it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff fuels you can find everything on pinballprofile.com all past episodes we're on instagram we're on twitter at pinball profile Email pinballprofile at gmail.com and check out our Facebook group. Josh Sharpe for years, for years has said, you know, if you can ever get this guy on, that'd be like, you know, finding the unicorn, so to speak. I'm like, are you kidding? In a heartbeat, I can get this guy on. I'm proving it right now from the IFBA. If you like that website, you should be thanking this guy. And a lot of changes that have happened in the IFBA and competitive pinball. Brian Shepard here on the program. Hello, Brian. Hi. Thanks for having me on. Josh said there's no way you'd ever come on. He can be wrong about a thing or two. We're going to go over a lot of the things he's wrong about in a second here. But I do want to get a little history for how long you've been with the IFPA. Basically, almost from the beginning. It's been 16 years now, I think. 16 years. So you've seen this growth now. I think we're probably not too far away from seeing 100,000 unique players join the IFPA. We're certainly over 90,000 now. And when I joined, which was eight years ago, I think 23,000 when I got in. So it's just booming. Yeah, I think it's definitely gone beyond our expectations. Is that good or bad? Growth is always good, but it requires a lot of people like yourself, the Adam Beckers. You've got people in Europe and others that are looking after this once little thing known as IFBA. It's good in many ways and bad in others. The growth is always good because we want pinball to be a marquee sport. It's bad in ways. Now I have a lot more competition to play at tournaments that beat me. Joking selfishly, of course, top 100 player Brian Shepard. When I first came in, I think all tournaments were worth a base of 25 points. It didn't matter how many people. And then, of course, they changed that. There have been a lot of changes. Well, actually, that was the very first rating system was basically the NASCAR system where first got 25 points, second got so many, and so forth. And then after that first year, I basically told Josh, we could do this better. And I don't remember the second system we had, but it was based on some level of skill, so the bigger tournaments were worth more. And that's kind of what started this journey, is to be accurate as much as possible, but promote the growth. And make the better tournaments stand out than the lesser tournaments, basically. So what constituted a tournament back then? Were they all the same style? It was basically if you held an event. I don't think we had nothing about formats. We didn't have nothing about rules or anything. It was literally just if you held an event that did some kind of event or some kind of format, we had no restrictions or nothing. Now, I thought the competitive pinball scene and really IFBA was more for leagues than tournaments. Am I wrong? No, actually, the reason why leagues were used heavily up front is because we didn't have a lot of the great locations we have today or even a lot of great tournaments. You know, at the time, geez, I think the first year we had Papa, California Extreme, and Texas, and maybe a few others, Expo. But that's about all we had. We had probably 10 events a year. So the leagues played an important part of filling in the gaps because back then, 20 years ago, everybody had home collections. We didn't have the barcades and stuff existing. So it was a great way to fill the gap. But if we go back 30 years ago, there wasn't the Internet to find out about these things. I mean, you're in Ohio, and of course, all the manufacturers in Chicago and stuff, they knew about this stuff. I only found out about this when somebody on Facebook in 2014 said, Hey, we're going to play pinball at someone's house. And I said, What? They are doing? He has a machine? Oh, no, he has 11. Ray Boyle out of London, Ontario. And I'm like, Wow. I went there, and that was the hook. And then they told me, Well, there's tournaments. There's this. There's this. That's how I got hooked. But how do people know about this before the Internet, before Facebook, before really any kind of social media? Well, for IFPA, it was definitely the Internet that helped. But I think it's just the word of mouth of the shows. Just like your story, I think we all have that story, right, where we knew somebody that joined our league. Like we used to have the Ohio League, and a couple of people from Cincinnati we knew joined, a couple of people from Dayton joined, and then we have a waiting list. And it just grows from there. And then I think we see the same story play out in the barcades. Now we have the leagues and barcades. People start joining and just word of mouth. And I think not just with tournaments, but I think the whole industry, right, with normal pinball, collectability, people collecting, it's a self-feeding mechanism. I should point out, you're probably wondering why it's so loud here. We're actually at Cleepin in Independence, Ohio, just near Cleveland. A wonderful show and an easy show for you to get to. But these shows are certainly an example of the growth of pinball there everywhere, not just shows but tournaments. And barcades are kind of coming back a little bit. the home use of pinball is definitely higher than it's ever been. Oh, no, it's amazing. I mean, just think, you know, 15, 16 years ago, we would have the Ohio shows probably started. I forget what officially started, but, you know, now we have three shows just in Ohio. There's so many shows I can't even pick what I want to do now. And this show today, the amount of people here was just amazing. I think it's the most I've ever seen here. It was butt to butt. You couldn't do anything. And not to mention the C word, but again, you know, there's still the COVID thing that we're coming out of. And, you know, some of the hotels have been certainly suffering. This show, I couldn't come to last year for the first time in several because I couldn't cross the border. Yeah, I couldn't come last year, not because of that, because I was waiting to see a little bit longer with the COVID stuff. Yeah, I was surprised they had it, honestly. But I'm glad we're back. I think we'll be at full strength probably next year. I think everybody's starting to come back more and more. And it did a wonderful thing with the rankings. It reset everybody, basically. Well, I was wondering why that wasn't paused. You mentioned resetting. So when we look at the top 100 players, top 200 players, really, we're looking at what they've done in the last 18 months, probably by the end of the year. Yeah, I mean, it's true. I think we did talk about it briefly about doing that. But the truth of the matter is it probably required a lot of changes on our back end to support that since we want to do the three year rolling window. And that was probably just at the time we just didn't really want to deal with given everything else going on in life with COVID. I'm talking to Mr. From the Back End here, all right? So when he says, yeah, it would have been a lot of work, he's basically saying, yeah, not happening. Yeah, I mean, truthfully, during the first few years, the first couple of months of COVID, I really didn't care about pinball or working on the website and stuff. But I will say this, it's definitely revitalized my interest in pinball. Before COVID hit, I was starting to get burned out quite a bit with the website, with playing and complaining of pinball and stuff like that. So it did help. But back to your original question real fast. I think one of the reasons why we didn't want to pause it is just simply because we knew everybody would come back. Once things started coming back, it caused a gold rush of people wanting to come back and play competitively. And for those that came back, it allowed them to get back in the rankings much faster. I do want to sincerely commend the IFPA for suspending it when it did and putting safety first. 100% agree. And also taking advice from the different country directors. Are we able to do this? Is it ready? And it wasn't a 50% plus one vote to say, OK, now we're good. It was you were looking more for a bigger majority. Yeah, that's true. And one thing I do want to point out is a lot of people think Josh is a dictator when it comes to the FPA. And it's farther from the truth. I mean, I'm on the forum with the country directors and state representatives and and the women's board. And everything is ran by those folks for input. And we have some very heated conversations about stuff. Now, he will occasionally pick something that he firmly believes in, but the truth is we take a lot of input from people, not just today, in the past as well. A lot of people helped with the rankings, helped with certain ways to do things just to make sure we're trying to be as fair as possible, but it was a group effort to make that decision, to Paul's things. I think the point structure was a big change, and it came from a suggestion out of Europe. So the original point, so back when we moved away from the NASCAR system and then we did some work for years and we did the 5.0 system, Patrick Bowden from Sweden, he helped with it a little bit, and he had a friend that was a mathematician, so he was helping kind of cover some stuff, making sure we were crossing the T's. No bugs. No bugs. Well, no, but the honest truth is what did a lot of it was I got laid off from work and I spent three months literally doing daily rebuilds, trying to get the system tweaked as possible. And then over the course of those years, that's when we came up with ideas about adding ratings and strength and stuff like that. Like how can we make it as accurate as possible for a positive-only system? So it's not like a traditional rating system like chess, where it's a negative-positive scenario. We want to encourage people to play, hence why it's like that. But yeah, a lot of people have contributed over the years. now when you talk about a 5.0 change in the whopper system the ranking system that's a major overall and i can't remember but i want to say it changed the points that you previously earned is that correct uh no actually when we started moving forward moving forward so so for i thought one of them was a changing back no no so so when the 50 system came out we started that january with that system Anything prior to that date those three years prior was built with the old calculation In fact if you look at your profile page you see calculated with version 5 That's why I said that. It's not important now since it's all gone, it's no longer valid. But we did keep it the same, so if we had to rebuild two years prior to 5.0, it built the old way. We tested it, and it was not fair because we didn't know all the particulars about those tournaments. because the other big change with 5.0 is that was the TPG calculations and grading every tournament on their merits, where prior we would have the main tournament and the Classics was always half of the main tournament. Yeah, that's right. So that was the big thing I wanted to push for was, what if Classics was more competitive than the main division? It should be worth more. Who suggested Classics should be worth half? Let me guess. I don't remember the full story behind that. I know me and Josh talked about we wanted to encourage more competition. And since Expo did a main and classics, we said, hey, you can run a classics at the same time to get half the value of your main division. That's kind of how that developed. I'm glad that didn't pass. It did, of course. That first couple years, like year two, three, four, five, that's what we did. Absolutely. But as you see all these big tournaments, and I'll name them, the IFPA World Championships, Indist, Papa when it happened. Pinberg. They all included classic games. Right, but remember back then we only had 10 shows a year. So that was the driver. But now that we have places like District 82 and with the Delaware Collective and stuff like that, that growth was coming, so we needed to start grading everything on their own merit. I think that's a good idea. It actually makes sense that you didn't go back and recalculate because it would make sense. And with a new 5.8, you're not going to go back and change. Like, we now know that Indisc will be worth 200%. It's a major. Before, I think it was 150. You just did the certified. You're not going to go back and change all that. So it's always moving forward. But my goodness, when I look at what's going to happen in January, in 2023, you got a lot of changes. How did these changes come about, and where do I start picking at them? Are you talking about the 5-8 changes? Actually, I like most of them. I really do. Like, I was worried leagues would die before this 5.8 change because we're seeing tournaments and multiple tournaments in days. And I thought, wow, leagues are now just social because they're not worth anything. Uh-uh-uh, you've changed that. Yeah, honestly, I wasn't involved a lot with those changes. I know Josh bounced a lot off me and obviously the country directors and stuff. I mean, that's one of the goals, right, is we want to make the ratings and rankings as fair as possible. but when it comes to change we never retroactive anything except i think three occasions we don't change midstream we change at the beginning of the year so we try to snapshot the year the same unless somebody finds like an exploit or something like it's happened a few times but it's all about you know what we see if we see certain trends that may be bad for pinball or for competitive pinball i should say you know we look to try to address that what is a bad trend for competitive of pinball well you're gonna put me on the spot here yep i do think something and sorry eric if you're listening something like district 82 doing seven tournaments over three days it produces an interesting problem where it becomes the whopper farm and it and it makes it harder for other regions to have that to earn those points i will say this i will offer a counterpoint no matter what you say so i will say this in defense of eric anybody can do that 100 and i'm not i'm just picking on him uh i know others are starting to do it as well boros well hold on actually let me say fold up yeah yeah so let me say this i've been in from that because i've been going to every one of them i've been driving i've been driving nine hours to get there and play but it's an interesting scenario when you think about when you're trying to talk about equality for for everybody and we can't solve everything but it's it's an interesting problem so when you take the top 20 scores over the past three years for a player what if they're all from the exact same place is that fair has that been discussed it has been and i've heard people say well maybe you should restrict like the number of majors you can go to maybe reduce the card you know we've talked about maybe the card becomes 12 versus 20 so there's less events you have to go to to get your your tops your your points well remember when we started the rankings when we didn't have a card the very first year and we instituted the card honestly because Trent would have won every year because he was going there. Because it's volume. Yeah. So for those that have not played competitive pinball, and I think most people listening to Pinball Profile have probably dabbled, whether it's a league or a tournament here or there, whatever you do in a calendar year is worth full TGP, whatever that tournament's worth. But after a year, it goes down to 75%. So if you won 20 Whoppers, now it's only worth 15 in year two. In year three, it's only worth 50%. So 10 Whoppers. and after year three, it's worth zero. So it's the best you can do, the best 20 events you can do in a three-year period. That's correct. And the whole reason why it does that decay is to promote current play versus somebody that did good three years ago and is just resting on their laurels. But again, as we mentioned earlier with COVID, because there weren't any events for a year and a half, really we're looking by the time the end of the year happens, it's really who are the best players over the last 16 months. Yeah, it's been really interesting. A little stat for you. I looked at March when we started back up. The number of points in 250th was 103 years ago. Or the reverse of that. I got it reversed. Basically, the points you had pre-COVID for 250th spot was worth 100th place this year. I thought a lot. It's weird. I saw my, during the decay, if I was, say, 80th in the world, when the decay started happening, because I played so much volume, at one point I was 40th in the world. I hadn't played a tournament, but it was just the volume. People were losing tournaments and maybe not having 20 on a card. I pulled a Trent Augustine is basically what I'm saying, Brian. Well, and that's what's happening this year. You got everybody traveling to try to fill their card back up. And honestly, that's what I've been going to District 82 is I want to make Germany next year. And if I don't do it this year, I probably won't do it ever just because competition. So what you're talking about, Jeremy, that is IFBA 18. That is the World Championship, which has, amazing, expanded to 80 players. They've always had the top 64 players, and you fill that with the top two from every country. And then there's also the North American champion. There's also the European pinball champion. And now there's the women's champion and a few other things, but it's expanded to 80. That is a long time coming. Yeah, I'm glad we did that. In fact, we were talking about that at Becker's about three years ago. and then when he announced it this year, I did joke with Josh that he did it because he was lower in the rankings this year. So get him in again. But it was good because we have so many more countries now playing that eventually they're going to fill all the slots. Well, I think what happened, and I'm not sure if it was Italy, but the person who was 64th didn't actually get in because of all the people that took up the country spots, and that seemed a little odd. If you're in the top 80, you should probably make it. I think it was even less than that. I think it was 46. Well, there you go. It was the first time it happened. Yeah, because it's gone down every single year, and I think we had 23 countries represented this time. So I can't remember the exact number, but I know we're going to have more because Argentina is playing now. Well, when you play in Europe, you probably have more countries than when you play in North America. I would assume so. It's just easier to travel. Well, now you have New Zealand and Australia, all these countries that wasn't playing 10 years ago. The growth was there. So we had to go to at least 80, and it may grow more once. I know Taiwan is playing competitive pinball now. Did I mention I'm moving to Romania? Well, at least you'll be able to have a chance for the country exemption. Fingers crossed. That's the next Pinball Profile World Tour event. No, that's going to be exciting, and certainly that is the race. We see a lot of people, whether it's the Stern Pro Circuit, although I don't know how much people are really racing to get in the Stern Pro Circuit. When that reduced to 20, I thought probably there's less competition because there's probably more people in that 30 to 50 range that think, oh, I'm on the bubble, I need to go to events, versus, oh, I'll never make the top 20? Yeah, it's difficult to predict. It is interesting. But okay, let's talk about some of the changes happening in 2023. I mentioned earlier, I think what you did, making leagues worth a little more, is probably a good thing, because it's a lot of time and investment to go. It's really done for a social reason, but there are also points involved. And now you've got some new rules for leagues that, depending on the size of your league, there are some limitations as well. I find leagues are going to be worth more in 2023 than probably they have been for the most part. Maybe not the Super Leagues, but for the most part. Yeah, I like the change because, you know, I play in a house league. We meet every Friday night. And I also play in a public, you know, barcade league. And I think it's good to help separate the public leagues because they have an opportunity to bring more people in and have bigger leagues than the private leagues, which are great. And they fill their niche because it's great being able to go to people's houses and hang out. But those are more limited in fashion, so it's a good change to allow the public leagues that can hold 50, 60 or more people, reward them for being more competitive. The certified, we saw that in 2022, and it's changing a little bit in 2023, but it's going to continue. Different limitations, I think you had to have 64 rated players, you had to have so many games played, you had to have a playoff the following day, so to speak, couldn't be the same day. those exist it now expanding to 128 but worth a little bit more that kind of interesting and then what we done with kind of majors and minor majors if you will worth a little more too So a lot of emphasis on big tournaments. Yeah, I think some of this harks over the changes over the last couple years where you start having like these one-day tournaments that were so valuable they became like what Expo was worth or like Cleveland, like we're here this weekend. And I think the certified events helps bring back that atmosphere was like a multi-day event. Well, a lot of what we do at IFPA has been modeled kind of off of BGA. Like what do they do during golf? You know, the golf weekends and stuff like that. They join live. Yeah. No, they're not live. But I'm not a golfer and I even know that controversy. But it's all about, you know, a style of an event. And I think the certifieds help do that where it's just not you show up for six hours and you get, you know, 90 points for winning. And you have to really, you know, look at this weekend. Look how much we had to play. Well, I qualified. You didn't. But, you know, it's. Take it easy. It was sixth in classics there, champ. That's true. I didn't make classics. But you get my point. It's to help reward, again, the bigger events that require a lot more competitive play to get, you know, to get your points, basically. Is that just kind of the eye test, if you will? Like when you say some tournaments were being run and they were worth more than Expo and they were done in a day. Is it just that they were too efficient? Absolutely. It's weird that a lot of people are just like, you just don't like the way certain results are. And that's true to some extent. When we first built the ranking system, one of the things that was clear definitely 15 years ago is Elwin was the GOAT. And I think he just won like two or three world championships in a row. And he had to be number one, right? So when we built the newer ranking systems, we looked at, okay, who's been playing really hot? Who's been good? If they're not at the top of the rankings, the rankings can't be trustworthy. And that's happened with others over time. People try to create their own and, you know, and keep starting at the top 25. How is that legit? And the same thing goes for, you know, decisions we make. There was a tournament held one year where you played one ball on the F-14, and it became the number one rated ranked tournament in the whole year. No. We had 170 people play one ball on the F-14. Wow. And so that's obviously an extreme example, right? I think, like, recently, and I don't know the full details, like, frenzy. You know, me and you talked earlier about this. I don't know the full details why that got cut. I think there's, you know, there's some problems with that format, personally. But I had nothing to do with the frenzy cut. But it's something, you know, you do look at it. Any system has to pass the smell test. It can be mathematically correct. You know, and every scientist can look at it and say, yes, that's correct. But if you don't see Raymond or Escher or Keith, those people that are actively winning tournaments at the top, then you know something's wrong. And that's the whole point of it. Now, you can clearly go through the rankings and say, oh, this person's ranked 400th and we know they're a better player. It is a system you have to play in to be ranked. But I think most people agree if you look at the top 100, it's pretty sorted out. I think it's pretty accurate. I'm in there, so something has to be wrong. You're a good player. I think you deserve it. I didn't make the playoffs as I was just reminded a second ago. Anyway, I will say this about that efficiency thing. This is the smell test I don't get. A tournament that you play 25 meaningful games is not as important as how long it is played in. And why I say that is, this weekend we played a lot of games. But meaningful games, how many did we really play? Five counted on a card, and then you played playoffs. You could pump and bump and pump and pump and dump over three days. whereas other tournaments every single game counts not pick and choose not dump i guess what i'm saying is a tournament that has the same amount of games played done in three hours i don't understand why it's not worth the same as something that's done over three days it's a good question um i know when we originally started the tpg or gp i get the initials confused all the time part of it was the main question we're trying to ask is what does it take to win and in this And the cleap in format, the herb, pump and dump, whatever you want to call it, the reality is you only need to play five games to qualify. Now, does that happen as much today? No. If you look back seven, eight years ago, you could probably look at the top five and they probably played less than seven games to get qualified. So some of it, you know, maybe it's something we revisit it. Maybe we start making herb worth a little bit more since it takes so much time. The time, the length of qualifying was supposed to help with that a little bit. But the truth is, once finals started getting expanded to make up that value, it really didn't matter. And people get really creative on these, you know, trying to get the TPG. I do agree, and I kind of see your point, where, like, that's what the certified events and stuff is supposed to help with, to raise those values. I do wish my personal pet peeve is that I don't like having the 125%, 150%. I would rather recalculate where 100 was always your top game. So if your weeklies would have gone down to, like, 70 or 60 versus 100%, because it's just a number. but at least it's a capper. It's 100%. Yeah, when you nerf something like, and I'll use this example because I've been vocal about it, the Clip Frenzies, you've nerfed it and when you've expanded the other ones, so you've actually double nerfed it, really, because it'll never be a certified, it'll never be a major, so the opportunities just aren't there to expand beyond that. And that's fine. I will also say this. I've said it on Final Round Pinball Podcast. I think actually most Clip Frenzies are not run properly and I think that's a real disservice to what could be a fun format. I think, and I've said this before on Tilt Forums, you need to have a win-loss differential. I've seen flip frenzies that run, oh, it's the most amount of wins. Well, that means nothing. You can go 20-19 and beat somebody who went 18-0. Who's a better pinball player? The 18-0 person. So a win-loss differential is important. I think you have to insist on a playoff because you at 20 and 0 may have never played anybody in the top four. And you and I have both done that. So if you have a playoff, guess what? You have to play the top people to win. And it's match play. It's not another flip frenzy. It's match play. I think there are other things too. You have to have only so many people in the queue. I think you can only have so many people in the tournament. If you have 10 machines, you can only have 20 people in the tournament. Things like that, as opposed to having this ridiculous queue where you only get a certain amount of games. There are a lot of things. My point is, the nerfing was a blanket move, whereas there wasn't a solution to fix it and say, this is a legitimate tournament, this one is not. And you probably could have got rid of 90% of the flip frenzies and just said, do it this way and we'll count it. Well, I know you're a Canadian, I'll plead the fifth, though. No, seriously, though, honestly, I wasn't involved with a lot of that discussion on changing the flip frenzy. I do think it needed changed because, as you mentioned, I won a tournament in Columbus where I didn't literally play the four best players in a tournament. Was there a playoff? No. Then that's the problem. Well, to me, it's a great casual format, but it needs some way to guarantee that the good players play each other. It has to guarantee that part. In pin golf, do you have a playoff? You have to have a playoff in pin golf. That is a rule. They made that because it would have been ridiculous otherwise. You know, I actually didn't know that. I should know it, though. Do you have to have direct play? Yes. That is essentially, in a way, a playoff. Well, and that goes back to the league changes. I know a lot of people were upset this past year. We made those league changes. They had to have direct play. And it's the same reasoning, right? I agree. I totally agree. But anyway, that's just a sidebar. And for another story, like you said, you're pleading the fifth. I'm picking on the wrong guy here. But I did want to get some of your points, too. We were talking about this kind of tournament, this pump-a-dump tournament. Here's an interesting thing. So you had to have five games. Your best five games would be scored, and that determines where you are. Now, we've seen this a few times, where people have played games. After two games, they go, you know what, I'm not playing. Because they didn't play 50%, they don't count in the tournament. And maybe they want to protect their ranking, their rating, their top 100, their power 100, whatever the heck it is. So they bail. Now, this pump-and-dump format allows you to void your score. There are people I know that played three different games, voided two of them, and you and I talked, and I know you agree with me, that they played three games. Yeah. And they're not counting in the tournament. What the hell? Yeah, this is a thing we have to weigh the positives and negatives on. So the reason why that rule exists is because in the past, I'm not going to name names, but we do know of people that basically set up tournaments and gave free tickets out and just pumped the numbers up. In fact, actually, I will call somebody out because I was involved with it. Louisville used to do this. The very early days of Louisville, everybody that came to the show got one or two or three entries in the tournament. So basically, there was 168 players played at Louisville. The truth is only like 40 people played in the tournament that really played. We do know of other tournaments that were artificially inflating. So how do you separate that situation versus what we know happened here this weekend, where we know it was legitimate? He didn't do that. He just couldn't be. One of the guys couldn't be here for the weekend. So he's like, you know what? I'm going to leave. I can't do this. So how do you separate those two? Here's the solution, and you and I both agree. When you play in a pump and dump and you play a game, the first time you play that game, you're not allowed to void that game. That score counts. you choose to play it yep and it's the first time you've played it no voiding your first game i can get behind that change in fact we've joked for a long time about what if we just didn't allow voids at all well there's that as well too i mean you're gonna have a problem with uh the the papa ticket format but we not talking about this we talking pump and dump the first time you play you cannot Mars you cannot void it That score counts So you making the choice to play it That true but to throw this back at you what would happen if I came in, played two games, and left, so I still didn't get my three out of five? That's fine. You had to play three. We have people that played three. They entered one score and voided two scores. You and I called Josh. We called him and said, does that person count? He said no, because those voided entries don't affect the tournament. Well, hold on a second. The one he entered did affect the tournament. Yeah, and that's the crux of the problem, right? Well, solve the problem. Make the rule change, for God's sakes. But again, what happens, what if he didn't void the other, what if he just played one game? What if he came in? If he just played one, he doesn't count. But he didn't, that's not the issue. But your question, your statement was, he affected the tournament. What if I came in, put number one on attack from Mars, and then left? So I took number one away from somebody else. So maybe in the software, you remove those scores. If they're not counted as players, maybe they don't count in the tournament. Well, that will definitely be up to us. That's a software thing that can be fixed. Well, that will definitely be up to Carl. I'll give Carl a call. And those guys that do that stuff. But the easy fix is that first game is impossible to avoid. Yeah, I mean, and there's also, you can do things like no new players after 4 p.m. on Friday, right? When we've had the game rule, the game malfunctioned majorly after 4 p.m. and it was gone. You can do the same thing there. There's solutions. Yes, and that's the point. That's why we make these changes everywhere. We talk to people. We look for exploits, right? That's what we want to find, and we want to correct them so people can't imbalance the system. And something like this is a great conversation. One more player situation. you're in a tournament, there's say 13 rounds of match play. You bail after three rounds. I'm, oh my God, I took zero on all three. I don't want to play. I'm out. And it was a limited tournament and somebody couldn't get in because you decided to leave. Is this a possibility? They don't count towards the number of players that are in the tournament because, so that'd be 140 rated players. Let's say, well, that player didn't play a full thing. It's 138 or 139, but it is going to go on your card as last place? I honestly don't know. Like I said, I think it's a problem that there's not a straight answer to, and every answer has another problem. You know what? We're sitting here in a crowded arcade, trying to solve the world's problems, but we're just brainstorming. I'm sure this is how a lot of ideas have happened as well. I wanted to bring up one more thing, because I don't want to keep you here. No, it's good. I have nothing to talk. I can talk all night. Well, okay. We're not leaving. You and I were talking about, again, the back end of the IFBA. And I've talked with Adam Becker, a friend as well, about what he has to do, and he's done so much in the past. And who's the person in Europe that's helping you? Michael Trepp. I want to give Michael a shout-out as well. Because without the three of you and others involved in the IFBA, this thing we like to joke about and complain about, we actually really love. That's why we're so passionate about it, and we do love it, and the work that you people put into it. So thank you. I was shocked to learn how many TDs do not get their tournaments posted in time and actually lose that whole tournament. Maybe the tournament didn't happen, or maybe they weren't happy with the results. Maybe they didn't pay the IFPA fee. That happens a lot, you told me. Yeah, I don't know the official number, but I would say that probably at least a minimum of five per week don't meet the 45-day submission window that we give. And it's not like you don't email several times, hey, just congratulations, your tournament's over. Please submit your fees and your tournament results. You give all kinds of reminders. Yeah, we actually do three reminders. I think you get one after two days, one after seven, one after 14, I think. And then, you know, tournament directors, obviously there's always reasons why tournaments are not held. They go and delete the tournament from the system themselves if they want to. But like I said, it's gone down since COVID came back. At the beginning, especially the first couple months this year, it was pretty bad. But it's a lot of it's weeklies too. It's nothing major. Like it's not these big tournaments doing it. It's definitely weeklies and stuff that are doing it. But it happens. hopefully we can help encourage it not to happen as much do you think it happens where the tournament actually took place i think in some cases it could happen where these some of the smaller you know weeklies where you may get 10 12 people and then one week at the only three or four people show up and they decide you know what heck with it we're not going to have the tournament i think it does happen i just wish we knew a little bit more about that just uh you know see if there's anything we do to help address it i've run a lot of tournaments quite a few in fact i have a hundred percent record for putting in tournaments that happen but i wonder what other tvs you know how many tournaments they put it oh my god i have numbers on most of this because i'm kind of i'm kind of a stats guy yeah and it should be posted uh well there will be stuff coming next year i've shown a lot of people this over actually it's been ready for two years i never published it there'll be director profile pages and stuff you'll be able to follow directors and get emails like when they post results and stuff like that so there's a lot of that stuff coming uh we want I personally want to start promoting directors more, just how we promote players right now. There's a lot of stuff that happens, a lot of TDs that, like the folks this weekend, that bust their butt to do this stuff, and there's a little name on a tournament page. So hopefully we can start encouraging, we can start promoting those folks more and give them some recognition that they deserve. Well, I want to give you and the IFPA and even that Josh, quote-unquote dictator, or a recognition because you've certainly made this hobby into a massive passion for so many people myself included and it is a lot of hard work it's a lot of time it's not like you're making the millions of dollars or are you i have never taken anything for uh any money or anything for this in fact the the the compliment josh he's actually offered over the years like hey i'll pay your flight out to seattle or to becker's and i've turned it down because i'd rather use that money to give to youth tournaments or anything. Something to promote the hobby. I don't do this to make money. I do this because I find it interesting. That's why I do it. You're a good person, but people like yourself that put in this time for everyone else, some sort of compensation, some sort of gratitude, something needs to be in place, whether it's publicly, whether it's financially, whatever the case may be, because, again, it brings so many people joy and amazes me at tournaments. when you count the number of volunteers? There were quite a few people playing this tournament. Maybe 10 volunteers? Maybe? Like in the actual tournament? No, I think there's more. Probably 15. I think, I don't know, there's a lot of scorekeepers that helped that I didn't know. So I know, it's probably about 15 I would say. You're probably right. If you want to help out and you go to a tournament, ask, is there anything I can do? Can I go grab you a bite to eat because you've been here for 10 hours? Can I give you a break to go to the washroom? Give me an iPad so I can score. I wish there was more of that because it makes the tournaments run smoother. It's less stress on the TDs because at the end of a tournament, they're bagged. 100%. In fact, you do the same thing I do. A lot of times when I go to these pump and dumps, I just scorekeep while I'm waiting. As long as, you know, we've got to help where we can, right? Obviously, we would love to have paid staff to help with all that. But until we get to that point, we can help out where we can. If you ever go to a tournament or even to a show and you see somebody, like, busting down a game, offer to help them. It's a great way to meet people, for one. But two, the people that bring these games and run these tournaments put a lot of effort in for not a lot of thanks. But you enjoy it. How many years have you been doing it? 16? Were you playing before you were in the IPA? Yes. In fact, my first tournament was Pinburg 2001, I think. It was on top of the hotel at Holiday Inn. And then I did Expo later that year, and that's kind of what kicked everything off. and then uh kind of my getting really into it was i joined the chicago league i was in i from columbus ohio and me and three friends in columbus went to chicago once a month and we got to play you know basically against all the williams you know developers and stuff but get this you know and that's what really hooked me because i got to see great players play on great machines but yeah almost uh 20 years now do you have a favorite moment out of the 20 plus years um If I had to pick one, it was probably winning B division at Pinburgh. I think the first or second year we had Pinburgh against Steven Bowden, which is great because he's so much better than I am now. That's a good feather in your cap. I think Pinburgh was one of my absolute favorites. I mean, obviously we saw it grow to 1,000 people, and I never once made a playoff, never even came close. I made the A's a bunch of times, but it was just such a great grind, and I thought, boy, I don't know if there's anything better than match play. Yeah, I mean, it's so exciting. I wish I could do better at the big tournaments like Indus and stuff, but I know my place, but I'll keep trying because you never know, right? It's fun to compete. Brian, thanks for everything you do. Thanks. Glad to have you here. See, Josh, I got him. No unicorn, just Brian Shepard in the flesh. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find everything on pinballprofile.com. All past episodes, subscriptions and more. We're on Instagram and Twitter at pinballprofile. We're on Facebook as well, and you can email pinballprofile at gmail.com. dot com. I'm Jeff Seolos.