the starting point of your math I don't know so this is the multiball now And his jackpot value will be slightly lower because between his last multiball finishing and this multiball starting, he did not earn as many diamonds as he had for the first one of the ball. But, wow, right away. I thought he went for the two-grid jackpot, but it's not lit yet. This is the control he wanted last multiball, and, wow, pays the price. He's asking himself what he did there. It's like, wait, this is not the key, I know. 79 diamonds collected. Wow. And his map progress. Okay. Jungle Jackpot is now the award. Uh-oh. Slingshot. And this is going to count down pretty soon. He really wants to keep the map hold. They're off the slingshot. Sometimes slingshots are helpful. Those trad monsters are awesome. Yep, so the only jackpot that's lit is the hole value that he just locked in. Well, no, the mystery is also lit. All right. But the value is based on that hurry up that went down to 23 million before he locked it in. So he just got that one jackpot thing. So Keith is showing us how to start a lot of multiballs, but not how to cash in. Yeah, cash in. 20 diamonds away from super multiball or 21 diamonds away. Isn't the next grade like 15 diamonds or something like that? Yeah, it would be a lot. And that will help me get a few more. The fact that he's going for maps as much makes me think he really wants to kill fire. Wow, Mr. J is in the video mode again. This could be more diamonds, I was going to say. Instead, it was that creature. I saw a little smirk on his face. So, if you guess, Amy here could also give him diamonds if he completes it. Right. Two more shots to Amy. And this is also one where you can, like, double your Amy score if you hit that mine shot instead of the lock shot. Fifteen. So he's very close. A little early on the map shot. He's got a lock lit. Takes it. But these are very likely to be cashed out of the super multiball, which is coming up at 100 diamonds. What lights video mode? That's a good question. Maybe those side target shots? I don't know. Oh, it looks like the mystery chat is in the video mode. Yeah. Even if it's not worth that many points, it's just a nice break. That's apparently 71 million points if you're from New Jersey. Yeah. All right. He has lit skill fire. This is one of the most valuable modes. And this is a skill he has is knowing where to plunge the bot. Like, this one he seems to be dialed in on. Because this full plunge is going to hit the middle target. So every time it's lit, he's going to get the timing exactly right. Oh, that one was a little long. There's another there. How long does he have for this? You have a timer. I don't know exactly how long you have. It's counting down the line. Tracy, do you like the left outlay, like that super skill shot? Uh-huh. It scores double the skill shot value if you do get the – we saw one last round, which was 100 million in the left outlay for one skill shot. Probably a lot slower, though. I think you probably got more being quicker at the plunge. Yeah, that seems like the compromise you can make. Although, in theory, if you know how to line it up quickly and you can let the balls go as fast as they're fed, you could potentially do it as fast, but can you be as accurate? So what are we, one diamond away? Yep. There we go. Now, when the gorilla is not disabled, this multiple is really annoying because all you do is flip the flippers over and over again to complete your Congo letters. Now with the Gorilla Disabled, it's a lot more skillful. You have to shoot your shots to get your jackpot. What are the jackpots here? I don't know what sets their value. You grab some ejects according to the display. So that combines both the jungle jackpot multiball and the regular multiball. Only 10 million? Yeah, this is sad. This is why the girl is disabled though, because completing the Congo letters during the told you ball, which is active the entire time multiple balls are in play, is 50 million. Oh, he might see the little pass thing. Oh, he tried it. Didn't get enough on the pit pass. 1.7 billion. That's a good score on Honda. He was going for map again, but what comes after skill fire? I've never seen... You loop back around on the map again, so you could get all the way back to skill fire. Back to 25 million? Yeah. So skill fire is the last one. I think it is the last one. I need to go back. I'm not a Congo expert. I've played it a lot, but not for many years. And it's a game, you've probably noticed this, that it's like we're talking about what's happening next. because what you do on the path of the game determines kind of what comes next. Which multivale you start blocks the other one, and this, there's other things. So it's a game about choosing kind of your pathway through it and how you're going to get points. There's always something to get to, but the way you get there is interesting. There's not one consensus strategy on this game. So he's had quite a long ball there and I kind of forgot where Jim was at I suspect at this point this is, he's had one multiball because this looks like progress towards the second one. And he's likely completed gray once, so completing gray again will start a multiball. The gym is taking some time here to think. I can never tell from his expression what he's planning, what he's thinking about. It's a very calm expression, obviously. Yeah. Oh, he was thinking about not that. Yeah. Yeah. So Andre, who never really got going, he was making some big moves, almost a little too big for the game that didn't really get him comfy. He's been looking around and jumping around, and I know when Andre gets dialed in, he's so good. but the process of getting there... Oh, there's a flipper stuck up. So maybe Carl can hear us. Carl, there's a flipper stuck on Congo. And, okay, Bob Matthews is heading over. Tournament director to take a look at the stuck flipper. And we will take a bit of a break here to take a look at what's going on in this game. So obviously the players can't play the game if the flipper is binding a little bit. And Andre clearly demonstrated that the flipper was stuck. It was in the up position and he walked away. It wasn't his doing. Sometimes it's also just the button that kind of like didn't come out. And what I have, what I've seen like the Sharks do in the IFPA tournaments is They're going to flip it like 50 times, and if it doesn't stick once, play on. So because Jim's playing in this group, Bob or Carl, his tournament directors, will step in to make a decision on what will happen here. But players were reacting to the right flipper earlier in the game. They're kind of looking at it like, did that just do something weird? And it did, for Andre. It just got stuck in the opposition. Well, it looks like Bob's taking a picture of the scores, which implies to me they're going to probably open up the machine and take a look. Yeah. I don't think he has to flip it any time, because he was able to demonstrate to the TD that the flipper was stuck. Yeah. So we actually have results from group four, which is Escher Lefkoff's group. He is now through to the semifinal round. He won on Revenge for Mars. We saw the end of that. And he took first with $523 million on World Cup Soccer. Kaylee George is in second in that group with four points. and Tim Hansen and Jared August are tied with one point each on those games. So Carl is pointing to me because we're going to go to this camera. And we're going to take a look at Congo for a little bit. They don't want us to see the insides of the machine, all the little secrets and the magnets that they have in there. Right, all the live tech secrets of Indus will not be found. So we're back here at the quarterfinal round of the Open 2023 World Championships here in Riverside, California, at the Riverside Convention Center. I'm Tim Sexton. Tracy Lindberg. And Dave Stewart. And we may have a chance to talk about, well, I don't know, talk about how I got into pinball. No, when and how? Because I'm sure there's a lot of listeners out there that are always wondering, how do the people who are heavily involved, where did they get started? And what we'll hear is anyone you ask has a different story. So what's yours? So I started much later than Mr. Dave Stewart. I was not playing pinball at two years old. I was not playing at three years old. No, in fact, it was not until I was 20 years old that I played at a place called the Pinball Gallery. It was in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Had about 30 machines there at the time. And I just went there with my friends, and I noticed on the wall there was, like, oh, league results. So I took a look, and I was like, oh, a pinball league, like a bowling league. That kind of makes sense. Let me go online and check this out. And I joined the Downingtown Summer League and found myself a few months later in the city of Pittsburgh. And I had heard about this big tournament that happened in Pittsburgh every year. And, you know, I just had this trip planned in August. And I looked, and on the same days of my trip to Pittsburgh, I had, oh, the Papa World Championships are in town. They only happen once a year. Let's go check this out. Walk to the Papa facility. 450 pinball machines. or something there, or however many they had, and I was just blown away. Got to see the Papa 16 championships. I played in C divisions, so that was my very first one. I got smoked. I think I came in, like, last in all three classics, but I was just having a great time. I was like, let's get into pinball. Let's just go all the way into it. And then from there on, I just kept doing what I could. I was in college at the time, graduated, moved up to New York, played in some of the leagues I could. up in Syracuse when I lived in Binghamton. Then I moved over to Kipsky. I played in Orange County, New York, as well as the Sanctum in Meriden, Connecticut, in the New Robert Englunds League. Then after a few years of playing and traveling a bit more, and, you know, I was working, I had a little bit more money and time to go on weekends and play in some tournaments. Then I started talking to Zach Sharp at a tournament, the 24-hour battle. And then he asked for my resume to see if I was interested in working at Stern, and I handed it to him. And then I was talking to Keith Elwin when I heard that they were maybe going to reach out to me soon, and he's like, yeah, well, here's kind of the lowdown. Keith had been at Stern for a year at that point. Zach had been there for about a year. And Stern was in the process of hiring some players, and they looked at the pinball community to figure, hey, if we're going to get a next generation of people, they're probably going to come from the people who really enjoy this thing. And I had a skill set that worked. I have a computer science degree from Penn State. I was working at IBM in firmware engineering group, they called it there. And I was looking for something else to do and took the job offer they gave me and moved out to Chicago where I've been for five years. And I've continued to play in tournaments. I came here, obviously, to play in the tournaments. And then I get to work on the games during the week. So I had to adjust my life a little bit. I can't play every single night anymore. I would totally burn myself out. But I make room in my schedule to focus on the big tournaments like the Open here. And I plan to go overseas to Germany this summer for the IFPA World Pinball Championship. So we are going to cut back to ourselves. because the rig is being positioned by someone else over Congo and Carl making his jog behind us on the camera over to adjust the rig back onto Congo where the flipper has hopefully been repaired and the game can resume otherwise. So we won't have time to get into it now because I think we're switching. But while I started playing at two, I was also in college, my first ever competition, which was showing up at Papa. There's a little bit of a story there to share some of the history of how things might have gotten started. Okay, with a totally fresh flipper, that worked. Yep, and the scores are unchanged. Nothing, the game was repaired. Jim is one of the masters at repairing machines live. So this is currently the last game being played of the game two. Andre got his first shot. He's on his way. Sometimes that's all you need. What you need is just to get that first shot under your belt and jump. I'm predicting. Whoa. I was about to predict a long ball, but I have seen some players do that bounce pass. When I played this machine, I was always doing the live catch because that bounce pass looked a little bit iffy. and, you know, right there prove that, yeah, there is risk associated with it. Sometimes when you're playing and qualifying, you know, the game is being played constantly. It doesn't have a chance to rest, but it actually affects the temperature of coils and things like that. So feeds change considerably when the game is, you know, breathing here between rounds and cooling off. This is a good feeling. You start your ball. You were one shot away from multiball, and you get it. A little chance to relax a little bit because you have some insurance. And that ball is gone, but you don't need it to keep hitting jackpots. It gets in the way half the time. Wow, that's a big jackpot value, $43.5 million. Oh no! Oh he did get one of Grey's Fury, that's a good point. Nice how he got his kickback with it too. Yeah, that's great. Oh wow, I haven't seen that happen yet. Okay, the light's been in turn on until after it kicked the ball out of the scoop. I was like, is the lock really lit? It is. Travis did not take a shot at the line. I think he's going for the map strategy now. He knows he has to win. That light's in the jungle, Jackpot Round. He has to get it back in the scoop there. You could shoot the wraps if Travis were like this. He uses a little bit of time, but take the time to get the shot. It's worth it. He almost has it at max value. It's $33 million every time he goes back into a softball. I haven't got a chance to try it, but if he can get the flippers. Oh, like this. See if he shoots the mystery. Nope. I was wondering if you'd be able to shoot the mystery and catch it coming out and shoot it right back there. And he's got a legal, this is a loud, this is a legal ball trap. The ball falls out because he had to use the flipper, but you can hold a ball there skillfully in a multiball. Wow, everyone's getting great progress in these tunnels. 50 million. He even got the last one. Keith didn't get the last one in that same spot. I think I get the snake 99% of the time. Into the ball. Now, if Keith runs away with this game, it helps Travis at this point. Because the player takes eight points. It's not as hard to be that second player. But if someone like Jim or Andre wins, then Travis is really in a lot of trouble. No matter what. Although Travis would rather come back on ball three and win himself. Yeah. Just the way the game is shaping up. Keith has a pretty big lead here, and he's kind of on his second lap through the game. Oh, finally video mode. We'll see if the 71 million happens. Oh no. The raft capsized. Only 51 million. That's a tricky pattern of rafts we got there. I thought it said lock is lit. It did. And it didn't light the lock. I don't know. There is not as much mystery as Mystery Castle, but there's certainly a lot of mystery. It could... I don't know. I don't know the answer. Yeah, that I cannot explain, but even if it was a malfunction, Keith very well knows it. It's a minor malfunction. They would not have done... They basically say play on anyways. Back to map. Was Jungle Jackpot the second or third map award? I think it's the third one. Map award diamond hunt multiball? I've never seen that. This is after chill fire. It doesn't start over. and with 200 200 diamonds he can get to super multiball again for 20 million each or you think still 10 I think it's still 10 million each that's the end of diamond hunt multiball but he did have his lock lit after that for real he almost always used coming out of diamond hunt multiball Right, but you need more locks on the later multi or more diamonds on the later multi balls. So not not as certain Loop combos at like 20 million apiece Why you were diamond And that's the third lock back to multiple Come on! Come on! Come on! So, while Keith is doing well, I wanted to point out that every other group, someone has eight points. And someone is already moving on from all the other groups. And if this four is to hold, the way things are, Keith would also have eight points. I can also say that several world champions have already been eliminated from the tournament. Zach McCarthy with zero points after two games. Bowen Kerins with... Oh, Bowen Kerins has not been eliminated yet. He does have zero points after two games. That was a nudge. He can make a crazy tiebreaker, everything goes right situation. That was a $15 million gray award. I like seeing awards that I don't normally encounter, even when I do have a good game on causal. There's been a lot on this game that I have seen that I've never seen before. Since I haven't had a lot of time on it, I've not even remembered seeing the video mode before. 15 more to light lock and I don't think has he started satellite transfer yet no he's completely avoided that shot as you said that he hit the satellite but it didn't progress him there at least wow he hit the that's the double one Ready to lock another ball. Tracy, are you keeping track of how many diamonds he's at so we know when the next super-duper multiball is at. Ooh, would it be at 200? I don't know. That's what Tim says. I believe so, yeah. What's he at? Are you at it every time he gets 10 plus 15 to know where we are? I have definitely lost track. There's another 15, but he is only, now he's going to be ready for a third multiball? Fourth? Fourth. I know, he's played a lot of multiballs. Of the volcanoes. Oh. That scared you. That was good hate. If we had a Tracy camera, it would be very interesting because watching Keith dead bounce from the end of those slippers. So the way you can learn when you can and can't do that, play one-handed because you have to start trusting that more often. That is good advice that I've received before and not yet taken. How else do you use up credit when you have a whole lot of credits left? 2023 is my year of working on my flipper skills. So... I think it's all New Year's resolution, like flipper skill related, yeah. I've got to put some time in it fast, though, before the Women's World Championship. Yeah, that's coming up. What's the next flipper skill that you want to either perfect, improve upon, or learn? Well, I keep getting told that I should have saved a ball that was going straight down the middle. So I really need to learn to save. And I guess it's not necessarily the flipper skill, but it's the right timing to hit the machine to save a ball that's in the center. So basically it's boxing. Yeah, and I do slap save. I think I let go and I give up on some of the ones that are right in the middle. And some friends keep telling me you could have saved that. That was amazing again. It was like a one for a slap save. So, yeah, I've got to start saving stuff from the middle. How are you on the outlanes with nudging? Decent. Decent, not phenomenal. Better on classics. I love classic games. And I was quite happy. I ended up tied for 13th in the strike tournament today. Nice. 126 players, so that felt good. Congratulations. Got knocked out just in time to join you in the booth. My drop catches need to be more natural, too. I can do them just fine, but in a stressful moment in a tournament. They go away. They go away because you forget to use them, or they go away because you're doing them but somehow your timing is off? They go away because I think I become more nervous in a stressful moment in a tournament, and I'm afraid to use the skill in case it goes wrong. But I am drop catching a lot more than I was before, so that's a plus. Because every time I watch the top players, the drop catches happen all the time. Well, maybe this helps. One thing to know about drop catches is slightly late is better than slightly early. Thank you. So if you're being nervous, you could still try them. And what's funny is a live catch is the opposite. A little bit early, et cetera, and a little bit late. A live catch that's a little bit late, you actually flip the ball into nowhere. We've seen this whole game. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, kind of spoilers. It just goes to Super Multiball again, and you just go through your map awards again. Yep. Super Multiball. And Drill Disabled, so this will be $10,000,000, I believe. Jackpots again. So our producer has a comment. If you want to know why they never made a sequel to Congo, it's because you see everything in the first game. All right, he can loop this over and over again for $10 million. Yeah, he could loop it. I don't know about you, but maybe he can. But that is a very satisfying shot when you get that through the pop bumpers. What I don't understand on there, there's like a light there that says triple something. And I never know what you're tripling because... Oh, it's a 3X. Or a 3X. What's 3X? The hippo, right? No, it's up the ramp. It's up the ramp. Right. But his Congo jackpot was still like $10 million, not $30 million. It would seem to make sense if the values were more on that right ramp. especially when that 3X is lit, but I've never seen what's actually triple. Wow, you got the double super score there. You were talking about that. Dalton says it is triple hippo bonus. Okay, you can go see this board because he is going directly for the hardest shot in the game. Yeah. But, yeah, I love that. If you can get the timing on that shot, it's like 150 million plus diamonds on that aiming. So our next exciting thing will be to see if the game rolls at 10 billion The other groups can't play Groups three and four cannot play the next game until this game is done because Keith has choice before they do so rush premium is going on behind us with Zach McCarthy's group and That's already out. He just picked it because he wants to play it But beyond that we're waiting for This group and the other groups are waiting for this group. What game are you hoping we see for game three? Out of the eight teams? Oh, wow. Maybe, well, I don't know. I'm hoping to see. I don't. Keith knows that he may want to do more picks in future rounds. He's not going to waste a pick. I could totally see him just taking fourth, get out of the way, or even taking first, but getting out of the way, deferring the pick. So who's next highest seed on this? Would that be Travis? Or something crazy he could do is pick Alice Cooper, because that game has not been in the open call. That's actually exactly what Josh Sharpe did. That's a game that got me knocked out, but not because it was Alice Cooper and I didn't know it. I just got unlucky on ball three. But that's what Josh Sharpe did. He had eight points. He picked that Alice Cooper in order to get a practice game on it. I would love to see that in the next game because I spent quite a bit of time learning it recently since it was in the women's bank before it was moved to the open. Oh, good. So you can explain it to us. I have a bit. I have a bit. Now, Keith ends with a bit of a score, 4.287 billion. Let's see how scores look in qualifying. Did anyone come close to that score? Congo, number one score in qualifying, 3.9 billion. So he passed three full days of qualifying scores just in that game and finally came in. Well, that's because nobody in qualifying was on camera. So they didn't have to demonstrate the entire game. And again, that was so long that I've kind of forgotten where we're at. Right. Well, we can, for the sake of argument, say that he's won the game. And we have a close battle between Jim and Travis here, and Andre needs to get the game going. Those two players are going to move on to this group. We could end up with an interesting 8-2-2-2 scenario. We could. There's the multiball from the gray award. Three jackpots in a row for Jim. Only $14.5 million for these. So now, see, because he went up to left orbit, You've got the super jackpot lit on that mine, which, again, would be double your regular jackpot value. Jim is making great nudges in multiball here to keep the ball from going out the out lane. Why did you say something? I don't know. Because it was so cool how he got it in the end lane, and then the left side didn't do anything. Oh, it didn't lock in there. It goes to the post pass. Jim, despite waiting all that time for Keith Ball, came into this very focused. He didn't spend a lot of time flipping the flippers and warming up. He kind of knew, like, okay, I know what I need to do. Hit gray, get started. Okay, more diamonds, lock lit. Amy Dunn, there you go. Oh a nice ricochet Yeah Yeah Still hasn't caught up with Travis, though. They're not even trying for the outlaying skill shot there. They're also not trying what we saw the other group do, which was just go gray over and over again. to each short fund, but it didn't go well a couple of times. Oh, that was... Oh, yeah. He had the chance. Oh, he has another great chance for $40 million. And he gets it at pretty high value. I'm excited to have learned about Jungle Jackpot here. I love... Yeah, that hurry up starts at $40 million for a while, and then it quickly counts down. But $36 million and you're very happy with that. There you go. First jackpot. So he held the flipper up and then did a little half flip to slow the ball down there to catch it out instead of going for the live catch. Whoa! airball! Now, I believe I've heard that the doorways are the same for everybody until it's completed. That's what I thought. But that looks the same again. Yeah, well, I thought it was the same for every player, but it seemed like he didn't have the left door being the $50 million. It's another mystery of Congo. I don't know. I don't know the answer. Okay, so where are the diamonds now? There's only one lit. He just lost the second ball. Well, there's always Amy around any time he completes the lane. There's always the gray award. So there's diamonds in bunches. Does the map shot light a diamond if it's not lit? I'm not sure if it's... Or is it you have to collect? Because you don't end up with no diamonds. There will always be one diamond on the play zone. I think it's there. Perfect. And there's more diamonds right there. That's their super multiball. Jim has definitely cast in on his multi-balls more than others so far see if he can do the same here I think him playing on the fly like this because the jackpot scoring is so low you're going to get extra points out of the hippo and the pop numbers and stuff that probably makes the efficiency on this multiball a lot higher than what Keith was doing but there's there's a big window in the middle of the play field with a gorilla holding a ball and the words Congo and normally when you play this game On location you can use the flicker sometimes to knock it rocket back and forth and knock the ball into targets That is disabled because it's really boring and it makes this multiball really overpowered We didn't catch Pete, but he did create some space If someone catches Keith here, then we're going to have an amazing show. I'm sure Andre's first goal, not knowing what Travis will end up, his first goal is at 1.4, try and catch Jim. Guarantee a point. With two points, he would definitely love to go in with a third point. That one point could be big if he can get it. Yeah, our most likely results here are either 8-3-2-1 or 8-2-2-2, which, you know, even if Andre passes Travis, but he can't come and beat Keith, then it's still any of the players, other players on the team to move on. Looks like he's working out a plan. Yeah, his plan looks like it's gray all day. So with one more gray shot, he'll light his next block. Give him a diamond. and you can I mean in one multiball especially your first multiball with your very high jackpots you can catch up there's no limit to the number of jackpots you can shoot it doesn't it doesn't change anything besides your diverter in the multiball 29 29 but you just need 5 to lay the lock at this point right right so that's why you can't back the locks because then you'd just immediately have all of them lit. I'd be okay with that. And, oh, see, that kind of, you know, that was diamonds he could have used for his third lock that he won't be able to use. Wow. Oh, that's not always that. Yeah, I'm not sure what he was shooting at that point. Can you backhand, Gray? Was he trying to do that? I don't know. On a roll, maybe. You could, from the left flipper, sneak it into the mine shaft. I've seen that happen, but that's, like, a really hard shot, but I'm not sure what value that would have brought in. Travis is not guaranteed a point. So is Jim. Let's go. So we're going to have, basically, yeah, a game three of this group. Keith will be, you know, Travis could still come back. Keith has at least six points. And even if Travis comes back and wins, he'd have four. Keith would still be pretty far ahead and in good position. So he's pretty comfortable right now. 85 diamonds. Only 15 more to go in. Yeah, but now I'm kind of sad because Super Multi-Multi-Multi's still a little point. it's almost like you get there to get it out of the way yeah but you get there and do it twice and that's the diamond that's funny he looked he needed 15 diamonds yeah It would be a grind, but he's alive. Yeah, but you'd much, knowing how little, you know, he didn't have that much to catch. Well, I guess 700 is still a little bit, but you'd much rather be in multiball grinding than in single-ball play grinding. Yeah. Yeah. Travis is going for control there. Oh, no. Speedball's up the right. Oh, these shots are not landing where he wants them to. There they go. So, Travis, like, I think the Super Bowl Super multiball kills your lock progress for your regular multiball. Yeah, I noticed. He got 15 diamonds, but he does not have a lift lock. But has he played a skillfire yet? Is that what he's going for? I don't think so. That he could pass Jim on a skillfire, um, if it goes his way. And he's pretty far through his map already. Oh wow, it bounced really high. Took a danger. Look at danger. Steel fire is next. Oh, I don't know why he shot that. He could have shot the map ramp to divert it around. And he's been hitting the ramp pretty consistently. Oh, that almost killed him, too. There we go. So he hasn't hit anyone yet. Oh, he missed the one where it's all lit. He's, like, out of phase with the skill fire. Oh, my gosh. Travis has not dialed in. A little early again. He has not hit a skill fire shot yet. I have to say, actually, that's pretty impressive. I have never seen this. He has missed every skill fire shot, and he's going to take a walk. It's not good for his score, but that was mighty impressive. If there was an award for that. And with this game, the light is the same. Like, if it's off the light, there's no grace period. So it's as soon as that light's lit. And he was hitting the target like a frame before the light came on. He's going to watch this back and watch me criticizing him, too. And he's going to go, yep, yeah. But hey, it's like, it's fall one all over again, you know? You're like back to the beginning. Oh, it was, that's the 3x, Dave. It's the 3x Pippo bonus. Amy can add up fast. That was a nice, nice. Oh. I don't think he has enough. He doesn't. So Jim now takes second, puts in the three points. Andre's through the two points, and Travis will have one point ending that game. So Keith Elwin, eight points through to the semifinals. And in all the other groups, the only player who's been eliminated is Zach McCarthy. Let me think. Has he been eliminated? No, Zach still has a chance. If Neil gets second and he gets first, he can still make it to a tiebreaker. So nobody has been eliminated yet, but we know Neil Graff is through to the finals. or semifinals. Jason Zoller is through to the semifinals. Keith Elwin is through to the semifinals and Escher Lefkoff are through to the semifinals. So those four players plus four more who will join them from these next games in tiebreakers. And let me update my notes here. So Travis gets a point out of that. Andre stays at two and Jim Belsito is up to three points. Jim Belsito is the man who can do it all. He can play in the finals. He can run this entire tournament. Tournament director, tech, repairing all these games and stuff. He's been quite impressive on the floor here, just keeping it all under control. Although, when you talk about repairing games, I have to say, I have seen very few machines out of order compared to most tournaments where there's always someone repairing something. something. They've got a lot of use this weekend. And how often, you know, occasionally I think it was Bagels that was down at one point, but very seldom were machines down for more than like a minute. And that was very few and far between. The tech crew was quick to show up at a machine and solve a problem. Iron Maiden got opened up quite a lot. but it was solved really quickly. Prospector was down for a few hours, and they worked so diligently to get it back, and I know the women really appreciated getting that back into the... Did you hear the story of Bad Girls? Jim drove across town to a storage unit to get a board out of one of his other games. Came back here, installed it in Bad Girls, and kept the game going with 110 scores already entered on it. early on Friday. That's fantastic. That's like the kind of dedication. So he's done that. He's driving all across California. I crossed town. I'm not talking about Riverside. He must have driven down to maybe an hour away to get to his storage. I have no idea where it is, but he got a board out of storage, put it back in the game, got it all working again, and just happened to be that incredibly rare board that he needed for the game. His dedication to making this. one of the best tournaments of the year. And, Dave, you had a story first about Papa, I think. Oh, yeah. So this was before I knew anything about leagues and tournaments. And as I since found out, at the time, there were only two that existed. There was a Chicago league called IFPA. There was a Broadway arcade league called Papa. and they started, Steve Epstein started running the world championship. Oh, we're going to twist, sir. So I don't know if I'll have time to finish this story, but let me try. And I was playing, I was at Carnegie Mellon. I was basically, talk about firmware engineer. It's what I basically do, but I resisted mixing my, you know, my work with my hobby passion. so that's a story that we'll have to wait for another time because we want to watch the game and don't want to hear me talking when the game's going on it looks like Travis picked this so Keith did defer as opposed to selecting Alice Cooper I have played Twister all at once and it was at a previous Indisc and so I look forward to learning the rules as we go along well Tracy if you know how to shoot orbits you know how to play this game Yeah, I don't know much about this game. There used to be one in Maryland way back when, when I was with the Free State Pinball Association. I don't remember that at all at this point. But what I do know is that, at least here, the strategy was cow multiball, which is orbits. And then when you're in cow multiball, shoot orbits. Yes. Players may never shoot the ramp. Players may never even shoot the lock shots. And that's really all this game has other than some targets and the pop-up bars, which the cow shot will divert it into them. But, yeah, a lot of the game is about just getting control after it comes out of the pop bumpers, and that's the biggest challenge for the players is just when you're going to play the cow strategy, it's always going to be out of control from the pop bumpers. And how do you get the ball back to the flipper so you can make an orbit shot? So looking at odds to advance out of this group, Travis Meary, 14% chance to advance. We have, looking for the next player, Andre Masikoff, 32%, Jim Belcido, 55%. The odds split. That may not round up to 100%, but, you know, it's close. off by one or two. So how many orbits does it take to get to cow multiball? Nine. Nine orbits? Yes. And that is the best strategy. Oh, yeah, because the jackpots get well over 100 million deep into cow multiball. And also, when you, Jim Drain's out here, going up to the orbits, you get bonus acts, and you get pop-up birds, which are, like, the only points in the game. So it just kind of gives you everything. There's this skill shot here for 30 million that almost everyone will pass on to get the bottle of Flipper. Even if they don't pass on it, does anyone actually ever succeed at that skill shot? Which is to try and hit the magnet in the middle of that spinning disc. And for 30 million, considering scores are often like in the billion here, 30 million is really not. not as much as it might seem. Right. Also, Cow Multiball puts six balls in the play. Creates a lot of chaos. And then players often just try to trap up as many as they can. So it's interesting. Oh, Andre was going for the middle shot, and there is really no grace period on Sega's, so it's not coming back. Now there's another multiball, which is there's a drop target. Basically, knock down the drop target, lock ball, do that, I think, three times to get a three-ball multiball. Yeah, and it gives you the same speed cost every time you do it. I'm looking for the drop target. No, it's hidden behind that wire ramp. So he's got neither orbit lit for shout, or is that because he hasn't done this? The skill shot is hiding the lamp, but it's only the left orbit. Every game it starts at the left orbit for every ball. The pop-up is alternated. And look, 2x bonus here and a lot of points. So he's made one shot so far this game. Let's see what his score is when we get a chance. See, he's already at 50 million just by making one shot because of the pop-upers being the most valuable scoring feature in this game normally. It's just an odd rule set that makes that happen. Shooting the in-lane will change which orbit is lit for Cal. All that trouble with flipper packs, I bet it switches on him. He has those nice, steep stega flippers. makes it kind of easy to catch when the ball is rolling up and in lane. And one of the most challenging feeds, and this is the way that they adjust the games here so players can't do the same thing over and over again. Coming out of that right orbit, there's almost no way to get it from hitting the top of the slingshot, and players are going to have to nudge the game to get control of the ball. So it didn't look like much progress. Nobody makes much progress on ball one. Yeah, but on one ball, you can start cow, and that's all you need. This ball's coming back. Back handable? It's not, and it looked like you went for a post pass there. It worked. Although, I was trying that during one thing, and it is back handable, and I got two orbits for it. but I was only able to do it once and couldn't do it a second time. So I believe it's doable, but it's such a tight backhand shot that there's, like, no grace. If you're too early, it hits the post. Too late, it doesn't go through. Char's made a really great nudge on the right side there. The outlanes are really deadly on this game. It was a very determined nudge. So you're getting a lot of points in this pop-up first. Just got $20 million for blowing up that truck. Which I have not seen Twister. I don't know if that's important to the plot. It has been many years since I've seen Twister. Trying to remember if a truck even blows up. Hey, it looks cool on the screen, so whether or not it happened. Oh. Okay, he's very close to the cow multiball. Two away. Two more. I am excited to be cow multiball. Uh-oh. That was nice. Am I right now? Now, the right orbit is a little smaller than the left, the actual shot. So two-way, I mean, you know, you can do it, and then you can get back to your next count multiball. The thing I had to convince myself every time I played this game in qualifying was, like, no matter how many shots away it is, you can hit them, right? If I ball one, ball two were completely nothing, I was like, well, it's nine shots. You've made nine shots before. It just seems like such a far path. It does, yeah. Well, especially coming out of the pops, like getting control again. It's not just make a shot, make a shot, make a shot, make a shot, get the ball. So the skill guy will be on forever until he hits another shot. If he shoots the orbit, would it give him credit or not? It will give him credit for cow if he shoots the left orbit. And you get points for missing the... It's funny, skill shots missed 5 million points. And that's that right orbit feed. And Jim's like, I did that. I set that up. And I ruined my chances to move on in my own tournament because I was so devious in how I set up this game to come out every time to the top of that slingshot. Although he still has one more ball, and you said it can all be done in one ball. It can. And you have to believe in yourself. Especially at this level. But Jim also potentially has a helper. By coming in this with three points, if he doesn't do anything but Keith does, he may still end up in the tie game. Right. Oh, no. Andre is certainly having it rough. He has the whole round. He's crossing his arms a lot on the game. Which doesn't look like good body language to me. It doesn't look like he's happy when it goes up the L.A. Keith, his team's are very cold hands. hands warming him up. That's why I have gloves in my pocket and a hand warmer in my bag. Wow. Because we're in freezing Southern California. Convention halls tend to be cold. That's true. But there's great air exchange in here, by the way, as measured by CO2 monitors. Wipes off his hand as the ball is in the pop-up burst. Oh, he's going for the lock and get back to him. And he post passes on the fly. might be recognizing that the scores after two balls are not that high get some points and rather than rather than going through the flipper passage which have not been successful if cow is not lit in that direction go for the other multiball if cow is lit go for cow right I mean Keith also has absolutely no need to blow it up because he's through no matter what that's true okay so tell me Tell me about this other multiball then, since it appears we may see it. Oh, yeah. So it has a really cool starting effect where it drops all the balls on the spinning disc and the magnet. And then your ramp is lit for a jackpot. And the jackpot is not as many points as any cow jackpot. And that was balls three lots. Yeah, so one more. Oh, it's four, not three. And I hit the trough just in time. We've got to get the target down one more time. He thought he made that shot the way he reacted. Oh, going for the right orbit to light a Super Pops. Maybe bring it in Super Pops with multi balls is the plan. Super Pops, there's a million per Pop-Up, I believe. Is it timed? Or just a certain number of Pops that you can get? Oh, that was a good save. No, but he just hit 13 Pops there. Well, he's got like two multi-balls. One is lit. The other one is close. Right. And you can just plunge it and you know you don't validate the play field on this game either until you start to hit a few switches So Travis was very close to Cal in like two orbits away maybe That'll come back Oh The cow multiball. All the balls are coming to play. If the ball stays, light will flash, and it has absolutely no meaning. It'll keep saying drive again or whatever it says. And, no, he's at three balls. He's going to stay at three balls. None of those other balls are coming back into play. Down to two. But you only need two. And he wants orbits. Orbits for $47 million each. Plus they give you all the good top bonus lanes and top numbers and stuff. And he's finally got under control with two on the left flipper. I find cradle separations really tough on Sega games. Because you hit the slingshot a lot. That worked for him, though. 63 million. He's already at 600 million. Nice. And the grace period? Yep, that was a 77 million jackpot. And another exploding tanker truck. And it's the same number every time for cow. It doesn't go up at all. It's probably set at the highest to start. So he had started with 363, came out with seven something, so about 400 million on there. So as Cooper pops now, his game is just featuring the pops. Yep, and we'll bring him back to cow again. but I'm wondering it's like rather than flipper passing should he just shoot the right orbit yeah I guess that's what he did and just get more superpowers and that spinner gave him some good points there as well where it's falling in so shooting the orbit if the cow is not lit on there moves the wind shot so it is worse. Wow. Look at this superbox. Yeah, orbits are everything on this game. No one has made a single ramp shot on this game. And why would they? Because ramps are cool? But the ramp comes down in this really fast speed to the left-looker. It comes over the slingshot. Oh, first of all, lock this. For the other multiball. Six more. Oh, a ramp shot. And that's being, yep. Oh, that's drained off of it. That's why you don't do the ramp? Yeah, well, he tried just holding up the flipper and just right into the slingshot now. So solid ball, a lot of bonus. That was a great ball. 4X bonus. I don't know. So we said in this group we have three major champions. Travis is the only one who's not a major champion. He's currently in the lead. Now, in the rules, you're not allowed to, you know, necessarily tank. But if Keith is looking at this group and he has a chance to help Travis, You know, I don't know what Keith's mindset will be, but, like, you have Jim Belsito, who's won Pinberg, right, in the past. And you have Andre Matikoff, who's won Papa, Papa 18. And you have Travis, who is really, this is his first time on a stage this big. He's really up and coming. Yeah. He's climbed the ranks really rapidly this past year. You really have an interesting situation in the group happening here. because I thought Travis was so dead after game one, and then Congo, you know, he got it together, and now he has a chance to move through. And I was saying, what do you have, 14% chance to move on, and now he has, you know, no one passes him, he's going to move on. But if Jim can stop that, he will. He's got six more shots to cow. Like I was saying earlier, he has to believe in himself. Wow, he's got a rip. Oh, no. Yeah, that is scary. Okay, that is very scary. Wow. Jim is not out. Not quite out, but he is close. It will depend. His life or tournament depends on what Andre and Keith do now at this point. Right. If Andre doesn't pass him, Keith passes Travis. I think he makes it in or at the very least tie break. I think at that point, he's going to be cheering for Keith. There's no doubt. Keith is just that one shot away from the main multiple. The Everyone Underground Now multiball. I'm not sure what its actual title is. There's three multiballs. There is also a multiball by shooting the ramp over and over again. If you can survive long enough after shooting that ramp. That was pretty cruel as a feat. Actually, Andre basically guarantees himself a point here if he shoots the skill shot. Or if he shoots one orbit. Orbit's ready for him. Now he's going to the lock. Well, with how close and how much the pop bumpers are worth points, if he wants to get ahead of Jim, it almost seems like shoot an orbit and get pop bumpers. Because if he gets second place and Keith passes Travis, that still sets him up for a tiebreaker to just get ahead of Jim. And then he also hopes for Keith to pass Travis. This has been Andre's strategy, though, is just going for that lock, even though it's drained him quickly on the first of the balls. Wow, he plunges it, and he will get this ball back. And you get $10 million from locking it, so one more lock shot here would put him ahead of Jim. Oh. And with bonus, that should be enough. Yes. That'll put him ahead. Jim Del Sito will stay at three points. Andre has three points. Travis currently would have five points if it ended this way and he would go through now this is kind of what I was alluding to Keith has to play here but if he does nothing the non-major champion goes through his career I also know Keith from what I know I think he's playing he wants to win all three because that also that's his style win So I see him doing everything to go see this three-way. I think it's a three-way tiebreaker if he passes. Yeah, everybody would have three points. Have you seen this, Tracy? No. Wow, look at this. This is the game's whole gimmick. Woo! And then it's over. And you have to shoot the ramp. That's all that's left. It's the ramp. Yeah. He does get a little Sega Ball save there. There it is, and then he's got to control it. He goes for a flip. Nice, goes underground. I didn't pay attention to how much that jackpot was worth. It was 53. Okay, so I can see why Cal... Yeah. I think Cal at 62 wasn't that much more, but it's what you were saying about going up on top with the bonus X and the top bumpers, that's almost like what makes count as opposed to like the dangerous ramp shots coming closer to the flippers okay and he was a little early on that orbit shot headed to the out lane and that means Keith is through with 10 points Travis with 5 and Jim and Andre tie at 3 and will not move on to the next round other results we have Gabe DeSilveria Anyone know him? I don't. I've never played with him. Advancing from Group 1, Neil Graff was already through. Jason Zoller and Jason Werdrick, two Jasons moving on from Group 2. Escher Lefkoff and Kaylee George from Group 4 moving on to the finals. So we've eliminated Tim Hansen, Jared August, Jim Bilstito, Andre Mazenkov, Bowen Kerins, Eric Stone, Daniele Acciari, and Zach McCarthy. So we have eliminated one, two, three, four, five, six major champions of the nine. That still leaves three out of the last eight, but that also means five potential new players who have not won major championships. Is that what we're counting? That's correct. And even players who have never made it to a major Final Four, like Travis and Gabe and Jason Zoller has never made it to a major Final Four. Who else is still in? We've got three major champions. So we just got an announcement from Dave. What's coming in? Oh, just letting us know that our tour of duty here in the broadcast booth is about to come to an end. So we're going to have to wait some other time. We'll have to get on a broadcast to get that story. It basically tells you how we got started. Check back next year. Next year. Some other time. We hope in 2024 when we will finish our stories on how we got into pinball and what happened at Papa in years past as we watch the story unfold here. Okay. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure. I'm Dave Stewart. Monday Night Pinball, that's our Seattle league. We have 300 players every Monday. Team league, if you're looking to create a team league, take a look at our website. Look at what we do. The software is available in Git. So it's available to others. But we just enjoy it. It's part of our Seattle scene. Tracy Lindberg. I'll just give a shout-out to all of my Arizona crew who may be watching at this time. I'm Tim Sexton. I'm just plugging hey play some more pinball go out on location obviously play certain pinball but you know all pinball is good pinball for the industry and check out my website pinballstatistics.com and these are the INDISC Open World Championships thanks a lot you'll have the semifinals in just a few minutes