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Wizards & Warriors Episode 11 - A History of the IFPA With President Josh Sharpe

Wizards & Warriors·podcast_episode·1h 37m·analyzed·Nov 13, 2025
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.038

TL;DR

IFPA President Josh Sharpe discusses 20 years of competitive pinball rankings and tournament organization history.

Summary

Josh Sharpe, IFPA President, joins Wizards & Warriors podcast to discuss the history and evolution of competitive pinball. The episode covers tournament recaps from major events (PAPA 22, UK Open, Pinball Expo), upcoming tournaments, and an in-depth interview about the IFPA's origins as an operator-focused industry association in the 1990s, its revival through the creation of the World Pinball Player Rankings in 2005-2006, and Sharpe's philosophy of keeping competitive pinball fun-focused while building a global competitive infrastructure.

Key Claims

  • The IFPA World Pinball Player Rankings will celebrate its 20th anniversary around February 2026

    high confidence · Josh Sharpe stated: 'the World Pinball Player Rankings that we'll be celebrating, I guess, actually the 20th anniversary is right around this time now... in February, it will be 20 years since our team took over'

  • In the first year of IFPA rankings (2005-2006), there were only 52 sanctioned events globally for the entire year

    high confidence · Josh Sharpe: 'the first year of the rankings, there were 52 events globally for the whole year'

  • The original IFPA in the 1990s was created as an industry association modeled after the National Dart Association to help operators earn revenue through promotion

    high confidence · Josh Sharpe: 'Back in the 90s... it was an industry association that was modeled off of the National Dart Association'

  • The IFPA World Championship was revived starting with the 2008 event based on the 2007 season, designed as a year-long qualifying format with 50 events feeding to a single championship

    high confidence · Josh Sharpe: 'we did that... 2008 based on the 2007 season... 50 events and they all pointed to this one... all feed this beast... year-long qualifier'

  • Josh Sharpe's father and Steve Epstein are credited as foundational figures ('godfathers') of competitive pinball who built the infrastructure that the modern IFPA branched from

    high confidence · Josh Sharpe: 'my dad and Steve Epstein... I call them the godfathers of competitive pinball... the tree trunk of the sport'

Notable Quotes

  • “I was sitting in my cube wondering how long I could work on the same report with the cube mate next to me, seeing how many days could you go without actually working until someone noticed.”

    Josh Sharpe @ early interview segment — Sharpe humorously describes the mundane office job that led him to create the WPPR rankings system, establishing context for his motivations

  • “My two rules were like, don't do it if you're not having fun and don't spend a dollar of your own money to do it.”

    Josh Sharpe @ late interview segment — Core philosophy for running the IFPA - emphasizes volunteer satisfaction and personal funding boundaries that have guided the organization

  • “pinball is fun, man. It's really, I don't know if I've ever gone up to someone and they've asked them about pinball and it's like, oh, yeah, I know what it is. And it fucking sucks. Like, I don't think I've ever heard that ever because it's not.”

    Josh Sharpe @ late interview segment — Sharpe articulates the universal appeal of pinball as a core driver for competitive community building

  • “I do it for me because I enjoy this... I thought I was Papa Duke fucking good back then before kids... being able to see how I stacked up indirectly with people that I had never actually competed with.”

    Josh Sharpe @ mid-interview segment — Reveals personal motivations behind creating the rankings system - competitive self-assessment and ego validation drove the WPPR creation

  • “Does anyone know what happened at Pinball Expo in 1993? Josh, I found this article in Pin Game Journal... it was a lot of like scouring the internet for results of events to try to just like build this little Lego house and get it started”

    Josh Sharpe @ mid-interview segment — Describes the painstaking manual research and archival work required to establish historical tournament data for the early WPPR system

Entities

Josh SharpepersonInternational Flipper Pinball Association (IFPA)organizationWorld Pinball Player Rankings (WPPR)productZach SharpepersonProfessional and Amateur Pinball Association (PAPA)organizationSteve EpsteinpersonLyman Sheetsperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: IFPA operates on sponsorship funding model with Josh Sharpe enforcing personal non-investment policy for volunteers, has previously exhausted reserves on Austrian World Championship event

    high · Josh Sharpe: 'My two rules were like, don't do it if you're not having fun and don't spend a dollar of your own money to do it... Austria World Championship wiped out most of our kitty'

  • ?

    community_signal: Josh Sharpe emphasizes maintaining fun as core philosophy for IFPA operations, believing competitive pinball should remain enjoyable despite high-level competitive stakes

    high · Josh Sharpe: 'for me, it's it's really all about if you're not having fun doing this... I'm still only doing this because I enjoy this... pinball is fun, man'

  • ?

    community_signal: Women's pinball participation is increasing with dedicated women's tournaments at major events (PAPA 22, Pinball Expo, UK Open) attracting competitive female players

    high · Tournament recaps include multiple women's tournaments at PAPA 22, Pinball Expo, and UK Open with identified winners and WPPR point distributions

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Tournament scene is experiencing high activity with major events nearly every weekend in the fall/winter season, including PAPA 22, UK Open, Pinball Expo, and multiple upcoming events

    high · Hosts discuss 'fall rush, post-PAPA 22... Tourney scene has been on fire' and note 'it's almost every weekend you can find some big event to attend'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pittsburgh and Midwest regions are positioned as competitive pinball hubs with strong regional tournament infrastructure (PAPA, NWPC, Champion Pub Winter Bash)

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.294

0:00
Welcome, everybody. Episode 10, Wizards and Warriors. Thank you so much for your patience and waiting for us to get all of this together again. It's been a long time, but we've been playing a lot of competitive pinball. Shout out the 24-hour final battle at the Sanctum. But I hope you all are doing well. I'm here with my co-host, Joe J. Land. Hey, what's going on, Hottie? Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too, man. And it's been a while, but we've been watching, competing, and there's just a lot to talk about. But this episode is going to be special for a good reason in a second. So we're back from the fall rush, post-Papa 22. Tourney scene has been on fire, as usual, as we get into the winter season, from Papa to the UK Open to the Expo Flipout. We've had some amazing pinball to recap. So, Joe, have you been playing locally? what's the last big event you went to was that nwpc or no pop nwpc yeah it's nwpc so that was the last big one i kind of traveled to um and now just kind of busy with uh other life stuff you know just uh um so but i've been watching the stream so you know keeping up with uh with the uh the majors that are going on and uh you know papa we had the stern pro circuit finals that happened um yeah just a lot of uh consuming pinball on twitch yeah you too you know exactly i will say a warning to everybody out there me and joe have been hitting the gym so we're about to be the most jacked hot pinball podcast out there but it's great to hear as we mentioned um before we've got some recaps coming up but we've got a really great interview on this episode we're going to be talking with current ifpa president and excellent competitive player josh sharp i kind of want everybody to have a history lesson of where the ifpa came from how it evolved how some of the formulas are how they originated and where they are now as far as formats waited for different styles of tournaments and and that's fun stuff so make sure again to reach out to us at wizardsandwarriorspodcast at gmail if you want to highlight your upcoming or recent tournament or you have a question about competitive pinball so thank you for listening let's get on with the episode we're going to right now recap some of the winners of the most recent tournament since papa 22 in september we've got a few tournaments to go over so we'll just be listing off the top winners but if you're watching this video you can see the other winners as we scroll past past the screenshot so we will go ahead and list those for you right now the first one obviously is papa 22 i got to compete in this great event um i spent more time on the classic side but it was a card for the main pumping up for the classics and then there was also a women's tournament so your winner for the papa world pinball championships papa 22 is zach mccarthy getting 378.77 whoppers absolutely amazing performance lots of great players you can see the top three escher gregory raymond total total total blast and we learned how to play king kong that third of it as well your classics winner was eric stone congratulations mr stone you put on a really good performance you see my name right there 21 there it is yeah i made a i gotta i gotta buy it was kind of nice for a while i was the top seed but that obviously wasn't gonna last for but congrats to eric nick mueller was there zachary parks and derrick forgot forget forgot and then the women's at papa uh carrie wing is your overall champ she took down jane verweiss cassie beguet and christine doherty congrats ladies but top congratulations to carrie picking up 70 67.63 whoppers for the women's rankings what do we have next yeah we got cleap in maine uh it's card format we got the winner it was jack slovochek this year jack's been having a monster year continues to dominate rounding out the top four uh we got galvin morgan jesse baker and uh evan bookbinder shout out evan nice job nice yeah good good play for everybody and what do we have else yeah yeah cleeping classics uh we've got steve bowden taking down the top spot uh with 90 points there uh classics master bob matthews uh taking second I see another familiar face, Jack Slovichek in third. And Tom Graff, look at that, Fox Cities.
Escher Lefkoff
person
Oscar H. Rayperson
Raymond Davidsonperson
Arvidperson
Logan Hendersonperson
Eric Stoneperson
Carrie Wingperson
Alexandre Bouetperson
Jack Slovochekperson
Nick Steinperson
Danieleperson
Joe J. Landperson
James Ruizperson
Fox Cities Pinballorganization
Pinball Expoevent
Texas Pinball Festival (TPF)event
Pinball at the Beachevent
Stern Pinballcompany

medium · Tournament discussion includes multiple mentions of Midwest events (PAPA 22, Champion Pub Winter Bash in Wood River Illinois) as major regional gatherings attracting interstate competition

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Early WPPR rankings were seeded using input from top competitive players to establish system credibility and acceptance within the community

    medium · Josh Sharpe: 'I used a lot of those top players to kind of help create what we were doing there to get results... scouring the internet for results of events to try to just like build this little Lego house'

  • ?

    event_signal: IFPA 20th anniversary celebration approaching in February 2026, marking 20 years since Josh Sharpe's team took over the organization

    high · Josh Sharpe: 'the World Pinball Player Rankings that we'll be celebrating, I guess, actually the 20th anniversary is right around this time now... in February, it will be 20 years since our team took over'

  • $

    market_signal: Growth in competitive pinball participation from 52 global events in 2005-2006 to approximately 3,000 events annually across 30+ countries by 2025

    high · Josh Sharpe: 'the first year of the rankings, there were 52 events globally for the whole year... and now it has grown to such a level that it's almost every weekend you can find some big event'

  • ?

    community_signal: Josh Sharpe has been IFPA President for approximately 20 years since 2005-2006, having revived a dormant organization owned by the AMOA

    high · Josh Sharpe: 'my dad had come up with the idea of you know, the IFPA being dormant... and through my dad's industry connections... it was it was owned by the AMOA'

  • ?

    product_strategy: IFPA originally planned to bring back the World Championship as a year-long qualifying format with multiple events feeding to a single championship, implemented starting 2008

    high · Josh Sharpe: 'we're going to bring back the IFPA World Championship... 50 events and they all pointed to this one... year-long qualifier to make it to the World Championship... we did that... 2008 based on the 2007 season'

  • ?

    technology_signal: WPPR rankings evolved from manual Excel spreadsheet with every event worth equal points to sophisticated global ranking system with decay algorithms and event weighting

    high · Josh Sharpe: 'it was just an Excel spreadsheet... Every event was worth the same... every first place was 25 points. There was no decay. It was just additive forever'

    • 4:35
    Nice job, Tom. Good job, everybody there. Let me see it. We had the UK Open shortly after that, near the end of September. I went to this last year. Really nice event. All cards, so a little tough. Three tournaments, well, excuse me, four, but the three open tournaments, Pinball Republic, Classics, and Maine are card format. So not an easy, easy go. But your winner of the main tournament for the UK Open 25 is Alexandre Bouet. I hope I said that right. With 232 Whoppers, there's Timber, Nick Stein. Nice to see Nick up there in the top four. And Roy Wills. There's Jack again. Nice performance, Jack. The ladies, you had Lucy Vince, excuse me, winning the UK Open women's tournament. She gets 8.47 women's Whoppers. You got Isabel Amy Ziegenhagen and Helen de Hanverbeek. I want to try to pronounce these right. So congratulations to all you awesome competitors. And for the classics at the UK Open, Nick Stein took the top spot, 224 Whoppers. That's a lot of Whoppers for a classics tournament. Again, card format, so a little bit of a nice boost to the overall point total. Lucas Ott, Peter Anderson, Laser Lowe's, top four. Good job, Lowe's. Carlos de la Cerda and the Pinball Republic, which is sort of the high stakes format or high stakes tourney card there. You got Vigo, Arvid, Roy and Theodore, your top four. Wow. 200 Whoppers there. So congratulations to all the Expo winners.
    6:08
    UK Open. Yeah. The main winner. UK Open. Sorry. Yeah, you're good. Alexander. Alexandre. He only has 29 events on his card. What? Which is insane. i mean he's been active for six years but like i remember looking that up i was like i was trying to find out who this was and i was just like man he's only played in 29 events he's got a good rating look at that 1700 yeah nice so it's pretty impressive man yeah shout out there uh pinball expo uh big bracket marathon tournament this year um it's fun to watch shout out tom for streaming it uh he said he wasn't gonna stream past midnight and then kind of ran a a crazy hype train to get us there but really fun to watch arvid took down number one he had to kind of call his way out of uh or no logan clawed his way out of the losers bracket to meet him in the final but logan henderson taking second and um really having an impressive showing i know he was doing a bunch of jumping jacks during the finals is fun to watch. Rounding out the top four, we got Zach Sharp, familiar face, and then Ray Day, Raymond Davidson, taking fourth. So can you explain the big bracket for people that haven't competed in it? Yeah, yeah. So the format of the tournament, it's a limited entry, best game. This year, I believe it was a bank of 10 or 12 games. Yeah, something like that. And all of the games counted. So once qualifying is over, they take the top 50% of the field into the A division finals, and then the bottom 50% go to the B division finals. And it is a double elimination head-to-head bracket. Yeah, you're going to see a lot of buys. I think some people didn't even play until Saturday the following day. And the finals started Friday and went all the way until the early hours of Sunday morning.
    8:09
    Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting format. It reminds me of, you know, obviously the NCAA uses a bracket, but I like the opportunity that once you lose, you still have a chance to climb back up. So that was true for Logan, Logan's journey, and he ended up with 147 whoppers for his trouble. And then there was a women's tournament at Expo.
    8:32
    Yep, women's tournament. We've got James Ruiz taking down number one, Sammy Bacon in second, Jackie Olsen in third, and then Miriam Nadler in fourth. Nice job. I understand that tournament went the distance as well. But, yeah, shout out to all the competitors there, you know, really grinding it out. You ladies put on a great show, and kudos to you for awesome play and just grinding it out because I remember last year's tales of it, you know, going so long. And then we also did have the classics. Yeah, Expo Classics. I know Zach Parks was trying to defend his repeat title, but it was unsuccessful. So we got Daniele taking the top spot here, 190 points. Dalton getting second, Louis Bevins in third, and then Liam Bradley in fourth. Nice job, everybody. Just amazing, amazing skills to get to the freaking playoffs and then eventually make a run towards the gold. So that's a recap of a lot of our bigger tournaments. Do you remember who won Stern Pro Circuit? I'm sorry, I forgot to include that one. Yeah, ZMAC. ZMAC, right? Yeah, he got it over Ray in the final. That's right. And this was a different format where they had a timer and you had challenges to compete or to complete. So it was fun to watch. So if you are a tournament director, invest in a giant timer clock because that might be fun. So we do have some upcoming tourneys. to finish off the year there's been a lot of pinball it's been a lot of fun but there's been a lot and it has grown to such a level that it's almost every weekend you can find some big event to attend and we've got some upcoming tournaments that are still on the pro circuit for next year i believe right they don't count for this year obviously this is the start of the pro circuit or is that the expo flip out is that the start right i think that is for for 2026 i think or no i think that uh i think it goes by the calendar year by january okay yeah okay so we've got still for you're right you're for this year yes that's right i don't know why i'm thinking yes these will count for next year when they compete uh so free play florida november 21st through the 3rd in Lakeland, Florida. We got Pinsonati. I'll be going to that. See you all there December 5th through the 7th in Cincinnati, Ohio. And then we've got the CP Pinball Winter Bash from December 13th through the 14th. I went to that last year. A lot of fun. A really good way to end the year.
    11:18
    Wood River, Illinois. A lot of local players come, but it's drivable for many, so it becomes a really good time. I think they still have tickets you can register for. This might be an older schedule. I think the Fleet Bay of Florida is in Orlando this year. Oh, Orlando. Okay, I'm sorry. They moved it back there. Yeah, yeah, good call, good call.
    11:39
    They have pinball at the beach coming next year. I haven't been. It looks like a lot of fun, and obviously TPF Starfighters is earlier next year. That'll be in January. I hope I get off that wait list. If not, I still may go because there's still four tournaments. I just won't be able to do Maine. But yeah, that's a look at everything that's happened and upcoming. And like we said, the next part of the podcast episode, Wizards and Warriors, number 10, is our interview with Josh Sharp. We hope you enjoy it. It's a really good discussion about competitive pinball, the IFPA, some cool stories from Josh, how things came about, some of his time with Lime and Sheets and some of the funny things that he's seen occur. We also do a rapid fire round. So hope you stick around. Hope you enjoy it. And yeah, see y'all later. Thanks, Joe.
    12:35
    See you guys next time. Yeah, bye everybody. Stick around. Welcome everybody. It's been a while. Wizards and Warriors episode 10 here with my awesome co-host Joe J-Land. and we have a very special episode this time around. You're going to get a history lesson, and you better like it. I don't care if you've got to sit here and hit the fast forward, put it on 2X. You're going to listen because this podcast is all about competitive pinball, and I figured why not explain the history of it as best we can and also exactly what it is. There are a lot of you that are new to the hobby, seasoned veterans, grizzled, but you may not know everything you need to know about the wonderful governing body of the ifpa and with that we have a special guest with us josh sharp ifpa president czar all-around benevolent leader welcome josh hey guys we're gonna see how much i don't remember about the history of this organization more of a pop quiz here right like on a curve i hope But we really appreciate you being here. Like I said, we're going to dive into the history and evolution of competitive pinball with someone who's been at the center of it all. That is Josh.
    13:55
    And he wears many hats, and one of them is president of the International Slipper Pinball Association. Did I get that right? Geez, I hope I got that right. You did. Okay.
    14:06
    So thank you for joining us. for those who don't know, can you give us a quick elevator pitch on what is the IFPA and what's your role as president? I mean, I think the quick pitch, you kind of mentioned it, is kind of serving as the governing body for competitive pinball as a sport. And really, the catalyst of that was the creation of the World Pinball Player Rankings that We'll be celebrating, I guess, actually the 20th anniversary is right around this time now.
    14:42
    We didn't actually, there was an IFPA that existed before my team took over. So in February, it will be 20 years since our team took over. But it's about 20 years ago this month that I was not working diligently at my first job out of college sitting in my cube wondering how long I could work on the same report with the cube mate next to me seeing how many days could you go without actually working until someone noticed. Yeah, it's that. The old school computers had the boss button where you'd be like playing solitaire. Scrunchie time. Yeah, exactly.
    15:23
    Just a quick note on that. Is there – this may be jumping ahead, but do we have anything – Is there anything planned for the 20th anniversary or is this going to be sort of what? Yeah. Me hopefully remembering to celebrate it by throwing it up on our site. Probably forgetting. OK.
    15:43
    Nice. So, Josh, how did you first get involved with competitive pinball? And like what pulled you into this world in the first place? My parents got together and made me, Joe.
    15:54
    I mean, that's really the sad truth. It's the one story that I don't have, which is like this. Everyone you talk to can talk about the first game they played that sucked them into pinball, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All those all those falling in love with the game stories. And I don't have any of that because I have pictures in my closet that my parents have given me over the years of me clearly playing at one. You know, I don't remember. I don't remember what happened three months ago. I certainly don't remember any of those pictures of me playing. I remember having some nightmares as a kid from some of the back glass artwork back in the day. I can remember being a little messed up from that. But it's, you know, playing pinball has been a constant in my life forever. And the competitive side, I mean, I have a brother who's two years apart. We beat the shit out of each other, you know, playing all the time. So it's really, we would compete in anything. and pinball was readily available in the house growing up so we did it a lot very good did you guys have born into the darkness oh right did you guys have like a a pin you would always go back and forth on growing up like is there any special like did you have adam's family fridays or like where do you know i mean and whenever if my dad would get like a new game we would that would be the one that just played the crap out of it like i grew up with adams and twilight in my bedroom growing up as a teenager so and my room was right next to my parents room i don't know how they dealt with i mean i would play instead of going to sleep and just like just playing and playing and i can only imagine them like what is this bastard gonna go to bed it's a little hard like i just remember as a kid you you go to bed and like your parents are gone and you get out the Game Boy. You can't really do that with pinball because it's super loud. So you couldn't, like, sneak in late-night sessions. I was trying to think of – Yeah, and my – like, sneaking down to the basement, it was way too scary down there at my parents' house. But my dad's a maniac, so there were games – you know, games in the dining room, games in the living room, games in Zach's room, games in my room. Did he ever operate a location? No. No? Okay. So you guys would mostly play at home and then eventually got to on location Yeah, I mean, growing up, there was a Williams test location that was within walking distance that we were not allowed to walk to because it was too busy streets across. And that did not stop us from walking over there and playing, especially if, you know, we heard a new game came out. You know, I was a huge NBA jam freak, too. So I'd go over there to play that also. Yeah, that is that that game is such a classic. I remember playing the Super Nintendo version even after the arcade version, getting all those codes to put in Bill Clinton and all the fun stuff. $19.50 would go into that, and then $0.50 I'd make the pinballs last a few hours off $0.50.
    19:01
    Yeah, I mean, arcade was the jam. That's what eventually got me into pinball at this stage. So let's rewind a bit. What exactly is the IFPA at its origin? And basically, how did it originally come about, if you have the details? Back in the 90s, like not my group, the old group. So it was an industry association that was modeled off of the National Dart Association. So, you know, these industry associations are created to help operators earn revenue through promotion of the devices that they're operating. So there was a lot of success with that in the dark field, you know, at bars back in the day. And the IPA was created as sort of like the pinball arm for operators to use to run leagues, you know, set up run leagues, get people in the house, you know, to show up and support the local business and all that stuff. Was it as I'm just I'm imagining the organization of it with fax machines, because obviously emails weren't prevalent back then. Yeah, like trade magazines were a big deal back then. And I think Papa was also created back then. And my dad was kind of instrumental in supporting both organizations, obviously way more hands on with Papa and Steve Epstein back then. But the way that I had always viewed it was Papa was created for the players. It was a very player centric organization. And the IFPA was a very operator business centric organization. It makes more sense, especially if it was an offshoot of what the dart industry did. And there were a lot of operator groups and associations around that. How could I make my route earn even more money and strategies along with that? Yeah, and bring in in tournament. I mean, that makes sense why Papa was sort of aimed for the players. And when was, do you remember the original Papa? Like the first time it was ever an event or. So it started just in the Broadway arcade for like league play. Gotcha. And that was local to Steve's business at the Broadway arcade. So same sort of thing that the IFPA started to try to tap into in the 90s. Steve was doing that for all of the 80s and had father son leagues on Saturday. The way I looked at it is whatever bowling was kind of doing to be successful. He was doing with pinball and just growing out of that and expanding into larger things. And for them, you know, Papa One was run out of the Broadway arcade. So I think you can you can look at similar to like, you know, we were talking about InDesk briefly before we started recording. And like those guys started in inside a bowling alley, you know, with games that were used inside the bowling alley. So, you know, it's a similar thing of just building something, building the reputation of running something of high quality. And what my dad and Steve were able to do in the early Papa days grew to what it became before they passed it on. And Kevin, you know, growing it to what it became and still rocking them now back and rocking and rolling.
    22:23
    Yeah, it doesn't grow the way it does without people actually loving it. It's funny, the Facebook groups are called like Pinball Enthusiast, Pinball Enthusiast 2.0. And I'm thinking of how disconnected it might have felt back then initially starting something like that because there was no ease of getting in touch with people. So you really have to put some effort into it and get sort of some organization, not the same as like a union, but, you know, it takes a lot of work. Well, to tie that, I mean, that comment is kind of 20 years ago when I was thinking exactly in my cube of we had, whatever, the first year of the rankings, there were 52 events globally for the whole year.
    23:10
    And for me, it was Expo and Papa were the two events I played a year. and you know the ability to try to connect those events in some way they were very disconnected you know you showed up and a group showed up to from the midwest and you'd have some out-of-towners come in you know some of the the goats back in the day but besides that it was like oh the west coast people played at california extreme and you know the east coast people played here and the people in the netherlands played in the dutch open and yeah i making it worldwide even having global events just kind of boggles my mind of, you know, okay, well, how are we going to get these rankings together and make it all work? I mean, it's still with new technology comes new problems, obviously, but it does make it a lot easier. So what led to the revival of the IFPA after it went quiet for a little bit? Was it that desire of you to, you know, not just get away from work, but to also create something that was organized? I mean, I think the catalyst really was the rankings and sort of the birth of the rankings led to something that was really embraced pretty quickly by the community And I mean it not a shocker because I used a lot of the those top players to kind of help create what we were doing there to get results It was literally like, does anyone know what happened at Pinball Expo in 1993? Josh, I found this article in Pin Game Journal that had, I mean, it was a lot of like scouring the internet for results of events to try to just like build this little Lego house and get it started and try to build a foundation of which that we can then build upon. and my uh i think my dad had come up with the idea of you know the ifpa being dormant and at that point it was it was owned by the amoa which you know we still had they still exist today and and through my dad's industry connections and being able to talk with them about what i was doing you know sort of kicking off this rankings thing and there being some excitement around it using an association that was well known i mean they were one of the world championships back in the 90s it was you know it was ifpa and papa the triple crown was ifpa papa and pinball expo those were the big three so the attempt to kind of help legitimize the whoppers by tying it to this industry association seemed like a good idea to try to sort of jump start this thing into more than like, hey, here's Josh's spreadsheet for the month of January 2006. Because back then it was just an Excel spreadsheet where I'm just pasting, you know, all the points. It was every event was worth the same. So, you know, every first place was 25 points. There was no decay. It was just additive forever.
    26:18
    Josh, I remember you posted recently, it was like an email thread or something of like results from like Bowen for like regional events. And it was just like really funny looking at that and seeing, you know, a lot of local players to me and like just, you know, names that you would recognize. But it's just like that's how it was back then, I guess, just instead of a website we could reference, it was just an email chain of like this is what happened.
    26:43
    So a few chapter skips later and here we are today. Here we are. Cool. So who were I know you kind of mentioned a few people, but who are some of the key figures, organizations that helped shape the rebirth of kind of the modern IPA? I mean, really, you know, my dad and Steve Epstein, you know, I call them the godfathers of competitive pinball. So I kind of I look at them as the tree trunk of the sport. And everyone owes something to those two gentlemen for for what the sport has become. And I'm happy to just be one of those branches on the tree. I think, you know, outside of that, like the enjoyment I get in playing, you know, has I joke about this a lot. But, you know, every time that I'm I'm thanked for all the the hours of over the last 20 years of doing this, you know, my response is I do it for me because I enjoy this. You know, I mean, there's certainly you know, you get me on a couch with a therapist and it's like, you know, The Reikis were probably partially born out of my own ego to see how I stacked up. You know, I thought I was pretty fucking good back then before kids. And so being able to to see where I stacked up indirectly with people that I had never actually competed with. And I think the side effect was, you know, and part of us starting IPA was we're going to bring back the IPA World Championship. And and all of these events are going to be qualified. I have this whole, I think I still have the original sort of write-up of there were 50 events and they all pointed to this one. They all feed this beast. And it's all qualifying throughout the year. Instead of just two days of qualifying and a finals, it's a year-long qualifier to make it to the World Championship. And that was, we did that in 2008 based on the 2007 season. So it took us a couple of years to get there. And that was kind of the plan from the beginning. I remember talking to Lyman about it. We're going to bring this championship back, and here's how we're going to do it. Yeah, that fragile male ego. It's funny you mention because we had this conversation when I first – I feel like I had done about – I wanted to see where I was during the year or something like that, and you gave me the numbers, and I was like, yes. You were like, you can tell your kids you were the 10th best based on these many new events. And I was like, when you just mentioned you wanted to see how good you were and how you stepped up, I feel like a good portion, whether you have kids or you don't, the fragile male ego has born a ton of IFPA competitors because you can sit at your house with your pins behind you and be like, yeah, I'm pretty fucking good. Like, I want to go out. And then you go. And then some. Call that local hero syndrome. Come on out. And then some 21-year-old college kids. I'm sure you're really good at pinball. Yeah. Tell me what you got. It's a 21-year-old college kid spends three hours on Kong in the next competition. There you're at.
    29:43
    Proper calibration for when you go back home. Oh, my God, seriously. Put them up on two by four. When you first took over president, what were the biggest challenges you faced in building trust and growing the player base?
    29:59
    There really weren't. I mean, you know, that makes it sound like the association is far more, I guess, professional than than I've ever claimed it to be or have ever really wanted it to be. You know, for for me, it's it's really all about if you're not having fun doing this. And I've said this to all of our volunteers that have ever helped. It's like you better enjoy this. I'm still only doing this because I enjoy this. My two rules were like, don't do it if you're not having fun and don't spend a dollar of your own money to do it. So, you know, a lot of the stuff we've been able to do is through the help of sponsorship money because I still I've never spent a dollar. Are this Austria World Championship wiped out most of our kitty? But it really just, you know, I feel like.
    30:46
    My attitude towards keeping the association, it's serious and obviously that, you know, the champion, the high level play is some serious shit. But if you're having fun along the way, I feel like it just makes it easier for, you know, you to bring two people. And pinball is fun, man.
    31:06
    It's really, I don't know if I've ever gone up to someone and they've asked them about pinball and it's like, oh, yeah, I know what it is. And it fucking sucks. Like, I don't think I've ever heard that ever because it's not. It's like it's it's objectively fun. it can be frustrating and whatever but like it's it's really a fun unique quirky game that if most people give it a chance they're gonna like it yeah through all the through all the online old yet man yelling at cloud syndrome and all the posts a lot of that at the at the core of it when you cut through all of the the noise everybody has fun with yeah like everybody the most cantankerous online troll will always go back to their, you know, big top that they have in the basement that their dad gave them or something and just flip and have fun. And I think you nailed it on the head. Once you're not having fun with this anymore, then, you know, it's time to step away, take a breather, come back and, uh, remember why you enjoyed it so much. Yeah. There was some years ago, there was some, you know, someone doing some diatribe on Facebook, you know, hammering competitive pinball players for sucking all the fun out of everything and i posted like a photo collage of me losing in the finals of every world championship i've ever been in and it's just me you know me legitimately smile like having a good time while you know being super frustrated from a competitive aspect but like still realizing in that moment like how fucking awesome is it to be like playing this game i love so much at a very high level at this moment even if it doesn't end the way i want to it's just like so blessed to have those moments exist it's more fun to compete it is man gotley had it right had it right this whole time um so speaking of dollars uh yeah we've got a question about the uh the dollar fee for the ipa uh so what drove that decision and then how do you balance sustainability and keeping things affordable and accessible for players were either of you guys around for when that came out or is that after is that before your time i think it's before my time for sure yeah man you guys are you guys are puppies look at you too um you know it it certainly it was a it was a risk but i think you know for me the ability to try to garner more attention for the sport and seeing how our numbers were growing year after year after year. And, you know, the end of the story is that it's still growing, even despite some of the changes that we've made along the years that, you know, the number of times that the sky was going to fall if we implemented version whatever we were going to do. So, you know, that never happening feeds the next idea that like you become less and less afraid to try something because we can always walk it back. So for for us, it was like, yeah, this may, you know, the I think our target was if we can have at least half of the events stick around as sanctioned and willing to pony up this dollar. I'll see that as a success. And I think it was Adam Becker who was like, dude, you're hilarious. nobody's going anywhere and and we definitely had some people that immediately dropped out and by the time like april came around so whatever like month four month three to see these tournaments start submitting again and it's like oh shit we got them like this it's done and then i think the ability to you know you guys have competed in enough events that you go and there's 100 people, 150 people and 24 make the finals and there's 24 winners. And that's great. The ability for us to, you know, on SCS day where we're paying out all this money, despite whatever internet rumors are that all these dollars paid for my house or whatever, like the most exciting part of to me for that day. And that is like my favorite day of the year, besides my anniversary i love you honey there's a thousand winners that day yeah and that's a thousand different people so you know like zach mccarthy takes up one of those but you know all the names that and all these big events that fill up some chunk of that top 24 top 40 whatever it is there's a thousand fucking people winning that day and that's awesome yeah no that's that's got to be such a great feeling it's almost like pinball santa day yeah uh it's uh because you're giving out the, I think when people work, they always want to see the results of their hard work. Like teachers want to see kids happy and progress. And when you're, whatever job you're working at, but this is like the hard work of a year's worth of pinball or whatever it is. And they get to see some sort of tangible asset. So that is super cool. I'm glad, I'm glad you love it as much as, as much as I'm sure that people are receiving it too. And with the, I think what I like about and why I've never when it comes to like fees and how much tournaments cost. I love it because it's usually recycled in such a good way. Everything's put back in and I'm paying for a good time and I'm paying for me. I'm paying for the good community around me. I this this hobby, this sport, whatever you want to call it, has such a good arsenal of individuals that just make everything so much more fun. So I think when you see these tournaments and they have their cause, plus, you know, your IFPA fee, it's all worth it to me. And that's why I enjoy traveling and and getting to compete with people that I really enjoy just talking to and talking about pinball. I wouldn't have met Joe if I didn't compete. So it's been a great time. Yeah, I mean, I still have relationships with people that that know me from when I was a teenager competing. And that was 93 was my first tournament. So we're 30, 32 years in. And Jim Balsito was was a baby, you know, when I when I met him because I was a toddler. Crazy. He didn't have that kingpin. Yeah. So so Whoppers. this is the part where I would like you to explain it like I'm five. For those people that are new, hit this timestamp. It's a huge part of competitive pinball. It affects all our rankings. Can you break it down in the simplest terms for us and why it's – maybe explain why it's been so influential. Or maybe influential is the wrong word. Sure, I can take most of that. So, you know, at its core, it's a performance-based system where you earn points every time you go play in an event when you're starting. You know, the example that I've always used is my mom, who for some years played in like our local monthly tournament. And I guess I can update that to my son now who is starting to compete. I think he's played in 20 events. He might not even have a full card yet. I don't know. But, you know, at its core, the more you play, the more points you earn. The higher you finish, the more points you earn. The more players that compete in the events that you're at, the more points it's worth. You know, the more games that you play in the event, the more points it's worth. You know, that formula, I don't know how it came about. Actually, there was a group in Sweden that helped me come up with that formula. because when I came up with the formula, it was, you know, it was straight line. It was a fixed points. So I think the big thing along the way with that evolution is there's always people that have offered suggestions of, I think this could be better if, and it's like, okay, let's have a discussion. And sometimes those discussions are like, that idea is really stupid. And sometimes it leads to like that Swedish team was literally like Whopper 3.0 was, hey you just did something that's way better than we're doing we're just going to shove this you know mind shelves welcome yours because you know at that at the the core of what we do is we're kind of also the world's biggest archive of tournament results these days so for us you know the data processing of just getting tournaments in a calendar and getting results posted regardless of rankings and points and whatever is that's kind of the core of the nuts and bolts of what we do I think, you know, the Whoppers earned as you move forward, you know, your older events will decay over time. And you, unlike Whopper 1.0, where you could play forever and it was additive, at some point we put in an event cap because people were pointing themselves to the top by just playing pump and dumps in real life, honey, by playing, you know, every tournament every day. and every tournament was worth 25 points. So you could quickly just set up a tournament with your kids in your house and win 25 points. I love the, there's like a little blurb on the explanation of Whoppers. The explanation of Decay is my favorite. It's like, well, what about the title that I won in 1995? And you're like, well, that's great. But, you know, at some point you got to move on and take off the Letterman jacket. So how does the, how did the, and you don't have to get too technical if you don't want to, but how did this sort of weight of different events come about? How did you, I know obviously events evolved to where, okay, well, now we're going to do this style called herb format. Now we're going to do a card format. How did the differentiation of how those should be weighted come about? That never happened until 5.0. So every time before then, because there was a big shift. So part of the 5.0 shift was, hey, we're going to figure out, like, I mean, we were living in an environment where you'd go to Papa and the Project Pinball side tournament was worth the same amount as Papa. Not Papa because it was a major, but take another nod, like Texas Pinball Festival. you'd have a side thing and it was like that's worth that was that was a one attempt high score tournament like how is that worth the same as this week so it's a lot of like that makes no sense and it's like i know that's right that doesn't make any sense but this is like what are we going to do this is just what we can do and the hardest part of of getting to 5.0 is like we pushed a lot like people used to just email results to me and i would take that email put it in a spreadsheet and then upload a CSV file to what Brian Shepard had on our back end. And at some point to be able to grade a format, you needed to know the format that was being run. And that pushed a lot of the work to the tournament directors to do. So we didn't used to have to ask for anything. They would just say, hey, I'm running a tournament on this date here. OK, email me when your results are in and I'll take care of the rest. You know, they email me and it's like missing last days, whatever, whatever. But the ability when you have to grade and we see it now, it's like, you know, tell me everything about your tournament so we can, you know, for us, the currency was meaningful games played. You know, if I'm playing a one-time attempt on a Wizard of Oz at a launch party, that's not nearly as quality of a result as us playing 20 rounds at Pinberg of match play to a five-round final of four games per round. You know, so it's a lot of just falling into common sense and figuring out a way, how can we make this common sense measurable? yeah no more no it's i was gonna say what's worth more that one game of laws or the tiebreaker of one ball on f14 that was not my change that was not my change uh cool all right what josh what is the process for the layman's out there for tournaments to become ipa sanctioned um and then in addition to that how can something reach major status so to be sanctioned is pretty easy you just have to register for a tournament manager account on our site i feel like i send this email every couple of days to someone who's had like setting up and wanting to do something it's wanting to start a league wanting to start a tournament and so submitting to our calendar will feed our massive beast of uh submission requests that either Michael Trepp or Jermaine Mariel will tackle. I think I used to do them all, and then I split time with Becker, and Becker reached his breaking point at some point.
    44:20
    And, man, yeah, Trepp and Jermaine are monsters. So their ability to just keep making the donuts, man, I mean, it's like I'll go check right now of like how many events are in the queue and their their ability to just I wake up and it's like, how is the queue zero? When it was like it'd be like triple digits and I'd be like, fuck, my wife is going to kill me this way. I got to get through these. So it's a 23 of the results queue and 18 in the calendar queue. I mean, these guys are insane. Wow. Yeah, it's a great machine. I was thinking of all the, I don't know, the intricacies of website databases, but, man, the IFPA database has to just be monstrous of just the processing of the data and the archiving of all the data. And it's so clean the way it's updated with the staff, you and your staff, because I know people used to say, oh, you know, when are the results going to be? And now people, if it's not there within a day, people are like, wait a minute. Set expectations. Yeah. Yeah, you raised the bar.
    45:26
    My favorite is when a player of an event, I get this email a lot of, like, not understanding where, like, what's my ID number and where are these results? And it's like, we literally can't do, go bug your tournament director. We literally can't do anything about this for you. My first big event was Super Series, the last one I think they had at District 82. Oh, is this during the COVID boom out there? Yeah. I think I met you. It's probably the first time I met you was out there. Yeah, and I remember you being there, and I remember checking my IFPA profile on the app. I was like, it was like after like the second tournament or whatever it was. I was like, holy crap, the results are there. Someone goes, yeah, it's because Josh is here and he's playing. So the results are getting updated right away. I did pretty well this morning, so we're going to get that in right now. I was like, oh, I just got to go to every tournament Josh is at so I can get the results right away. As far as Joe, you know, major status, you know, to me, there's a very there's a heavy level of smell test that really is just, you know, ultimately the world's best players decide what the majors are by declaring that with their presence year after year after year and building that legacy as this is one of the ones you have to win if you want to be considered great. and so you know you could you could set whopper point thresholds for triggering and if an event earns this much for 10 years or more we'll add it and it's like at some point it the majors are what they are and and for now i don't see us adding anything besides you know the five we have hoping that there's a way for those five to each of them have their own challenges for just getting run every year you know as we see within disc right now yeah it's um i i love the fact that there's multiple majors it reminds me of golf a lot yeah i'm a huge a lot of the stuff we've done is very golf centric because i'm a huge golf fan so it's so nice to give people the option to declare themselves a world champion multiple times or give at least have multiple opportunities because pinball is very sporadic with its kinetic franticness. So it's like sometimes you're just not going to get the bounce that you want. And if you're good and you can get back up there and get another chance, man, that's just a great, great thing to have. As far as the Whopper algorithm, what improvements or changes are you most proud of that you've implemented or maybe the other teams have? certainly the i mean the jump from 2.0 to 3.0 was insane like you know we had the tournament value adjustment tva back then it was like for every you know the base value tournament was 25 points and if a top 50 player participated it added a point to i mean it was so like archaic and the ability for like these mathematician dudes from Europe who I did not know you know I was introduced to them through our Swedish country director and I mean I could the email thread just it just goes back and forth of them just explaining why you know that they like and we can give whoppers to every finisher based on where they finish and i like huh because for us you know it was like after if you didn make the finals you earned like a pity point you earned like one whopper if you showed up so you know opening the door to having some sort of decay and then having these graphs of like if you play in a 200 person event it goes slower than if you played a you know six person event and it go and it's just like you guys are blowing my mind with this math and i think that's the foundation for kind of where we've gone since then and and really sort of the uh keeping the system focused as a positive only system i know that like back in the day there whether it's match play rating now or even our own rating system pars back in the day you know the idea of i can put like my mom starts and she gets a rating to start and every event she plays in i know her rating is going to go down and if she is someone that wants to use that metric as a way to entertain herself it's really not entertaining to watch yourself just drop and drop and drop and drop so i think the backbone for what really sucked players into whoppers is my mom watched herself just go up hey i'm 40,000th and It's like, oh, you know, she goes to some monthly and it's like, how'd you do? I finished 72nd out of 72. Great job, mom. Good try. You just went up 8000 spots in the rankings. What? For finishing last? Yeah, for finishing last. So, you know, that's sort of like just pushing people. And, you know, I see it at, you know, the games that I work on at work that we release in terms of like, hey, man, people like life. sucks for most people you know dealing with taxes and death in the family and i just broke up with my girlfriend and my job sucks and it's like this pinball the video games we make the pinball tournaments you play in it's an escape man and a lot of that is like if if i could add a little positivity to that experience to make your life better that was kind of the backbone of whoppers being positive only i say that with an asterisk now since the processing came out and you know or maybe putting some limitations on the play as much as you want and you never eat as much as you want and never gain a pound.
    51:23
    That's the transition to 6.2, which me and Joe want to know about the proposed changes for the flip frenzy and amazing race formats. We saw that they might be implemented. You know, obviously, this is all fluid and things could change. But what is the thought process on? I'm not too familiar with flip frenzies. I do know more about Amazing Races, but what's the thought process on making these changes to these formats? A lot of the changes we make focus on the quality and validity of what a format produces for a tournament result. the extremes of that being like hottie if you were to play zach mccarthy would you rather that event be one ball or a best of nine game series what are you more likely to beat zach mccarthy on no probably the one ball but not probably right like me too for sure Yeah, that's the nine probably not. But the one ball. So, you know, the whole sort of nine is stretching out like, you know, what does it mean to win? And for Amazing Race, I have not put the Amazing Race like change proposal. What did not come from me? It came from from Adam Becker, our staff who who played in some of them. I've never played in one personally, but, you know, his feedback and bringing it up with with our team was like this format. That's a fucking joke. You know, and from his perspective, the early parts of Amazing Race can be. And, you know, he's sort of taking me through it. And I've gotten, you know, you can look at enough results where it's like, oh, cool. So you win as long as you get one point six million on Tron. But like that's like full plunge side ramp. Yeah, no, I know. And it's like, you know, one person has a bad one and then it's like, so what are the next 21 people do they they passed the score and stopped playing and were declared the victor so you know whether you want to call it the cheese factor like limiting the cheese and for someone like zach mccarthy who like hey if you're if your best chance is to beat zach mccarthy in a one ball game an amazing race one ball format on a random em or really hard setup modern game zach mccarthy having a plunge brick drain and losing in round one of an amazing race format and having the next 40 people plunge and beat him recognizing the quality of that result and how it should impact the ability for us to call zach a certain tier of player it's really just all that kind of analysis of just the smell test like what did we just do and how good of a result did that produce yeah amazing race i've noticed i've played it enough now it's don't house ball and you have a chance at advancing to the top five top four top three if you could because somebody along the way is going to get that awful rebound or awful feed three times uh and you just have to not do that you don't have to unwrap out what is it don't have to outrun the bear you just have to outrun the slowest dude that's uh that the bear's chasing stay back there so yeah no i that makes sense um i don't i don't know too much about the flip frenzy uh format joe do you have you played in it joe i've played in one and it was a lot of fun yeah no that when i started playing uh in 20 to 2022 now um oh you caught the tail you caught the tail end of the rage the very tail So they were they were still very popular in our area. And, you know, we'll run one every now and then just for kind of a more social event. But it's it's definitely a good format. And that was a nice surprise to see that in the proposed changes. It's people are excited if you don't like waiting to play. It is maximum play time, minimum bullshit time. So operators loved it because they I mean, it was just nonstop coins in games, you know, for playing. And I think the the bigger part is that's really great about it is it has a known end time.
    55:55
    And I feel this way now, like I take my son to our monthly here and it's like, you know, you get caught. And it's four rounds of group match play, which can end anywhere between 9 and 10, 15, depending on, you know, oh, good, Zach McCarthy drove out from the city tonight. Great. You know, you're only as fast as your slowest group every round. And with Frenzy, what's great is, hey, Zach can go play one game of Godzilla for the entire two hours, and while that happens, my son will play 11 matches in that time. That's awesome.
    56:29
    That's awesome. The good part of that is like it's really fun and everyone can kind of get what they want out of it. The bad part is that it possibly produces a lower quality result.
    56:41
    So we're kind of and, you know, with the with the new rules regarding needing to have some sort of legitimate finals, we're hoping that like the qualification process being cheesy will still ultimately lend a quality result through a decent formatted finals. having participated recently in the 24-hour final battle at the Sanctum. It's their choice to run this format, but I was thinking about it. I forget, even the people who run it have to stay up every year. Like, that's the, oh, man. Yeah.
    57:18
    Is there any, I haven't looked to see if it's in the rules, But is there any benefit to having excessive match play rounds? I'm thinking of like, Pinsonati has two days of qualifying. It's 20 rounds of match play. But see, the thing with the sanctum is there's no playoffs. It's just literally match play. So there's no, there's no benefit to having X amount of match play rounds, right? No, I mean, the rule that they run into is, you know, having a separate finals unlocks the ability to get beyond 100 value right so i mean that's really that's the trigger point so they they could literally have a one ball final and unlock the keys to all of that qualifying content to grade out but i i respect that their their stance is like we don't have that because it's just start to finish and it's done yeah at the end at the end of the 24 hours no one wants to see another pinball i proudly i proudly earned this way to go may i never get one of those give up a night of sleep oh my god all right what's next on the list yeah let's go through i think the next section we have here it's story time. Let's lighten it up. Favorites and memories here. So over the years, the IPA has sanctioned thousands of events around the world. Is there any one event that stands out to you as truly special and why?
    58:57
    I think obviously the first world championship that we put on was really special. But the second one we put on, we were committed to running the world championship in Europe. And for us, I mean, it's it's gotten less stressful now as we know the community. But like trying to find a place to host these things without the community was way smaller 20 years ago, you know, 18 years ago, whenever it started. So, you know, that first trip over, we went to we went to the UK for the first international worlds that we did. And it was like a combination of super exciting, super stressful. Never, you know, there was no Zoom back then. And so everything was like over email with these people. You know, I'm meeting someone as my brother and I are walking in and it's like, hey, man, no, nice place you got here. You know, are your games all set and ready to go? Oh, no, of course they're not. They play like shit. Oh, my God, we're starting tomorrow.
    59:56
    But then being able to sort of like find a way to like, I don't know how we got those early IFPAs off the ground. Like, I mean, the first one was at the Pinball Hall of Fame. I don't know if either of you guys have been there. But it's about as shitty as it was back when we somehow pulled it off. Some things never change. Yeah. So it's got a lot better as we've gotten pickier with our hosts. And, man, I mean, pinball has just exploded in such a way that you have these collectives and stuff with people that really care about the quality of their games. So the burden that puts on our staff for setup day is, yeah. I mean, we pulled it off because I was 20 years younger back then. I'm far too jaded now. I can only imagine like walking into, you know, our Minnesota host and just being like, I know I can't. I can't do this. It's like the Grandpa Simpson walk in and walk out of the. Totally.
    60:58
    How far in advance are you planning locations for worlds? Like, do you have to do that two or three years in advance? For sure. Yeah, I mean, it kind of it comes and goes, you know, sometimes we'll have, you know, four years kind of booked up and some some years, you know, we kind of I mean, I feel bad. Like Trent has been on the host list for a very long time and I keep pushing him back and I keep pushing him back because someone else comes along and it's like, Trent, man, I know you're going to be you're like a cockroach, dude. You're going to be around forever. I can always turn to you. But this other collection, you know, a lot of these these collectives may go away. And you see that with just like Brian O'Neill hosted the last Women's Worlds, I think. And he was we were in talks for him to do a Nationals. And it's just like, yeah, we're closing. It's like, oh, man. So all that this year sucks. So, you know, it's it's a little fluid. But we have let's say like what are the 82 this next year? We have the we have Sweden after that. we have Trent after that. So we're three deep right now. That's good. I always wondered how far in advance you have to kind of book. And we have, and we have, at some point it's like, you know, we have applications to review. And at some point it's like, it's not worth me talking about four years from now because, you know, too far down the world, the world changes. Yeah. So we've seen a lot of dominant players come across recently. Jason Zoller, Zach McCarthy, obviously Escher Lefkoff, Bo and Keith. but who are a few players or even local scenes that are, you think are shaping kind of the next era of modern pinball? You know, you have Sterling who's super young. Some players that, you know, I remember at pop-up meeting for the first time, I think Logan Henderson was one of them, Conor Mulberry, but are there any names either locally or just kind of that you see as the next era of competitive pinball? Oh, man, the big three are not to be messed with right now. They are at another level. I think, you know, similar to it. I think everything kind of general like per generation moves. I mean, back in the in the 90s and 2000s, it was like Lyman and Bowen and Keith that were that were the big three back then. And then you'd have that second tier with, you know, me, my brother and players of the like that that maybe didn't come out on top, but we were always hunting. And so, you know, you're seeing that now with Jack Slovacek, Nick Steyer, you know, sort of that that group of people that I don't know for for better or worse. And and obviously we take it pretty seriously as we've we've updated the rankings nearly every year for 20 years. But I really think like the pro rankings list as it sits today is about as good as we've nailed it in terms of like, you know, who are the best players in the world? And you go down that list and it's like, you know, those are names that like, yeah. And, you know, back in the day, you know, when we'd go from Whopper 1.0 to 2.0, we would we would have ideas in theory that we thought were important. and we would throw those ideas into the spreadsheet and we would calculate what the results spit out. And if Keith Elwin wasn't number one, the results went in the garbage. But I mean, and, you know, like I know we've taken a lot of, you know, from the pure mathematicians out there, it's like, you know, well, the math's the math. So if you're inputting a good idea, it's a good idea. And I've just never agreed with that because there is this subjective smell test of like, if Keith isn't number one, we're missing something. What we think is important isn't important or isn't as important or it means something else is important that we're not considering. So it's always been every time we've run and, you know, doing the pro rankings was the same thing. You shuffle the list and it's like, who moved up? Who moved down? And at the end of the day, it's like the people that moved up, do these people deserve to move up? And ultimately that comes down to this giant nose smelling, you know, you know, sorry, Tom Graff. You're, you know, it's time for you to move down a little bit, buddy. Yeah, the pro rankings were really a great idea because I think when I first got into competitive pinball, I was like, this is, after coming back from Super Series, I was like, this is awesome. Like there's a place there that, you know, you could get really good points. But then I thought about it and I was like, but the people that live there have access to this amazing. I don't want to remember what perform, but amazing location that just gives them these.
    65:54
    Insane amount of points, and I'm in this metropolitan area, a big area of W here, and I didn't have the same access. So I think the pro rankings are great. I really got to say the IFPA rankings, especially the pro rankings, reminds me of like the true skill rankings you would see in online video games. And, man, it is really close. We had it. Man, there was a version that never made it that was actually our – we called it the Wofford True Skill rankings. Yeah, no, it is so good. And it is – I look at my own ranking and I say, you know what? it is perfectly near perfectly aligned because I go to a lot of events and I have to be penalized if I'm not placing well yeah but if I place well then I see my efficiency go up so yes the open ranking is great I have a chance to add to my card for for events that I you know maybe I didn't perform well in the past and now I'm doing better but man it's just such a good combination of mathematical factors that translate for what you actually do in these bigger tournaments so i i think it's i think it's really really well done thanks i know that like you know i can usually we almost had no changes this year until you know becker becker k mccollin with the amazing race stuff but you know i think our days of radically rehauling you know the formula that spits out who's the best player in the world we're about as i think as good as we can we can get there you know we may now you know i think the tweaking of the formats that create the best result that's all just the event value part but everything else related to the formula that has nothing to do with like what an event is worth i i can't think of any ways that we can do it better right now no the names at the top belong at the top they are so consistently good and um skilled and it just shows in all the competitions the different types of competitions it's not even just the level that they're playing at but they they adapt so well and it's it's just awesome to see the rankings reflect that i remember having some online discourse with someone who you know those fucking kids at the top and them having whatever orders of magnitude more whoppers than anyone and this is just such bullshit and whatever and i tried to explain it to him of like hey man you know we we've played each other 30 times and i've beaten you 95 of the times now i've played escher who's beaten me 95 of the time so you know when you talk about like how good these kids are it's like they are as good against me as i am against you and it's so you're just you're way away from where that's how good they are properties yeah transitive properties baby josh what is the uh the funniest or weirdest thing you've ever seen happen during a tournament match man i mean at worlds in denver which would have been ifpa 11 there was a pretty heavy rainstorm and we had the roof collapse and water started coming down and coming towards the games and like we literally we tried to get people to stop playing and it was like yeah of course they're fucking pinball people so someone's in a multi-ball and it's like they're not letting it down it's like get off the fucking games now you know as well it's like they're it is just coming towards us oh my gosh the the game exchange staff it was like a section of the building and the game exchange staff was really good they pulled you know all the equipment that was in that zone to the other side of the it was it's a pretty big place so we were able to we were down for maybe a half an hour or something but it's like everyone got their cop balls and whatever like like like you're gonna die same for everyone play on right that was that was a tough one that was tough one i'm trapped up i'd rather can i get electrocuted when we restart do i get do i get what i've accumulated so far i had lost to the zone lit like come on man where's the where's the that's pinball emote from carl stream um on the lighter side who's got the best trash talk game and who takes it the worst man you have to answer that second part but who's got the best trash talk i don't know most people are way too nice i probably try i trash talk myself pretty hard?
    70:44
    I don't know. Yeah. Do you guys have any that come to your mind out there? I mean, you guys are out there a lot more than I am these days. I like Derek Thompson for the double bird when he trash talks the pins. That's pretty good. Yeah, he's a good – I've played in a few groups with him. I like his double bird move. I like a healthy they screwed me Norma from Eric Stone. Norma's always letting her know that he's always getting screwed. Yeah. How about you, Joe? Who would you say? Anybody? You know, I spent a decent amount of time hanging out with Z-Mac up at Northwest this year back in August, and I feel like he shows as a nice kid on the outside, but I got to see a little of the darker side of him playful banter, I think, between him and Escher and Preston while we were out there. Him and Preston were slapbox.
    71:43
    I did see that. Too funny. What about the worst mechanical failure mid-match? How did you handle that? I mean, that was pretty bad. I was going to say, what is pretty bad? I mean, the worst that I maybe felt was I used to run pinball back at Pinball Expo, which was a team tournament back in the late 90s, early 2000s, pre pre whoppers. But I remember having to go help with a ruling and was running and tripped on the power cord of a demo man that one of the matches was going on and totally fucked their game. that's good what you know full like one fly like it was a disastrous trip and i fucked their game oh oh if you could invite any three people that are alive to a celebrity pinball match who would they be who do you want to see play pinball uh in one man i mean i think of like mtv celebrity death match to me i used to think how cool it would be to see like you know michael jordan the like michael jordan and tiger woods and roger federer play a four a game of pinball with prime keith ellen and just kind of see see like the the the people that are and i you know i'm good friends with Tom McCullough who played in the NBA and plays competitive pinball at a decently high level And so you know for these guys when you at the mountaintop of anything competitively I think any competitive environment will get you going. And so, you know, the ability for like that kind of match to happen of like, you know, me explaining like, is there a Michael Jordan pinball? It's like, yes, and his name's Keith Owen. I would say Michael Jordan's the Keith Owen of basketball. You know, that sort of like commentary, like being able to see that play out would be pretty cool. Just a goat match. Goat match. Oh, cool.
    73:56
    If the IFPA could host one dream event anywhere in the world, where would it be and what would that look like?
    74:04
    Man, I really enjoyed the new timed format of the Stern Pro Circuit Finals. So the idea and I spent a lot of time talking with Z Mac over that is just like how cool it would be to have an entire, you know, major championship weekend of, you know, the way you would do quality, a pump and dump of challenges with timers everywhere and all that stuff like that kind of huge commitment financially to all those timers. And obviously you need judges, you know, recordings. It's like it's very not possible at the moment. But the idea of something like that, you know, the ability to have a different kind of stress while playing, it's really an interesting, you know.
    74:55
    It moves your blood in a way that you're very not used to when you're used to playing standard competitive pinball. And I think it's really fun. And it's way more understandable for way more people.
    75:09
    And that would be great. And it would be hosted at wherever my wife would want to go vacation for the seven days after the event.
    75:18
    Yeah, those timers were super cool. And the challenges were a nice change of pace. So it was fun to watch. I can imagine how it was in person. So looking towards the future, we know this is kind of how I got into pinball. During the COVID boom, it was through virtual pinball. I somehow discovered VPX. I had built a Goonies-themed virtual pinball machine, which is right over here, and now it keeps evolving. And VPX is great because it's got some really good advantages to learning rules, figuring out what may work, especially if you're designing. So from connected machines to live stream tournaments, how is the IFPA adapting to this new digital era? I know you guys just renamed the virtual pinball rankings, I believe. It's like digital pinball rankings now or something like that. Yeah. We yeah. Do you play the like at games tournament stuff for you? No, I haven't. Ever since I got the physicals, I used to stream virtual pinball every night for two years. And going back to what you said, do what you love. It just stopped being fun because I was burnt out from streaming every night. But I still have the V-Pin here, but I haven't got into the AtGames model because I have a separate custom-built one. I know, like, we've worked with Farsight and Zen Studios over the years. They've both been longtime sponsors. And AtGames has probably been the most serious sponsor we've had now in terms of, you know, most of our sponsors due to me being in the industry. You know, a lot of ours, I just had a call with the representative at AtGames yesterday and talking about some of the things we could do to try to get more people interested in virtual pinball, you know, on their side and bringing virtual players into the real world. You know, someone like yourself, Hadi, that found it that way. that's a pretty common story of people that like i played the pinball arcade on my ipad and then i realized that like funhouse is a real machine holy shit you know blah blah blah then you're gone but you know a lot of the sponsors we have are you know i'll talk to them once a year when i ask them for a little help for financially for the next year and they're happy to just like hey it looks like you're doing great here you go never talk to me again but but this current at games team is is pretty interested in trying to tap into the community so i'm kind of excited about some of the stuff that they're looking to do and uh yeah hopefully in the next you know year two years three years you know they'd love to see themselves have a presence at you know if you're at a stern pro circuit event there's a virtual component now that at games is stepping up to the plate to help organize you know maybe not in the pinball expo tournament room but on the expo show floor somewhere that people can come over and and do things like that so being able to create our virtual system for them and working i mean what's great for them is all of their result everything that we do is still like manual right like you run an event and it's like submit it into us we of a human review it and fix it and you know a human kicks off the reload button and for them it's like well this is all digital so our scores are all live and as they come in it just all exists and when it's done i just hit a button because we wrote code that will they i mean they pretty much run a pump and dump so yeah like it just feeds those results over to me by them just creating that code to do it. Yeah, AtGames is really, really into it. I know I transitioned from the arcade one-up era. That's kind of how I got into pinball and then virtual pinball, but I just see them constantly advertising in the Facebook groups that I'm in, and they're really into the digital world. They have their own custom tables, whether it's Snoopy or different IPs and licenses, because not, again, not everybody can afford a full-size pinball machine, whether it's space, money, whatever it is. So the virtual pinball world is a great, great gateway to at least experience the joy of pinball in many different facets. And having them be a partner is really good. We learned really quickly that they have their Keith Ellen, you know, this mad Ben Henn guy. You know, you start seeing results come in, and I do all the approvals for them. and I'm the tournament director, so I handle all of our website's side of it. And it's just like, you know, they send me all these results, and I put them in, and it's just like, good lord, who the fuck is this guy? What if Matt Van Henn is just your mom playing?
    80:09
    I joke, what if it's Asher? Yeah. So, Josh, what is the IPA doing to attract younger players and build a more diverse, accessible player base? I mean, I think we're fortunate to have a we're seeing like the next generation, you know, the kids of players that play. You know, I'm one of I'm one of them. You know, my dad was in and I'm just happen to be one of the older sons of a parent that has played. But I think the community does the best job of growing the community. And my wife and I talk about it all the time. Like, I'll watch, you know, I'll take my son Colin to these events and just seeing how all the kids that are in that like age 15 to 25 range are just they're so they're so nice. And, you know, they're willing to have genuine conversations with him. And he's he's growing these friendships with these guys that that is really I mean, I lived that path when I you know, he's going to be 14 here in a couple of weeks. And I can remember being 14 and starting to have conversations about how school was going with Jim Belsito or Neil Schatz or whoever it was back then. And it's like there's a chance for those bonds to be around for decades. And it's so nice to have a community that's mostly made up of people that generate that within the community. That's the secret to growing it. It's like you rely on the fact that the community is just solid.
    81:49
    Yeah, and another shout out to the IFPA for such a great women's or ladies board and section to allow so many amazing tournaments for all the highly skilled women out there that play. because I love that there's a separate space for the women to just kind of ball out and enjoy pinball against each other and form their own community together to further the hobby. It's really a really well-done event, and they keep growing so much. You know, I was talking to somebody that went to their first Women's World, And they were just so ecstatic for the opportunity to be able to do it.
    82:40
    You know, if you can't make too many mains, at least you've got the local women's leagues that will allow you the opportunity to make make a big event there. So, yeah, I think, you know, seeing what the women's board has done with like now there's like the women's at the NACS and the state championships at the women's level. And that's all. You know, I did not have any more bandwidth. So the Women's World Championship literally was the same day as Nationals because there was no other, honey, I need another weekend away to do this. And their ability to step up to both make the Women's World Championship far more legitimate than it was when my team was organizing it and them stretching out and finding the reps that they needed at the state level to pull off, you know, the WNACS weekend and feeding that into Women's Nationals. It's great. And I mean, it just circles back to it takes a community of volunteers that are not getting paid, that love this game so much that they're willing to work hours and hours and hours, you know, just out of the kindness of their hearts for the passion that they have for the game.
    83:54
    Exactly. What's the misconception about the IFP or competitive pinball in general? you think that it's not fun you know like most most collectors you know but like we don't know how to play for fun and and we take things too seriously and i keep all the dollars those are those are the two the big two i love my dollar back i'm glad we cleared the air there I think there is this misconception that because we can take things so seriously and a lot of that is at a high level you turn ways into making games potentially not fun I think regarding the design I think there might be a valid criticism of tournament player influence on game design or maybe code design. Oh, yeah. Modern pinball has jumped so many sharks. That's another four-hour wizards podcast. But at the end of the day, it's still fun to flip. And the designers of Pulp Fiction, Stern Pinball, Chicago Gaming, JGP, they make ways to access that fun. You can hit hobo flippers and get to the wizard mode if you want to just try it or do a flip count mode. So I think people are understanding that there are ways to temper the difficulty sometimes that comes with tournament players designing games or whatever, whatever it is. I think the competitive pinball, what it also does, and, you know, to speak back to that Gottlieb tagline, it's more fun to compete. You know, you can take the shittiest early solid state game you can think of. you throw three other players on that and that thing's going to provide some entertainment for those four minutes and it's going to be fun for sure um so josh looking ahead what is your dream for the ifpa 10 years from now and what do you hope people remember about this era of competitive pinball man i don't know i hope to i hope to still be loving it as much as you know 30 years in as i am 20 years in i hope to still be competing at a some kind of level that uh i could every i feel like my uh i joke with adam lefkoff all the time my my highs are just as high as this as they've always been they just don't come around as often as they used to but you know the ability to really still love competing and as long as i still love competing i'm going to want to see where i'm against the best in the world and if that's you know outside of the top 100 someone fucking kill me because i'm not gonna let that happen as far as the legacy like it's it's not really something I worry about because like there's so the expectations of where the IFBA has gotten now 20 years later I think on my dream board when we created the rankings the first time and had 500 players you know I said this a bunch of times over the years but my goal someday with enough hard work and promotion and getting the word out we could double that and to go from 500 to a thousand you know if you told 26 year old me 20 years ago that there'd be almost 150,000 players ranked i'd tell you to go fuck yourself like that's it there's no like wow we're at 500 how How do you turn 500 into 150,000? To double it and then double it again and then double it again and then double it again and then double it again.
    87:57
    Awesome. Well, thank you so much for answering our questions and giving the audience a great history lesson. But we're not done yet. We're going to go through a rapid fire. Oh, shit. Yeah. So you just say what comes through your mind on these. This is dangerous. Yeah. we'll just we'll alternate and uh some are easy some are you know a little little more dicey maybe uh flipper skills or nudging skills flipper skills pinberg or papa man papa on the fly or controlled play controlled play uh scorekeeper or commentator neither i got results to approve just you'll find me at a desk with a laptop trying to manage the and i look and it's like how many ip oh good 77 great that's that's how many i have right now uh more stressful organizing ifp ifpa worlds or playing in them organizing um uh classic ems dmds or modern lcds man i will say a balanced mix of the three proves that you are the best and that and you know all joking aside that was a pretty big deal for you know that was a really that was a component of our world championship from the very beginning and back then every world championship was industry supported back then so it was always on the newest games that just came out so the integration of classics and stuff being a healthy component in deciding who's the best player in the world and i remember at some point you know the conversations with that i would have with lyman who was a masterful you know Williams era player from the 90s, you know, could go toe to toe with Keith Elwin, you know, was not afraid to play anybody on anything from that era and assumed he was going to destroy you. That was his mindset. And, you know, as the as competitive pinball evolved and the older generations of games came in, even he was like, Keith is a fucking monster, man. You know, You go find a one-inch small flipper EM, and he will find a way to just beat you every time. Even to someone like Lyman, who battled him among the titans of modern games. Before we go on to the next ones, I wish I had a chance to play with Lyman. I'm such a fan of his work. I'm getting a Walking Dead remaster just because it's my favorite code and rule set. My favorite too. um do you have a favorite story to sort of like honor lyman or something an enjoyable i mean i think the best the best thing that so i mean a couple like he used to i used to go have practice sessions at his house just to hang out you know could sort of in my college years and early out of college that just he was kind of my uh competitive pinball mentor so you know really valuing going over there and him just kicking my ass, you know, all the time. But I used he back in the day, you know, his calling card was he played in his socks.
    91:30
    So, you know, if you'd be at D82, if 1994 version of it's like he'd be walking around. It's like it's time to play. Shoes come off and he goes and plays. And I used to play in my socks back then. And he used to have a towel that he's a towel that a player towel that hung out of his back pocket. I had a towel that, you know, you emulate your heroes. So he was my hero for sure. That's awesome.
    91:53
    That's super cool. Favorite non-pinball arcade game? NBA Jam. Good call. Least favorite pinball machine ever?
    92:05
    Man. John Wick. No, I don't know. Ever? I don't know. You know what? Pinball is like pizza. Like, even really bad pinball in the right moment, it'll work for you. Sure. It'll work. Yeah. What did – Ray Day said Algar, right? I think he said Algar. Algar's all right, man. Go for the captain balls on the right. Try to survive that feed. That's okay.
    92:33
    It's fine or Bozo? It's fine. What is your favorite city for pinball tournaments? And you can't say Chicago.
    92:44
    Man. probably, I mean, Seattle is pretty freaking awesome. I just went to the World Cubing Championships with my son last summer, this past summer, and I was able to check out the IFPA calendar, because that's a thing, and noticed that, like, holy shit, there's like eight tournaments a night in the Seattle. No wonder Jermaine doesn't mind approving results. half of the world's events are organized within 10 miles of his house that uh you know that area you know if i could if i didn't have any wife kids work anything that seems like a primes if you wanted to just play pinball until your arms fell off that seems to be a really great place to be and i did sneak out one of the cubing championship night evenings and played in a weekly out there Yeah, we went to NWPC up there. And, man, there's a reason that Washington prize pool is big because they have an army of people playing. They do. Yeah. It's wild. Favorite tourney food?
    93:56
    Man, the food truck at District 82. No, maybe the quick trip down the street from District 82. That Jamaican jerk chicken. Jamaican be crazy?
    94:06
    That's the best jerk chicken I've ever had. I can't find anything just as good. Favorite pinball machine for competitive play?
    94:16
    Walking Dead. Casual play. Favorite casual play machine? Attack from Mars. Don't play Halo. Attack from Mars. Don't play Halo.
    94:30
    What are you talking about, Holly? The favorite game hasn't been made yet. Maybe in the next six years. uh favorite pinball venue or like barcade in the world man i mean the the papa facility was pretty freaking great like that i can remember you know introducing my brother and i we over the years we would convince our friends to come out especially when uh when they started pinbird because surprisingly card format is not fun for most people so we would drag our friends to card format they would be like i wasted a vacation day and a flight and a hotel for this shit because i feel terrible about myself why am i here but pinberg you know the camaraderie of pinberg and getting to i think maybe they had two in that building before they moved two or three and it was just magical man and you bring your friends in for the first time and it's just like oh my god this place exists especially because on the outside it looks like a complete you know dilapidated piece of shit and you walk in and it's like it just mind-blowingly awesome i've only heard good stories about the facility there's a similar thing to like you walk into district 82 and you're like oh shit like this is for real like an order of magnitude higher than that uh what pinball rule change would you institute tomorrow if you could man
    96:03
    No mode stacking with multiballs ever. No utility multiballs. The multiball exists to play the multiball and those rules.
    96:18
    Naked multiball only. That's right. Pulp Fiction style. No stacking. Yeah, exactly. We'll see how that works on the next one. Oh, my God. I can't wait.
    96:29
    Thank you for bringing street level back, by the way. Thank you for taking us on that journey, honestly. Thank you, Josh. Yeah, it's incredible to see how far the IFPA competitive pinball scene has come. And with, you know, obviously all your hard work and everybody behind the scenes and the people that came before you, it's been amazing. You know, it's a global scene now, and it's super cool of how large it is. Your leadership and dedication to so many players around the world have made it. So for anyone watching who wants to get involved, check out ifpapinball.com to find your local tournaments, rankings, player resources. But, Josh, before we go, do you have any final words? And obviously feel free to plug anything as well. Is there anything you want to tell the audience?
    97:17
    Buy a Cactus Canyon upgrade to help me put my kids through college. I need the money. Buy the upgrade kit. Buy it. Buy your upgrade kit and hope that it boots within an hour. is there anything you want to plug other than actual physical products is there any website anything with the idea you want to pull that okay well thank you so much for joining us joe always awesome to have you here is this the start do you guys gonna keep going and now do all your recaps of shit like right now yeah so wow congratulations bye holy shit say goodbye