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The Ray Rae Show, Episode 2: Pinball Expo

Poor Man's Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·analyzed·Nov 10, 2022
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TL;DR

Ray Rae Show Episode 2 covers 2022 Flipout Tournament formats, IFPA certification, and classic pinball gameplay analysis.

Summary

Rachel Ristel and Raymond Davidson discuss the 2022 Flipout Tournament at Pinball Expo in Chicago, covering multiple tournament formats including Battle of the Bells (women's team event), Classics (EM tournament), and the main tournament. They explain IFPA certification requirements, the 20% WPPR boost for certified events, and provide detailed gameplay analysis of classic pinball machines like Fast Draw, Knight Rider, Space Shuttle, Little Chief, and Lost World.

Key Claims

  • The IFPA certifies tournament formats to incentivize prestigious events; certified formats provide a 20% boost to WPPR values

    high confidence · Raymond Davidson explaining IFPA certification requirements for Flipout Tournament

  • The 2022 Flipout Tournament main and Classics tournaments were changed to best-of-five (instead of best-of-three) for top brackets to achieve IFPA certification

    high confidence · Raymond Davidson describing format changes required for certification

  • Stern provided 40+ games for the main tournament, including games for the Stern Pearl Circuit

    high confidence · Rachel Ristel thanking Stern for tournament machines

  • Battle of the Bells had a $20 buy-in with all proceeds donated to charity (winning team chose Trevor Project)

    high confidence · Rachel Ristel describing Battle of the Bells format and charity donation

  • Battle of the Bells was created by Therese Edwards and Jen Rupert from Columbus, Ohio

    high confidence · Rachel Ristel introducing Battle of the Bells format originators

  • Rachel Ristel placed second in Battle of the Bells (team Bells and Chimes Columbus) and second in an unspecified earlier Battle of the Bells event

    high confidence · Rachel Ristel's personal tournament results discussion

  • Sammy Bacon was a three-time champion of Battle of the Bells; won the 2022 event with team Talk Tilty to Me

    medium confidence · Rachel Ristel recounting Battle of the Bells results (expressed some uncertainty about Sammy's record)

  • Fast Draw's middle drop target is a horseshoe worth 5,000 points and serves as the 'wizard mode'

    high confidence · Raymond Davidson explaining Fast Draw strategy and mechanics

  • Space Shuttle features an outlane ball save gate on the right side that opens at the start of every ball

Notable Quotes

  • “So if there are 100 Whoppers available that you could take, you could actually take 120?”

    Rachel Ristel @ early — Clarifying the 20% WPPR boost mechanic for certified tournaments

  • “I'm a person that I learn so much by hearing and so much more by doing. You know, I just can't absorb some dry content.”

    Rachel Ristel @ mid — Explaining her podcast format preference for accessible tournament education

  • “Battle of the Bells, really great tournament style, so much fun. I encourage everybody to try that format.”

    Rachel Ristel @ mid — Strong endorsement of the Battle of the Bells format as social and inclusive

  • “It's a fun game of skill. I like games where there's really straightforward. One, two, three... simple things.”

    Rachel Ristel @ late — Expressing preference for classic EM games over complex modern game rule sets

  • “Game five. It's brutal because now for the rest of my tournament, I'm playing two out of three, which is so much scarier than three out of five.”

    Rachel Ristel @ late — Describing the format advantage difference in double-elimination brackets

Entities

Rachel RistelpersonRaymond DavidsonpersonPinball ExpoeventFlipout TournamenteventIFPAorganizationTherese EdwardspersonJen RupertpersonTilt AmusementscompanySammy Baconperson

Signals

  • ?

    event_signal: 2022 Flipout Tournament at Pinball Expo featured five tournament divisions with IFPA certification, broadcast by Fox City Pinball, attracting regional and international competitors

    high · Rachel and Raymond's detailed tournament recounting with specific format details, results, and streaming coverage

  • ?

    community_signal: Battle of the Bells demonstrates growing emphasis on inclusive, social tournament formats that encourage women participation and team-building; on-site team matching enabled individual women to participate without pre-registration

    high · Rachel praising the format as social, welcoming, enabling players from 'all over the world' to participate and meet; specific mention of players from Norway and Fort Wayne

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Rachel expresses strong preference for classic EM games over modern complex rule sets, citing straightforward shot sequences and skill-based gameplay; describes herself as '65% classics lover'

    high · Quote: 'It's a fun game of skill...simple things...for my brain, sometimes that's just easier than having to stack all this stuff in my head as you have to with modern games'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Battle of the Bells format demonstrates emerging design thinking around social/team-based pinball tournaments; format has been replicated at multiple expos by creator Therese Edwards

    high · Rachel noting that Therese/Tish has taken the format to 'several different expos' and encouraging listeners to seek her out for local implementations

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Double elimination bracket structure creates strategic advantage for winners bracket (best-of-five) vs. losers bracket (best-of-three); losers bracket becomes 'so much scarier' with shorter formats

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.328

0:00
Hello friends, welcome to the Ray Ray Show, a pinball podcast about tournaments or competitive pinball. I am Rachel Ristel, along here with my pinball pal, Raymond Davidson. We are excited to be here today for episode two, where we talk about the 2022 Flipout Tournament at Pinball Expo. First of all, thank you to everybody for the really positive feedback after our first episode. In addition, I would like to thank Ari Jones for encouraging me to talk more about tournament and competitive pinball play. He is a person that does not play tournaments, and when I talk about it on Tri-Multi-Ball, he often would have these different questions. So I thought, who better to talk about that kind of stuff than my pal Raymond. So I'm really glad that you're here too, Raymond. Pleasure to be here. Right? Secondly, I want to thank Stephen Silver for the awesome promo art. And third, I'd like to thank Len Wechter for the awesome intro music. That little ditty gets stuck in my head. and fourth, Tim Lee sucks at pinball. However, he does not suck at editing. Thank you, Tim, for all that you do. Yes. Oh, and Raymond, I'm going to mention this, that Tim Lee has asked me again if you can change the coding on the time machine on Rush. He really wants to use a teeny tiny little ball save. Anything you can do to help him? No. Okay. Do you get a ball save when you hit the well walker on Walking Dead? No It gets you towards your multi-ball You can also just shoot it when it's lit for stuff and it'll feed it to your upper flipper instead of sending it back down at you The more you know Thanks Raymond for settling that little disagreement between Tim Lee and I Although I suppose it's not a disagreement but a little conversation I wanted to put that one to rest. So thanks for answering that. So here we are to chit-chat about the 2022 Flipout Tournament at the Pinball Expo in Chicago that was recently held just a couple weeks ago. I played a couple of the tournaments, and so did you, Raymond. Yeah. There were a total of, well, really five tournaments. One that we were ineligible to play in because we are not children. There was a kids' tournament, and then there were four other tournaments. There was a Battle of the Bells, which was a women's team tournament, a women's tournament that was pinball, a classics tournament, which you played, and a main tournament, which you played. The classics tournament and the main tournament both had this extra fancy thing that I think would be great for all of our listeners to understand what it is. There was this magical certified 20% boost that was associated with both of those tournaments. Can you explain that? Yeah, so the IFPA wanted to give incentive for events that fall into sort of a more prestigious category, they feel, that gives players ample chances to do well, a higher test of skill, they feel. And so there's a certain number of formats that if you follow the rules, they are considered certified, meaning the IFPA approves of them as an official way to run a pinball tournament. That doesn't mean you can still run, like, strikes tournaments and things, but the IFPA doesn't consider them quite as meaningful as one of the certified formats. And the certified formats are things like your standard open qualifying and then a PAPA-style group finals the next day. Or in this case, in order to have certification for the head-to-head format that Expo uses, the requirement was best three out of five. So normally at Expo, it's two out of three, double elimination. But in order to be certified, they had to change it to best three out of five. However, they didn't want the tournament to take twice as long. So they compromised, and they basically said for the top 24, that will be best three out of five, but for all the rounds before that, it's two out of three. And so that basically allowed them to be certified with just a small change, let them keep their giant bracket of Doom format that they know and love, and by being certified, you get a 20% boost to your Whopper value. So whatever the first place would normally get in Whoppers, you will get 20% more times that amount. So that's the benefit of being certified is you get more Whoppers. That's pretty amazing. So if there are 100 Whoppers available that you could take, you could actually take 120?

high confidence · Raymond Davidson describing Space Shuttle mechanics and gate feature

Stern Pinball
company
Kristen Gregoryperson
Luke the Horniacperson
Tom Graffperson
Fox City Pinballorganization
Ari Jonesperson
Molly Oriperson
Mandy Peelperson
Ariel Duttonperson
Rita Stevensonperson
Trevor Projectorganization
James Brooksperson
District 82venue

high · Raymond's explanation of bye structure; Rachel's reaction to dropping into losers bracket: 'Game five. It's brutal because now for the rest of my tournament, I'm playing two out of three, which is so much scarier'

  • ?

    content_signal: Ray Rae Show establishes niche educational podcast for competitive pinball, translating technical IFPA rules into accessible language for non-tournament players

    high · Rachel's statement: 'I'm a person that I learn so much by hearing and so much more by doing...I'm sure there's other listeners that appreciate that, too'

  • ?

    community_signal: Multi-day tournament requires extensive volunteer infrastructure (directors, scorekeepers, streamers, booth staff); hosts dedicate significant time to thanking organizers and volunteers

    high · Rachel's extended gratitude segment: 'People generously volunteer their times. Because of them, the tournaments would not exist'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Stern Pinball provided 40+ machines for main tournament, including Stern Pearl Circuit branded games, demonstrating manufacturer investment in tournament infrastructure and brand visibility

    high · Rachel thanking Stern for 'all the games that they provided. I think it was something around 40-plus games for the main, including those Stern Pearl Circuit stuff'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Classics Finals tournament uses 'bingo card' game selection mechanic where players cross off chosen games and reset after completing all games; creates strategic depth in game selection timing

    high · Raymond explaining: 'We called that getting a bingo because you actually had a sheet that you crossed the games out on...part of the strategy was do I pick games to try to go through my game list or do I defer'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Space Shuttle features open-at-start right-side gate serving as outlane ball save; drop targets reopen gate if closed; spinner affects playfield difficulty through rubber post placement

    high · Raymond detailing Space Shuttle mechanics: 'To open your gate on the right side. It's open at the beginning of every ball, so it's like an outlining ball save...yellow rubber posts, which made the spinner shot smaller'

  • $

    market_signal: IFPA's 20% WPPR boost for certified tournament formats incentivizes organizers to adopt standardized formats (3-of-5 qualifying, PAPA-style finals); creates competitive advantage for participants in certified events

    high · Raymond explaining certification requirements and 20% boost benefit; example given: 100 WPPR becomes 120 in certified tournament

    • 5:21
    Correct. The results haven't posted yet as of this recording, so I'm not sure. I would be impressed if they are out by the time of this recording's release as well. It's a lot of people in that tournament to sort through and make sure everybody plays correctly. Absolutely there is. And talking about, what did you call the item of doom? The bracket. The bracket, yes, the bracket of doom. It is really quite an impressive thing that is on the wall there, and after all the qualifying is done, watching them lay it out and go to town on that is really quite something else to watch. It was very neat last year. I did play in the Open, and it was neat watching my name advance and then suddenly stop.
    6:04
    You know, it is a cool thing. For a person that's never really been competitive about anything in her life until pinball, it was neat to see that, to see that actually, like, that kind of bracket. Were there any changes to the Classics tournament then in order to get that 20% boost? Yeah, so the Classics also switched to best three out of five. Classics had already only taken the top so many people. I believe it was 32 this year.
    6:32
    So all they had to do was just say, okay, everybody in the winner's bracket plays three out of five. If you go to the loser's bracket, then it's just two out of three.
    6:42
    And I think they also needed to make sure they had at least five games of qualifying, but that was no problem because they had six. And I think everything else, they were already fulfilling the requirements. So they just had to go from two out of three to three out of five. Okay. So not too much of a change there. I did not play the classics last year, so I had no idea the format of it. So thank you for going over that. I really do appreciate every time that you answer those questions so forthright and just laying it out in such simple layman's terms. It's very easy to get lost looking at the IFPA rules and not always having that correct content and understanding of the content when reading it. So I'm a person that I learn so much by hearing and so much more by doing. You know, I just can't absorb some dry content. And I'm sure there's other listeners that appreciate that, too. So thanks, Raymond. Yeah, no worries. Yeah. First, before we dig into the different tournaments, I really want to take a moment and give a really big, big thank you to everyone who made the flip-out tournaments possible. First of all, obviously, the Burke family. Thank you for supporting competitive pinball. To Tilt Amusements, a.k.a. Deborah, Trent, and Troy, thank you so much for all of your hard work before, during, and after the tournament. It's such a huge, huge weekend in terms of tournament play and so much stuff to coordinate and do. It's crazy to think about that. In addition, I have to say thank you to all the tournament directors, volunteers, scorekeepers, streaming folks, and everyone who made three days of tournamenting such a fun experience. You know, people generously volunteer their times. Because of them, the tournaments would not exist. There's also serious props to Stern for all the games that they provided. I think it was something around 40-plus games for the main, including those Stern Pearl Circuit stuff. translates to calling trophy toppers and swag. Thank you to James Brooks. We're going to get back to him a little bit later in the show. American Pinball, Jersey Jack Pinball in Chicago or CGC is like to say for the games in the Women's Bank. Thank you to Wayne Rouse and I've not met this other gentleman so maybe you have Raymond but I'm going to say it's Fajnar for the games in the Classics Bank and I'm sorry friend if I destroyed your name there. Yeah, the classic games were really good this year. I was happy to play them. Yeah, I can't wait to hear about them, because I really do love classics, I think, over modern games overall. It's like 65% of me. I think thanks to NeverDreams.com as well for the fancy scorekeeping, and to those who donated monetary or items to all the tournaments. Thanks to all the people that were behind the scenes and went the extra mile to make it such a great event. I think that it's so important that I'm going to give him a little round of applause, Freeman. Woo!
    9:44
    Thanks so much for all of your help. Also, as it seems to be a usual thing, Fox City's pinball streamed the event. I think I got in the booth twice over all of the entire weekend because I was busy doing other stuff other than just competitive pinball because there's a lot of things going on at Expo. And the funniest thing is every time I was actually in the tournament area, I only saw Tom Graff in the booth, like, twice. I also caught him, I think he had Escher move the rig and a couple other people too. So that was kind of neat to see less of Tom and lots of other people jumping into the booth and doing that. You spent some time in the booth, didn't you, Raven? Yeah, I think maybe once I was eliminated on Sunday quite a bit, I was there. I'll have to go back and watch. I heard that there were just actually unbelievable and amazing games. I was seeing players completely blow up at different games. We're talking billions of points. So I'm very excited to go back and watch that so I can learn more as a player. So with all of that said, the first event that we're going to talk about is the Battle of the Bells. The Battle of the Bells is a team-based event that was created by Therese Edwards and Jen Rupert from Columbus, Ohio. It's an interesting event. It's not an IFP-approved format, so there's no points or anything like that, But it's an incredibly social and fun format to play with friends, to coach and encourage each other. There was so much laughter and clapping and applause. There were other players that were doing their qualifying for their open and their main that came over, and they had to witness a little bit what was going on there. Us gals are all having such a great time. So, again, there's also, it's always worth playing any type of tournament because, of course, there's trophies. who doesn't want to go home with some hardware? And the best part is that there's all of the money that was the buy-in, it was the $20 buy-in, all the money went towards a donation to the charity of the winning team's choice. So that's a really amazing way also to run a tournament, I think. So anyways, back to the format. The team event of between two to four players, it was set to three balls. The women's bank was used not only for Battle of the Bells, but also for the Penn Golf Women's Tournament that we'll talk about later. I will just say as a player, it was important for me to play the Battle of the Bells because it gave me a tiny bit of an advantage to pre-play those games before I went to go play my qualifying the next day. So I think that was smart. Right, Raymond? Yeah, makes sense. You've got to manage your time appropriately. That's right. So anyways, we'll get back to the format for the second time or third. Who cares? The team event of two to four players set to three ball. Each player plays one ball in the game or every other ball. So you have to have a minimum of two people on your team, or you can have four or five, I suppose, but just you can't play the same ball back to back. Now, if there was an extra ball, it was played by split flipper by the person who earned the EV and their choice of a teammate. Now, it seems maybe a little nervous for women just to show up and go play something while I don't have a team. The best part of this is because it's a great way to socialize and meet other people. You have the opportunity to get matched up with players from literally all over the world. So are you saying you didn't have to sign up ahead of time with a team? If you were a woman, you could just show up and you could play? That's right. Oh, I didn't know that. I would have told some people that they should go join because that sounds like a lot of fun. Yes. And, again, it was a great way to play pinball, number one, just to play any way you want to play, right? It was a nice way to meet. I met this really great chick from Norway, just people I've never met before that I've known of, Molly Ori. I know her from Fort Wayne, but I've never really had much of a chance to interact with her, so I had an opportunity to do that. It was fun. We laughed. It's just a really cool event to be able to play in. So once you're assigned to a team, you and your teammates can choose a name. for your team. And this is a lot of fun. So here they are. The team names were Three Chicks, Bells and Babes, Bells and Chimes Columbus, which is the team I played for, Get Shit Done, Great Bells of Fire, Talk Tilty to Me, and Wizards of Norway. So that's a lot of fun in itself to be creative that way and come up with a team name on the fly. I played for, like I said, I played for Bells and Chimes Columbus with Rita Stevenson and Therese Edwards with Tish. The top four teams went to finals. Our team ended up playing in finals, and we ended up taking second place. The winners were Sammy Bacon, who I believe was a three-time champ of Battle of the Bells. Who was Sammy? And on her team was also Mandy Peel and Ariel Dutton. Their team was Talk Tilted to Me, which I think was the best team out of all of those. Again, I think the Battle of the Bells, it's just such a fun social event. It is a great way to meet different women. I know that Tish has taken the same tournament style to several different expos that she's gone to. If you're interested in having her, you know, in supporting her to come do this at your local expo, you should look her up on Facebook. She's a great lady. I can go on, like, you know, I went on about Cassidy, our last episode, and I can go on about Tish forever on this one. Yeah. Better stop me. Do you have any questions or thoughts about that? Yeah, so if it was a team event, how did, like, one person win it? Or how does that work? Okay, so the games are played head-to-head. So the seven teams, there's one team that had a bye. So after you go to the final four teams, the top four teams went to finals. And the winning team, they all got trophies. So I think she makes up four trophies on the off chance that a person may have, you know, four people on their team. She just takes a gamble on that. So everybody that won got a trophy, and then together as a group, they got to choose a charity that they wanted to make a donation to, and they chose the Trevor Project. Okay. And then did that team then have, like, a civil war where they play a game against each other to see who's the ultimate bell? You know, I think that they did, and I want to say that Sammy won it, but I'm not certain because at that point I think that I had something else that was going on. I think it might have been Ariel. Was it Ariel? Oh, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I think I saw her with a crown of some sort. Oh, really? I didn't even know that. I had no idea. See, so my field reporting wasn't as complete as what it seemed. That makes sense because she was on the winning team, right, with Sammy and – Well, Ariel, that's awesome. I didn't know that you all had it out then. I was unaware of that because I've never been on the winning team. Not yet. It's the second time that I've come in second place. Oh, so you lost in the finals? Yeah, correct. Which game was that? This time it was on Firepower. Ooh. We'll have a conversation about that game when we talk about the women's tournament, the pin golf experience I had. Gotcha. It's a great game, but there's a whole story there. Let's just say that I struggled for a reason. But, yeah, Battle of the Bells, really great tournament style, so much fun. I encourage everybody to try that format. So the second event was the Classics. Now, Raymond, I do not play this, so this is all you. What would you like to talk about on it? We already know about the change in the style of qualifying or finals. Is that how I want to put that? All right, so the Classics was basically your old-school pump-and-dump where you can buy an entry to play a game, and you can keep playing that game as many times as you want to keep buying entries, and only your best score does anything. And so you basically just want to try to get six games with a high score. So that's how you qualify. And the top 32 play on the Sunday Classics Finals. I believe there was a buy for the top 16, and then another bye for the top eight, maybe. I'm not quite sure how the bye structure worked, but I was able to, I think I came in with one bye, maybe two. I don't remember exactly, but I played on Sunday, and basically it was a three out of five match. My first match was against Kristen Gregory. She was very formidable. I played fast draw first, which I later saw that she actually picked, So she must have liked that game. So I almost walked right into the trap. But unfortunately, she had some pretty bad balls, including on her last ball, which was your double bonus ball. Don't want to get housed on your ball five, unfortunately. So I won the first game. And then I think we kind of went back and forth. I can't remember what she picked next, but I believe I think she picked Knight Rider. and it was a close game, but I think she beat me with like maybe 80 or 90,000 and I had like 70. So pretty solid games in Knight Rider. So then I chose, I believe I, you could, oh, one thing about this format is you can only choose each game once. Okay. So unless, once you chose all the games, then your picks would reset. We called that getting a bingo because you actually had a sheet that you crossed the games out on and once you got them all filled out and then you could get a new sheet. So part of the strategy was do I pick games to try to go through my game list or do I defer and try to save some of my games for when I need them sort of thing. I guess I should talk about how to play the games. So on Fast Draw, that was the first game I played in Classics Finals. There's kind of two ways to play that one. Have you played much Fast Draw? No, I have not. So it's got two big five banks of drop targets on the left and right near your flippers. And then it's got three bumpers in the middle and two little holes below the bumpers, kind of right above the drop targets. And the goal is to try to get the ball to fall into those holes because they'll give you 1,000 points per letter. So there's A, B, C rollovers, and if you have A, B, and C, then each hole is giving you 3,000 points, plus 1,000. I think you always get 1,000. So each hole becomes a 4,000-point shot. Wow. And when the bonus on that game is just 1,000 per bonus advance and max is at, like, 15,000, you really want to try to take advantage of those holes. Unfortunately, there's no way to really, you know, ensure that the ball goes in those holes, so it can be a little frustrating because you just kind of keep throwing it back up top. But my recommendation is there is a little advanced bonus target that you can actually aim at when it's lit, and you can shoot it at that target. It will give you bonus, and it will be in the pop bumper area. So it's a little stand-up up by the pops. So I would go for that if it's lit. If it's not lit, sometimes I actually would shoot the drop targets, and I'd start with the topmost drop targets because they would bank shot sometimes into the hole. And that's kind of how I would play that. I'd either shoot the advanced bonus target or I'd shoot some drop targets if there was not an advanced bonus target lit on the flipper that I was on. So I pulled up the play field and I'm looking at that, and I see the advanced bonus target is kind of like to the upper left-hand corner of the pop bumper kind of on the left-hand side. Right, there's one on each side, but there's two of them. and there's one hidden behind the pop bumper that you can't actually shoot at. So if that's the one that's lit, that's when I would probably just shoot a drop target. Okay. But, yeah, that's kind of the strategy on that one. If you do manage to hit all ten drop targets, meaning five on the left and all five on the right, then what happens is the middle drop target comes up all by itself, and it's worth 5,000 points. and if you hit the middle drop target on both sides, then they'll both come up again. So you can keep getting 5,000s. It's kind of like the wizard mode of the game where every target 5,000, 5,000, 5,000. So that's if you really want to blow it up. So in qualifying, that's kind of maybe the strategy you would go for because if you can do that, you're probably going to get a high score. But it's risky because those drop targets are so close to the flippers and the ball goes so sideways. So you usually don't actually go for that strategy, kind of an all or nothing, because, you know, you've got to hit all ten of them down. Yes. So, yeah, that was fast draw. The middle target is a horseshoe. So that's a good way to remember that on fast draw is that, for me, that's a good way for me to recall that is that it does say on the playing field that that's, you know, the lick for 5,000. But that's actually a nice little tip in there for me to remember. is about that horseshoe. I'm actually glad that I pulled the game up. Okay, go on to the next one. Learning. Yay, Raven. I love to learn. Let's go. Yeah, so then Knight Rider. Basically, I think you're just throwing it up top over and over again to try to get the hole because the hole gives you either 50 points, 1,000 points, and double bonus, 3,000 points, or 5,000 points. Even if you get the 50 points, it still gives you advanced bonus, so you're still getting something for your troubles. So yeah, basically just lock into those two spinner orbit shots and just hit them. There's not really much nuance to it. I have changed, if I do plunge and I get the double bonus out of the hole, I will actually shoot for drop targets because the drop targets give you a bonus advance and I want to make sure I'm getting the most out of my double bonus.
    23:53
    So I'll maybe throw the ball into those drops sometimes but otherwise I'm focusing on just going up top. Does it light your spinner? I have no idea. I've never played the game. There's two spinners. One of them will be lit for 100 to spin, and the other one will not be lit, and it will be 10 points. So spinners aren't really where the points are at. It's just a means to get the ball back to the top. Got it. Just curious. Okay, cool. All right, so then you play Knight Rider. Yeah, that was game two. So I think Kristen took that one. So then I chose Space Shuttle, which is basically you shoot the locks to lock a ball, and then you shoot the middle to start multiball. One thing I found out about Space Shuttle is to open your gate on the right side. It's open at the beginning of every ball, so it's like an outling ball save. But if you use the gate and need to reopen it, you can hit the three drop targets near the spinner, which you can only hit from the right flipper. You have to kind of backhand it. But this particular space shuttle, the spinner didn't spin very well, and there was big yellow rubber posts, which made the spinner shot smaller than it usually is and way harder to hit those drop targets, which raises the spinner value. And the spinner value resets every ball. So it was kind of a multi-ball all day was kind of the way to play this one. At least that's what I did, because once you got multi-ball, you could just keep hitting the center ramp, and it would give you a mystery score anywhere from 50 to 100K. Maybe I haven't played this one. I'm looking at the play field. Some cool art on there. Okay, that's helpful. It reminds me of something else, but... Okay, so multiball all day long is a way to do it. Mm-hmm. That's some neat art. I don't think I've played that one either. Okay, so did you win it, or did Kristen win it? I won Space Shuttle. Okay. So then she chose Little Chief. Yeah. And so the little chief is an EM that basically you want to try to advance your bonus, double your bonus, and collect your bonus. And the way you do that is the lanes up top give you bonus.
    26:06
    Sometimes other shots give you bonus. They'll be lit. It'll say advanced bonus. Yes. And then the hole in the middle gives you double bonus. and the way to light your collect bonus is to get A and B. And A and B are up top and they're also on the lower lanes. So you can actually alley pass or shats one of the letters if you want. It's not the safest thing in the world because those outlanes are so big, but, you know, if you've maxed your bonus and you've got nothing else to do, I would sometimes try to do that to light my collect bonus by shats in. That's interesting. Okay. I have a friend that has that game, so I have played that a little bit, and I may have to fool around with that on his next play. Yeah, and the collect, once you get A and B lights on the right side, it's the shot that goes into the plunger lane, and that will collect your bonus. It will collect it doubled if it's doubled, and it will unlight your double bonus if you have double bonus. So basically, like, it's almost like an extra ball is how I think of it. It basically resets everything, and now you can do it again, but it doesn't use up a ball. Okay. that's kind of what you're going for on that game and I had a pretty rough couple of balls but on my last ball I had I just I came back and I had a really good ball where I got double bonus I maxed my bonus and then I drained I don't think I ever collected the bonus, but I had just enough, like, a thousand points over Kristen to advance. Yeah, that's rough. For her, that's rough, but it's good for you. Yeah. Especially on ball five. You know? Yeah, it was, yeah, I mean, she played well. It was a tough match. But she, that was the winner's bracket. So she went to the loser's bracket, and she actually, I was watching, and her name kept moving along. So I don't know how far she actually made it, but she was still playing for quite a while. After that, I played Luke, the Horniac, in the best of five. And I'm trying to remember exactly. Nothing really notable happened. Like, we both weren't really picking our favorite games because we already had picked them.
    28:18
    And we were both just kind of putting up pretty middling scores. And it came down to game five on Lost World. And unfortunately, for me anyway, Luke had one of the balls on Lost World where you get your 5X bonus and all of a sudden you have 250,000 points. Yes. whereas I struggled and played my heart out but only got like 170,000. I think both balls I drained, like I was one target away from 5x instead of 2x. So I had some rough breaks on Lost World. You can either shoot the holes on that game or you can shoot the targets to get your bonus multiplier. I kind of, it kind of depends. Like, if I'm finding the holes are sticking and are easy to shoot, I might keep shooting them, especially if it kicks it right back to your flipper and you can drop catch and hit it again. But at some point you will probably want to shoot at the targets to try to get your bonus X. I agree with you. Lost World is actually the first game that I purchased, so I'm a fan of the game. And it definitely depends on how the sponsor feeds and how it kicks out, because if it's dangerously close to the bottom of the slipper, I'm just going to go for my multiplier. It just depends on how the game is set up. But generally, I think like the one at District 82 that I play at, I usually go towards my multiplier first on that one. But I agree. You can play it either way. I think it's a fun game. It's a fun game where – this is going to sound so dumb, but it's a fun game of skill. I like games where there's really straightforward. One, two, three. That's why I like classic games so much, I think. simple things. Here are the things, this is all you have to do, you just have to do these few things to execute in order to gain a lot of points. And I find like for my brain, sometimes that's just easier than having to stack all this stuff in my head as you have to with modern games. Yeah, I find Lost World to be kind of frustrating because you'll try to shoot a target and miss it, or you'll have a lot of bonus but you'll only have, you'll have one X and someone else will have like three slingshots that hit the right targets, and all of a sudden they have 5x. So it's kind of annoying in that sense, but, you know, it's the same for everybody. And like you said, it's not like there's any tricks or anything. It's just who can bat the ball around the longest and make the shots when they matter. That's right. And sometimes the game just gives it to a person. It gives, you know, sometimes the ball will shoot it in the scoop when you need it the most. It'll just, you know, reflex off a sling into the scoop. I love it when that happens. It's like a free ball settling. You're like, oh, okay, all right. Oh, thank you, game. We are friends. Thank you. I won't take last on this game. No, thank you. No, I feel that too. Okay, so you lost on Lost World. Yeah, so unfortunately that sent me into the loser's bracket. Yeah, game five. It's brutal because now for the rest of my tournament, I'm playing two out of three, which is so much scarier than three out of five. I agree. So that was kind of a bummer. I was kind of bummed about that. I wish I could have taken advantage of, you know, when I was in the three out of five bracket, but that's how it went. So then I believe I played, I can't remember. There's no log of this anywhere either. No, it's okay. You played some pinball. I might have actually had to, I think I had to wait forever because Jared August was in the loser's bracket and he was also in the finals for Maine. So he could only play his matches in between balls of his Maine tournament. So he was bouncing back and forth like crazy. But I think eventually when it finally caught up, I think I played Josh Sharp or maybe Zach Sharp. I played one of the Sharps. I ended up playing both of them like back to back but I think so I played Josh and he actually he crushed fast draw where on one ball he got like he like rolled the game and I was just kind of standing there like well at least I know what to do I need to just shoot these drop targets and go for the 5000s since it's the only way I'm going to catch up unfortunately I did not catch up I ended up getting like 80,000 or something Man, that's hard. It's so hard facing that when you know a player, after a player has just blown up the game on ball one. It's almost like, do you go up and you really want to shoot your ball? Yeah, so that was a bummer, but then I'm trying to remember which other game we played. I know what the final game was. I don't remember what our second game was, but I must have won it because the game three was... was I had to choose. I could either choose 8-Ball Deluxe or Abracadabra.
    33:21
    And I had been playing that Abracadabra, like, over and over again during qualifying because I just couldn't get a score on it. And so I was learning a lot about it during qualifying. I learned how weak the flippers were, how you can't really make certain shots that you think you could, and how you kind of have to react a certain way. and also just like that the pop bumpers are worth a thousand a pop, and that sometimes is enough to get a good score. So I actually, it's funny because 8-Ball Deluxe, I would say, is probably a more skillful game, and Abracadabra is more random and crazy. And I had gotten $3 million on 8-Ball Deluxe in qualifying, but as, you know, my do-or-die game, I didn't want to go out in three balls on 8-Ball Deluxe because some of those solid states, the balls can just drain so fast, and you only get three of them. And especially in 8-Ball Deluxe, where if you have a good ball one, your opponent is, like, totally screwed because you have all those balls carried over from ball to ball. So I was just like, I don't want to be in that situation where Josh blows it up, I get a house ball, and now I'm behind the 8-Ball, literally, you know. Right, right. So I was like, you know what, we're going to play Abracadabra. And, well, I had to go first since I picked it, and it was a single-player game.
    34:47
    And I kid you not, my first three balls, no flips, none. No kidding. Yeah, and I was just like, oh, God, this is what I deserve for picking this, right? Were they outlying drains or center drains? They were all center drains, just down the middle. And so I'm plunging ball four. I'm just like okay remember and remember in qualifying like we can do this just just I gotta try you know and I kind of relaxed a little bit but not too much and I was just like all right here we go and then I kept fighting and fighting and fighting and I had the best ball four of like all time where I got I got like 70,000 points on one ball that's amazing it was it was insane and then I think I got another 18,000 on ball five. And so I had like 88,000. Josh was like, holy crap. Like, oh my God. So he went up. He had to find the point somewheres, right? He found the ball four, thank goodness. Yeah. And so my strategy on Abracadabra was just keep the ball moving because that one was so sluggish that it was hard to actually aim at the correct targets. You can aim at the bottom targets, but you couldn't aim anywhere past the, like, lower two targets. So, basically, just keep flipping the ball around to keep it up, hit pop bumpers when they're lit, and kind of taking advantage of, like, ski pass, and then kind of back flip the ball, and just kind of, you had to do creative ways to get the ball to actually go up. So, to get it ready, to have enough speed on the ball to get it back up. Yeah. So, I just kept that game moving. Josh tried. He put up like 48,000, 50,000. I was getting a little worried that he was going to be able to come back after I put up such a huge score, but alas, he did not. That was a really sweet win considering I started with three house balls. Oh my goodness, Raymond.
    36:53
    That's just unbelievable. When you have three house balls in a row, I've had it happen in one game in tournament play before and I went outside and I did scream. I warned everybody outside I was going to scream. And then I did because I was so frustrated because what did I learn? It's like you learn something from that, though, is that, oh, yeah, I can remind myself that I know what I need to do on the game, and after my qualifying and all of that stuff, I know how this game plays, and you went out and did the thing. So that's really impressive, in my opinion, for you to be able to come back from three really big – I mean, this is just not your down-the-street league. This is actually a pretty big tournament. so, you know, having that happen, that's really, that would be so hard on me. I don't know how you recovered from that and played so well. Oh, thank you. Yeah, it was, I was really happy with that win because, you know, especially if you go out in the winners and then immediately go out in the losers, like, oh, I feel so bad. So just getting that one win made me feel good. So then I played, I think I played Mike Weinberg, who was actually the number one qualifier in Classics. So he picked all his own games. But unfortunately, you know, he picked Lost World and got like 30,000 or 35,000, just a whole lot of nothing. But I also had nothing going into Ball 3. So I think I needed to go from like 22,000 to like 35,000 on Ball 3. Like I needed just like anything. thing. And so in that case, I just went for the holes because I knew if I could just shoot three or four of them, I would be good. And so I did. I managed to pass him, beat him on Lost World. And then also on, I think Fast Draw was the other game we played. Okay. I had a really good ball of Fast Draw on one of my balls where it just didn't seem to die. Like no matter what, the ball just wouldn't drain. It was like one of those, you got to take advantage of those momentums when you have that momentum going. Just kind of roll with it and smile and keep just ripping shots. And enjoy the moment. So after that, I got to play Zach Sharp, and he picked some game. I let him pick Space Shuttle, and he just had a very bad game, Space Shuttle. The flippers were also getting weak. He drained a couple times going for the middle, and it went down the middle. because if it goes halfway up that ramp, it just goes straight down. Yes. So I got lucky, I feel, because he just never got anything going. So I didn't really need a whole lot. I just needed to not drain immediately in each of my games. So that was a nice win there. And then I think I faced the final boss of Jeff Teolis.
    39:43
    The final boss. Yeah. Yeah, because I knew if I won against Jeff, I'd be in the top four. I let him pick Space Shuttle, and he put up like 1.7 million, get this, with no multiball. What? Yeah, he actually refused to play multiball because the flippers were getting weak, and he knew how dangerous that center ramp was, and he knew that he could just keep hitting the spinner to just get points on the board, and that's what he did. he just kept hitting the spinner over and over and over and over and over and over again. And I was like, wow. So he put up 1.7 million. I was coming back on ball three. I had about 900,000 in multi-ball, and then I had like a double drain, choo-choo train at the right out lane. That was sad.
    40:33
    A double train, choo-choo train. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of exactly how that happened. So he won the first game, and then I don't remember if we went to a game three or if I just lost. I think I just lost the next game, which was Stargazer, which I usually like Stargazer, but that one had the tightest tilt ever, and it just kind of psyched me out. And I just had a couple of bad drains on my last ball. I didn't need – so actually I was ahead of Jeff after my ball two, and he was player one. And so he needed to pass me, and he did. So now it was back on me. And I just needed, like, 150,000 points. And I actually got the ball trapped. I ripped my spinner, and it just popped straight down the middle after I hit my spinner. So it was just really nothing I could do on that one.
    41:28
    I think my mistake there was I should have chosen 8-Ball Deluxe instead of going second because I was hoping Jeff would pick 8-Ball Deluxe, but I shouldn't have hoped. I should have just made it happen. But, you know, I got greedy. I was like, maybe I was counting on him to pick 8-Ball Deluxe, but he did not. He did not. Well, shame on Jeff. Well, sometimes that's just it. It's also pinball is just not playing. There's also other strategy that's being involved here.
    41:59
    Yeah. And for Stargazer, by the way, My strategy on that was shoot drop targets to get bonus X because it carries throughout the whole game. Getting the rollovers near your flippers, that will spot you bonus and also light your spinners and then just always hit spinners when they're lit. But if you can get a big bonus on ball one, don't tilt balls two or three because it will carry all the way. Yes. That is a good thing for me to know. Thank you. Because I do have a tendency to tilt at the most inopportune times. So, Gerard Tilts. Okay, noted. I've not played that game either, so look forward to trying out that method as well. So, Jeff won. Yeah. Yep. So, he's in the final four. I got fifth overall, which is sad for not getting any hardware, but still great for Whopper Hall. So, I will probably still get a good amount of Whoppers for being fifth. And not a bad way to finish the loser's bracket, right? Right. Yeah. What is the loser's bracket? The winners were Steve Bowden took first. Gregory Kennedy took second, Neil Graff took third, and Jeff Teos took fourth, and Raymond Davidson took fifth. So congrats, Raymond, to you. That's a hard fight that you had to go through with quite a few people that you had to knock out. Well done. Thank you. Yeah, it was a good day of pinball. Well, good weekend because, you know, you had to qualify all weekend and then finals.
    43:26
    Yeah, I was pretty happy with it. Me too. So this actually leads into a good question for you, because we talked just a little bit about that, about when you have those three house falls, you know, about what goes on through your mind. It's a question that I've had a couple people suggest that I talk to you about. And you and I have talked a little bit about this before, is how do you deal with your nerves in that situation? You know, there's this Zen game of just to play the game. But how do you do that? How do you keep yourself calm in that moment? Yeah, it's tough because if you're too calm, I find that also backfires sometimes where you don't save the ball when you could have. So I just focus on what I want to happen. Then I find the more focused I am on achieving the goals, the less panicked I am and more, you know, I recognize like, oh, I can do a dead pass because I want the ball in this flipper because I want to hit this. Whereas if I don't have a clear focus, I might just flip it away because I don't have my next move planned out, you know? Yes. So focusing on the objectives and the rules helps me a lot because it becomes more of you're traversing this roadmap as opposed to you're fighting gravity and a steel ball. And it's like, yeah, yeah, you have to be ready to save the ball when it goes wrong. but having that that roadmap ahead of you helps you stay focused and calm and you kind of remember sometimes I have to remind myself oh I can drop catch on this I can dead pass this um and just don't be don't be worried about the ball draining it's like it will drain when it drains sometimes sooner than you want it to right yes absolutely I think about that in kind of it too about is the ball going to dead slip over or can I catch it? And that's when I feel like I'm panicked in my head. That's what I tell myself. I'm like, I'm thinking about that. What's, what's the, what is the ball going to do next or can I anticipate it? And that's kind of, I guess, the same as to, you know, focusing on the rules or focusing on what the next objective is. And that does seem to help me. The other thing is listening to music when I play, like when I'm really in the competitive Rachel zone, I got the gear on and the shoes and, you know, the whole thing. But when I put earbuds in and listen to music, sometimes that helps me. It just calms me down. Like it's a reassuring, you know, soothing blanket I've now put on myself that calms my inner self. But that's a great answer, Raymond. Just having that roadmap ahead of you is a good way to achieve that kind of zen. The other question I had, I was recently asked is, would you rather set the big score in a game or chase down you know the high score yeah so I've evolved on this quite a bit I always loved going second I always thought of myself as someone that could always come back no matter what the deficit like I can use my rules knowledge to try to get the points I need but I'm starting to find in actual execution that I blow it right often I get so close and it's so frustrating when you're behind and the pressure is on you that it almost doesn't matter as much as I thought it would going second. But I still like going second for the opposite reason of if I can have a good starting point and I'm ahead of player one, that puts the pressure on player one really badly because not only are they behind me, but they don't know what I'm going to do on my ball. So they have to not only pass me, but they've got to go even further past me. So I still like going second for that aspect, but I never actually – it's not enjoyable chasing when you're behind, regardless of if you're player one or player two. I agree. I agree with that. Yeah, it's almost irrelevant in that aspect. You really just want to blow up the game and don't focus too much on what your opponent's doing. even though I fall into that a lot because I'll feel good about myself if I'm ahead of my opponent and I'll feel bad if I've got a lower score than them. But in the grand scheme of things, just focus on your objectives, blow up the game, the scores will land where they land. And sometimes you do have to think about strategy, like on fast draw, if you know you're behind a lot, you will change your strategy. But other than that, don't panic, don't let it get to you. So I had a really good comeback against Jared. It was on camera in the main that was on Jurassic Park. So that one felt really good. Okay. But then I also had one where I fell four million short of Escher, and that one felt really bad. All right. Well, we're going to get to those.
    48:33
    I agree. I think it's neither nor. I'd much rather be player three in a four-player group because I know the work that I have to do, and I only have to wait for one more person to play. So I'm not sitting on pins and needles for player four. Right. Yeah, because going first, I agree. Going first and having to wait and sweat it out for three players, I don't like that. Like that, uh-huh. I like to know things as soon as possible. Yeah. And if it's head-to-head, if it's head-to-head, I don't care if I go first or second. Yeah, I agree. It doesn't matter. I'm just going to go play my game and not focus on their game. And that actually, you've given me that advice before, Raymond, is just focus on your own game. And I think about that. I'm like, what am I doing? Who cares? I hope these people have a good game, too. But I do hope I play a little bit better, you know. So it comes back to you. So, all right, interesting. So we're on to event number three, which is the women's tournament, which was pin golf. I'm not one, Raymond, I'm kind of a humble person. and I'm not one to brag or even use that word or talk much about the things that I do. But I have the opportunity to do something really, really neat for Expo for the women's tournament. Deborah Tallman approached me and asked if I would have Ladies Slip Wisconsin sponsor the women's event.
    49:55
    I felt super honored to do that. I was able to bring $1,500 into the women's purse prize. I was able to bring some keychains and stickers for all the women. I really hope that I can do this again next year. I'm going to try to challenge myself to fundraise $3,000 for next year. Every cent that I was able to bring in this year went directly into the purse prize for the women. I know, because of Running Ladies of Wisconsin, that it takes time and money to make tournaments happen. So I really want to say thanks to the special sponsors that helped me to reach that goal. I also want to thank Mike from Lizard's World, and I believe Jack Danger also helped to provide prize money for the women's tournament, so thank you. That's just cool, being able to be a sponsor of anything. I don't know, Raymond. Raymond, I've been doing this, you know, Ladies of Wisconsin's Traveling Pinball Tournament Series, and I really enjoy doing that. My whole goal is just to get more women into playing pinball. So having the honor to be asked to do something to help women's pinball on a bigger scale, that was pretty neat for me. Anyway. Yeah, it's awesome. It was pretty awesome. Okay, so the women's tournament, the pinball, the qualifying was $25 per card, endless entries. The top six team would go on to finals. It was set for nine holes, and it was set to five balls. The goal was to get, you know, nine strokes, really, if you can get a hole in one in every game. The qualifying was objective-based, and the finals was point-based.
    51:35
    The objectives, so I played it. There were a couple games that were new-ish to me or ones I had not played before. Cactus Canyon, Toy Story 4 Valhalla, and October Crust. I did a smart thing here, Raymond, because I knew those games were going to be in it. I looked at the objectives, and then I went back out into the expo floor, and I found the games, or I found people, and I talked about the games, and I played them. I thought that was a smart way to do it. You know, so I could have just gone up and played it and tried to figure it out. Yeah, I mean, why waste the money playing it when you can play for free first? Heck, yeah. So I think that was a smart way to do it. So for me, I ended up, I played one card. Tish, Therese Edwards, she had not pinned golf yet either, so we did it together, which was a lot of fun. I was able to get three holes in one in a row, got 20 points, and I placed ninth. And I figured, oh, that's good enough for top 16. I'm just going to do the one card, whatever. I went along Friday night, and I had fun with my friends, and I played Battle of the Bells later in the day. It was fun. And Saturday morning I got up and I went to Pinball Olympics. And so I didn't think I was going to play another card. We'll just toss the dice and see how it goes. I still didn't beat it for finals because I wanted to support. What I do have to say about during the qualifying is that the last game was firepower. Now, this game was brought forward by James Brooks. Raymond, he still may be crying because I kept breaking his game. I felt so bad the right flipper kept getting stuck in the up position and I honestly don't know if it was because how I was playing the game was a little bit probably more I can admit that probably a little bit more forced than I need to but it's just kind of my style of playing how my hand comes down I'm not going to apologize for the way I play pinball but it happened to another player but it mainly happened to me so I don't know if I didn't press the flipper button in properly or what, but it just kept getting stuck in the upright position. I'd take my hand off the button, and there it was. It was the last game in pin golf, and with it set to ball five, or to five balls, I ended up taking a four par on it. I will tell you that I struggled because I was getting upset with myself as a player, because I wasn't trying to cheer the game up, and it happened, I think, I think it happened all four balls that I played. Oh, no. And I was the only person to happened to. And I kind of felt like I was going to lose my shit a little bit each time that it happened. Because, you know, when you're trying to qualify and trying to stay in the zone, and I already had a pretty good card that I was going to submit as a last game, I was kind of stressed out about it. But right here is where I need to give a big shout out to Wayne Rouse. Every time I messed up the game, Wayne, who was the women's TD, he was so patient with me, he came over, we opened the game, he put the ball back into the shooter rod because I usually have the ball caught on the flipper He gave me I think I even ended up with a compensation ball because the game broke you know broke I wasn't able to catch the ball on the left or the right. And he was just, he just gave me so much encouragement to stick with the game. Wayne, he was a super volunteer that weekend. Like I said, he was the main TD for the women's tournament. And if he wasn't stuck behind his table, he was off fixing games, including that space shuttle. I know that he tried a couple of times to get over there and work on that game. He really is a rock star in the pinball world. Louisville, that area, you are so lucky to have Wayne. Wayne with an H, Wayne. He's my buddy. Anyways, the qualifying was all day Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
    55:25
    I should tell you a little bit about the objectives, maybe about the qualifying, right? Yeah, so you had to play all nine games, so you couldn't avoid any of them. That's correct. And so if I had a junk card, no, Tish, she did not have a great nine holes. So she went and did play a second card. It's a pump and dump. You know, you can do as many as you want. So the nine games was Cactus Canyon. The first objective was to save Polly. And that's just shooting the ball up the middle. On Toy Story 4, it was you need to complete the Woody spinner and the Bull Pete spinner to start your super spinners. And it's really cute because in the upper right-hand corner of the display, once you have enough spins, Bullpeep and Woody come together, and there's, like, a little heart. So that was a cool way to, like, you know, notice you got your super spinner and did the thing. So that, again, I had not played that game before. Oh, a couple games on it before, but not much because it's not local to me. So I went on the floor at Expo and was able to play the game, and that helped me immensely. The third game was Jurassic Park, and you had to spell C-H-A for chaos. I actually think that was kind of an easy objective. I know the A and the O can be tight shots, but whatever. I was able to still do that in one ball. I love Jurassic Park. I find that game to be a lot of fun. The fourth was Mandalorian. I struggled with this game over and over, and we'll talk about that. But the goal was to start a mission, which I like to just backhand with Scoop. Do you like to start missing during the ramp thing, Raymond, or do you just backhand the scoop? If I have the ball on the left flipper, just backhand the scoop. If I have the ball on the right flipper, I might actually try to backhand the right ramp. Okay. And then the fifth game was a Guardian's Pro, and that was easy, start Groot or Orb Multi-Ball. The sixth game was Dead Fool. I want to say it was a Pro. And that was the start, the first dazzler mode, which is the left loop. The seventh game was Legends of Valhalla, and that was to start a Tier 2 battle mode, which I had no idea how to do that, and Raymond, you helped me with that.
    57:31
    Oktoberfest was to collect five steins, and I think Dave Brennan is the one that ultimately helped me with that. Wow, yeah, I don't know much about, I wouldn't even know how to do that.
    57:42
    On Legends, yeah, I had just recently learned myself, because I was playing in the World Cup that was entirely on Legends of Valhalla games. Oh, well, we'll have to talk about that, too. And then the final game was firepower, where all you had to do was just light the spinner, and I think it was just completing the drops. That's all you have to do, right, and light your spinner. So, and I struggled so hard to have the power, and I kept breaking it. But anyways, so I qualified on Friday. On Saturday morning, I had slipped to about 12th or so, and by the time I got back from Pinball Olympics on Saturday afternoon, I held on to 15th. So I qualified to play that night, which was awesome. I got a message from Cassidy on Saturday morning that she had arrived at Expo. You know we're buddies, District 82 gals, right? She ended up playing Monk Hard like I did, although she had 14 points over nine holes. She had six hole-in-ones and ended up winning the hole-in-one bounty, which I think was $100 in $2 bills. That was really neat. Every one of the finals received a $2 bill for each hole-in-one they got qualifying. Oh, wow. Yeah. So that immediately put Cassidy in first place. So that was cool. It was nice because being here in Wisconsin, I'm one of the more, I have the ability to travel more than some of the other, my lead ladies and so forth. So it's always nice when I have a familiar, you know, even how it is. It's so nice when you have one of your own people, you know, they're there. Yeah, someone in the hometown with you. That's right, exactly. So we ended up with 20 women in the finals as we had several times 16th place. Now, generally, if it was my tournament, I would make all the women that tied in 16th play into a one-game playoff, but I wasn't the TD here. So it was really fine by me that, I mean, what am I going to say anyway, that we ended up basically having one more round of finals is what it ended up being, which was okay overall. So the finals was a three-bait of games, a score objective, and the final two in each group would advance. I find a score-based pinball to be harder, but I like that style better than an objective-based. What about you, Raymond? Yeah, I think score is easier to verify for sure, but also there's many different ways to get the score. so you kind of it's more interesting than just having to do the one thing and then like if you don't either do it or you don't there's not really any opportunity to kind of decide like should I shoot this should I not shoot this like it's pretty cut and dry right so I could see depending on your preference you know if you like the classic games where you don't have to make those decisions all the time and you just focus on doing the one thing then the goal base you know would be your jam, whereas if you like having different ways to get points, that adds another wrench into things of decision-making. For sure. I'd agree with that, too. I think it really depends on the game. Either way, it was fun. I've only played a couple of pinball tournaments, so it was fun being able to play the qualifying and the finals in two different ways. So in my first group, it was Rebecca Hinsdale, Mandy Peel, myself, and Bree Reynolds. I can't recall all the games that we played, but I know that I advanced.
    61:08
    You know, I'm just telling you, it was a lot of pinball. It started at 7 o'clock at night, and the tournament ended at 2 in the morning. So it was a lot of pinball, so my memory about some of the earlier games isn't so great. But anyway, so I was able to advance into the quarterfinals, and Cassidy had also won. She came into my group. So now we ended up getting into three-player groups because we had this weird number of people, and then we had taking that top two from each group. We started out with five groups, and then it put us down to three groups. Oh, weird. Yeah, because it started with 20 finalists, which is kind of a weird number. Yes, it was a bonkers number. So it put us in two groups of three and a group of four.
    61:50
    Then Cassie and I were able to knock Bree out in the quarterfinals. So we move on to the semifinals. I'm thinking this is great. It was funny because Cassie and I took a picture before we started, and we took pictures in the nights, like the before and after, you know. It was quite a bit of pinball. We had so much fun together. Such great ladies to play with, too. So we moved into the semifinals. This is where things get interesting.
    62:15
    Cassie and myself, because we're traveling now along together, and Deborah Tallman. Now, again, you used this term last time on our last episode, like the death match. And let me tell you, playing with Rebecca Hinsdale and Mandy Peel and Bremont Reynolds and Deborah Tallman, it was like, to me, every match there was a death match because I know what great players these ladies are and how they can just turn it on. So I was very nervous, that whole thing. I didn't even think I was going to qualify in finals, to be quite honest. Let's see. So we get to the semifinals. Let's see. As the main finals were done for the night, the ladies' finals actually got streamed. So you can actually go back and look at Fox News Pinball and take a look at that and watch my game of Mandalorian. I went back and watched it today in preparation of our podcast. Let me tell you, Raymond, it was very hard for me to watch. I'll get to it. Skip ahead. Do you ever go back and watch yourself? That's a good question.
    63:16
    Usually not. I will sometimes if I do something well. I want to see the reaction of people. Sure, for sure. Okay, so we pick up. We're in a three-bank between Debra, Cassidy, and I. We pick up with Mandalorian. Cassidy and I could not execute getting the scoring on that. And Mandalorian, to get a hole in one, was 80 million maybe. Oh, they changed it up in finals where you had new points? Yes, his objective score. So you had to get 80 million. Oh, wow. 80 is a weird number on Mandalorian. I feel like you either get nothing or you, yeah. I struggled every single time I played that game, every single time. And it's a bro, Mandalorian, that was there. I guess maybe I'm used to playing it premium. I don't think the shots are any different, but I don't know. I have my thoughts about that game. I like playing it, but it doesn't like me. Actually, if it's a pro, I would actually probably, I think jetpack is probably the easiest way to get 80 million. The premium is harder because the super jackpot is on the U-turn with the ramp, and it's harder to hit. But on a pro, the U-turn, it's easier to make. So I would probably think jetpack multiball, which usually you don't really want. But if you only need 80 million, and you save your flamethrower until after the multiball is done, You basically hold it down and shoot the super jackpot, and that's like a guaranteed 50 million in that one shot. Well, I'm going to use that advice the next time I have to play it, which hopefully is not for a while.
    64:52
    I know that's really good advice. Thank you. So Cassie and I could not execute the mission, and Debra took the game. So then we went on and moved to Valhalla, and I was able to get a hole in three. I felt like I was able to finally figure out that game. That one you can really nudge around quite a bit. That's one thing about me that's good and bad. Once I know that a game can move, I like to take advantage of that. In terms of, hey, if I didn't tilt it and I didn't damage the game, I'm okay, right? But I also get nervous because these are also brand new games, like out-of-the-box kind of games, too. I don't want to, you know what I'm saying, Raymond? Yeah, I mean, they're industrial strength machines. I wouldn't be too worried unless you're doing death saves. No, I don't even know how to do a death save. And I don't want to know how to do a death save because I don't want to put that, you know, even as a possibility. So anyways, so that was okay. And then we get to Guardians of the Galaxy, a pro. And this is where things kind of get weird and interesting. I was player one, Cassian was two, Debra was three. And the goal was 45 million, which really isn't hard if you just, you know, go for a multi-ball, you know, in a mode. You're going to be fine. So at the end of Debra's first ball, she just totally spaced out, went back up to the game, and she plunged my ball as player one. You can see her reaction on stream. And when I talked to her later, she just qualified herself. And in that game, she had to take the full max of points, which was 10. What happened? She said that she just kind of spaced out. She's like, I just thought I was playing. For whatever reason, I thought I was playing my own game, and I had to go back up and start my next ball. And I think that it's just, it could also be a combination of Deborah being a superwoman and doing all the things. Oh, yeah, she had a lot going on.
    66:41
    Constantly coming up to her. She was, I mean, incredible. And if that wasn't like an exhaustion-fueled misplunge, I don't know what was. Because if you look at her reaction on stream, which, again, I watched today, she was as shocked as the rest of us. So now what happened, though, is I'm sitting there behind her when she goes up to plunge my ball, and Cassidy's dad Rick is still there and he's like Rachel she plunged your ball so I go up to the game and you know what I did is I tripped over the ball because she the ball save was still on so now I know that Debra had disqualified herself in the game but did I do the right thing here did I make a mistake of taking over the ball that Debra had or should I just take a compensation ball I felt like it was a natural thing for me just go grab that ball what would you do Raymond I still reach the objective. I would probably, especially in, yeah, in pin golf format, hmm. I'd probably, just so I don't mess up my game state, I'd probably try to get the ball under. I think messing up your game state with compensation balls can be kind of mess you up. Yes, you can lose your progress, lose your carryover bonus and everything else too, right? Yeah. However, I think it's a gamble because if you run up to the machine and have hands-on flippers and the TD sees you and you drain, then you don't get a comp ball. So if, you know, you got to, you're basically deeming that you have taken control of the situation. And once you have made that choice, that is binding. So you can't go to try to take control, drain, and then ask for a comp ball, or else you're kind of in a little shady.
    68:28
    So it can be risky because you don't get a skill shot, right? If there's a game where – and they'll use up all your ball save. So that's the downside. So it's really up to you. Do you want to take control and keep your game state but not get full control over the beginning of your ball, or would you rather have a comp ball? So I think that's totally up to you to decide. And, again, you know, this is like we're playing, like, after midnight. It had been a very long day, and I just, you know, I wasn't sure of the best thing to do there. I mean, I got the objective, no problem. The ball stay was on, and I think maybe the ball stay was off. Then maybe we would have asked for the comp ball. But I was just so tired myself that I didn't even know what the right thing to do was. The main thing is that I reached the objective. But the horrible thing is that Debra disqualified herself. But because of that, because of that, I was able to move on to finals. Wow. Yes. So it was a very good and bad moment in pinball, right? I feel bad because that happened, and I wasn't able to get up, because I've almost punched other people's balls. You know, when you play, like when I play with friends, you know, if we're playing even in a tournament, depending on how we're playing in the tournament, I suppose, we don't really want, we don't try to let each other play out of order, because it does screw everything up, you know, and still should be hopefully a friendly thing. But I do understand as the farther you get competitively, people are less likely to say that. But if I would have had the opportunity to say whatever, I would have. So the thanks for helping me boost myself into finals, I guess. Weird situation, right? Yeah, it happens, you know. It happens. I had a similar situation. I made it to the Popeye World Championship finals because someone got sick. and basically I didn't have to beat them anymore. So it was like a free pass and it felt weird. It feels weird. But I know I'm a good player and I do deserve to be there, even though I might not have had the best games, you know.
    70:29
    So I moved on to the finals, the final four, with Cassidy, of course, and Sammy Bacon and Rebecca, a.k.a. Bex Bex Rex, or also for the day, she was known as Scott Tenisi, or she cosplayed like Scott Tenisi for the day. If you've not seen pictures of her dressed up like Scott Tenisi, Maven, you need to look at it. I've seen them. I saw her in person. Yeah, it was impressive.
    70:55
    It was amazing. Anyway, so the four of us moved on to finals. It was the first time I've ever played pinball at almost 2 in the morning on stream. That was a really surreal moment for me as Rachel. It was such a really awesome group of ladies to be able to play with. The final three games were Guardians of the Galaxy, Mandalorian, and Deadpool. So, in that order, we played them. Guardians of the Galaxy, no problem. I went up, and I actually accidentally had two orb multiballs locked lit. Just accidentally popped the ball in there. So I figured, okay, I have my third, like, I'm one shot away or two shots away from my third. So I'm like, we'll just take that instead of working towards Groot. I think I actually picked, like, Sibling Rivalry as my starting mode. Now, is there an argument there that I should just start a closed quest? I suppose. But I'm like, I don't know. I'm going to play the game like I normally play it. I normally choose that mode as a longer playing mode because when I try to bring Groot into it, it takes me, it feels like, forever to get Groot going. And so sometimes putting the ball back in the scoop to start another mode, I feel like it's easier for me if I get group done fast enough, I got a long mode running, if that makes any sense. Yeah, no, that's a good mode to stack with multiball, especially if you get it upgraded. Same with podchase. Yes, exactly. Same as podchase, right. So it's usually one or the other. And so I did not have a terrible old multiball, whatever. So I ended up being able to restart my mode. I started a new mode. I didn't know what I picked, and I was able to start my multiball, and I got a hole in one. So that wasn't awesome. You know, once I got the jackpot or whatever, I just stopped playing. Cool. I'm like, this is great. Here we are in finals. I don't even know what I'm doing up at this time of night playing pinball, but I'm having a great time. So let me move on to Mandalorian.
    72:48
    I was so hard for me to watch the stream today, but I forced myself to do it because I wanted to figure out what went wrong. I could not hit the bottom score in order to get 9 points was 48 million points couldn't even get that seems high and it was 80 million was the whole one I couldn't even get the base score 48 million to get 9 to take a 9 instead of a 10 wait, that doesn't seem right is it really only half? I thought you needed 10% of the score to get a 9 I don't know. So you'd go $8 million.
    73:28
    I don't know. I did not run the tournament. Oh, wow. And I've never run pin golf, so I don't know. I don't know what they have. Yeah, that's brutal. If you have to get half of the score in order to not get a 10? More than half the score is $48 million. Wow.
    73:45
    $80 million would have been a whole one. So I think after the first three balls, all the other ladies had achieved the objective, and I had to play ball four and I had to play ball five.
    73:59
    And I think I might have intentionally tilted on my ball five because I was frustrated. So, way back and looking at it today, I'm like, okay, what went wrong? And not in a bad way, just like what can we learn from here? One, I think I was at the point of exhaustion and so tired and I couldn't connect the dots and also Mandalorian isn't my game to begin with in that bank. and I knew I had struggled on it earlier and all these things. And I will tell you, between ball four and ball five, I turned around and looked at Neil Graff. I looked at Tom Graff and Neil Graff, a couple of people still there watching the finals, and I looked at Tom, and Tom says to me, he says, Rachel, mode, multi-ball. I look at Tom, I'm like, yes, I know.
    74:43
    But it was so bad, I couldn't connect the dots. So that was very frustrating. Would you not ever start the Razorcrest up the middle? I did. I started it, and I had a horrible multi-ball. I made it very small. So I just couldn't connect the dots the rest of the game. And so because I had to take a 10 on there, I knew I was going to take fourth place out of the top four. Unfortunately, on Mando, you really need to know kind of all the scoring nuances, or else you will just get, like, zero points. So you could have – there could have been a number of things that went wrong. You could have accidentally played jetpack multiball and then not gotten the super at the end of it because you get no jackpots during the multiball. It's all at the end when you're down to one ball and you have to hit the super. So if you double drained out of that multiball, you'd get nothing. So that could have happened. Also, during multiball, you want to hit those 2x targets on the right. Really focus on hitting some jackpots. Also, make sure to use your flamethrower at the appropriate time. and just these little rule nuances can definitely make or break your points. I never would have thought of using my flamethrower to get my, to use it with my super jackpot. I would never have thought about that, and that's really a great piece of advice. Yeah, only for jetpack, you want to save it until after the multiball, but for all the other two multiballs, you want to use right at the beginning. Right away, okay. And so I thought about that, too, and I also thought about maybe I was just doing a lot of panic flipping during the game. But then when I did go back and look at the multiball, I did the right thing. I caught balls. I trapped balls. And I was doing the right thing there. I just couldn't execute. And that's okay. So, I wasn't even supposed to be the final four to begin with, Raymond. So I was just so happy to be there, right? So everybody had great games on it, and we moved to Deadpool. I love Deadpool. I know you enjoy that game, too. I actually watched you stream that game, so sometimes when I'm playing... It's funny. Sometimes when I'm playing games, I think about other people playing games. I'm watching them playing games.
    76:46
    Do you ever do that? I don't know. But Deadpool, so that was no problem. That was, I think, 35, I think it was 30 million. I got 30 million points, which really isn't that hard, I thought, on Deadpool. That seems way easier than Mando. Heck yeah. By far. By far so much easier than Mando. Worked towards my baby Deadpool. Started Sabretooth. Finished my baby Deadpool. or opened it, worked through the multi-ball, and what I like about that, and this is what I'm standing there in stream thinking, thinking about my friend Matt McCarty and how he gave me advice sometime this past summer about that's not a bad stack because if I just let the balls go through the pops, it's going to help me collect saber tooth faster because it works towards battling him or whatever. And so that was the method that I chose, and that's usually a very good tournament strategy for me. I know people usually like to bring team-ups and so forth into it, but I just figure I'm just going to go all out and just try to get these points. So I end up not collecting Sabertooth at the scoop, but I went on and I collected two of my Katana ball locks, and I did something else there. I think I shot it in the scoop one more time, and then I drained. And everybody's like, don't tilt, don't tilt, because I have the game in bonus. and when I went to go play the game I thought, here's another Rachelism that I did I thought that the target score was 45 million for whatever reason that's what I thought and when I drained I had like just shy of 30 million it's like 28.5 or something so I collected it bonus and so I got a whole one on that game but it's funny because once again I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing there or what it's actual objective really was Ooh, close one. Yeah, it was a close one. So it was very exciting. So Sammy Bacon, she played really well. So did Cassidy. So did Rebecca. We really had a lot of fun, the four of us playing together. Cassidy took the tournament with Sammy Bacon, Rebecca, and myself. So it was really such a fun time. And again, I'm going to use the words, it was really surreal. I know you've experienced that, Raymond, but for me, sometimes I still feel like Ricky Rachel. So having that experience of playing pinball at 2 in the morning is a pretty bonkers thing. And then having friends watch me on stream and blowing up my phone excited for me. So that was neat, too. Wow, did it go until 2 in the morning again? 10 to 2. Oh, my God. Last year it went until like 2.30 or something of the scene. I remember that. Yeah, I finally went to sleep. I think I finally was able to shut down my grain about 3 in the morning. So it was pretty awesome. I was looking at the pinball standings to qualify. looked like the top top 20 qualify and you needed 21 points or less on nine holes that's less than that's like two like a little over two per hole yes that's crazy that's I mean you basically if you if you get a five or six on a game or you're done if you get a 10 you're definitely done like that that is an absurd how how hard it was to qualify the scores people were doing. And it's very, very, it was very, very tight standings and qualifying, considering that I had, I had 20 points, but there are, let's see, there are five people that had 19 points, two that hit 18, you know, it goes on from there. So it was very, very tight standings. I know there are several women that, you know, did a couple of, a couple of cards. This whole segment about the women's tournament was about Ladies Flip Wisconsin. And here's the really cool thing about that. And I'm going to put a little feather in my cap. The neatest thing is that all women that played in finals went home with cash in their pocket. And to me, that is a lucrative tournament when you're able to provide back. There were, I think, 42 players, 44 players total, when 20 women got to go home with at least one of their cards, their qualifying expense, reimbursed to them, plus some. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm just really excited about that. This is all pin golf. What do you think of pin golf? Do you like it? Do you have medium on it, cool on it? I liked the pin golf this way where it was objective and scoring based between qualifying and the finals. I think pin golf generally, I like that it is a score-based because it's easier to think in my head, I'm just going to play the game like I normally play it, right? The objective-based, I think, was a lot of fun to play because I had to learn things. Because if you didn't know how to do the thing, you know, the specific goal, you have five balls to learn, but you really, in this scenario, you had to do it in two, one or two. Right. So, yeah, I enjoy it. It's not, I've thought actually now a little bit about doing a ladies' flip pin golf down the road So maybe I put that on the calendar for 2023 Now that I played one I really enjoyed the one I played before was a 0 and it was when I was a fairly new player and so I found it a lot harder But now if I would go back and play that again it would probably seem easier It's all perspective, right?
    82:08
    Yeah. When you said for 2023, there's actually the IFPA pin masters at District 82. Yes, I know. Are you going to play in that? It looks like it's $350, but that does include three or four days admission to the facility, so that's kind of bundled in there. But that's a pretty big price for pin golf, but you do get 18 holes. What are your thoughts on that? Are you going to be playing in that or you haven't decided? I'm going to lean towards no because I will likely want to volunteer to stream it. Yeah, there's going to be some great streaming action that weekend because it's the weekend of Nationals as well. Yes. But the Pin Masters is wide open if anyone wants to play in it. The tickets are still on sale. And it's 18 holes of pin golf, so if you want to try it out, why not just jump in at the IFPA Pin Masters World Pin Golf Championships? Yeah, at District 82 in beautiful De Pere, Wisconsin. That's true. You can check out the original Whopper Farm, right? The original Whopper Farm, right, because the Whopper points you get at District 82 don't matter. I'm joking. I'm joking, friends. I'm glad that you brought that up. I've not really considered playing it, but I'd probably like to stream it. Longer tournament weekends, it's a lot going on there. I like being in the booth. I learn more being in the booth. I enjoy it. But never say never. I know that there's going to be some other tournaments in the Green Bay area that same weekend. There's also going to be the Whopper Chopper at Lumberjack Johnny's, which I think is going to be several different tournaments that are not going to conflict with the other stuff that's going on. I think they're working with District 82 to make that happen. So it's going to be a big pinball weekend overall. That's in March, right, 2023? Yep. I haven't even put too much on my calendar yet, but we'll see. We'll see. So this leads us to the fourth event, which is the main open tournament. And I did not play this because instead I went and enjoyed Pinball Olympics. I missed it last year because I was playing forever and ever in the Open event, and I was so bummed out seeing all these great things that my friends had, you know, did and enjoyed. I wanted to go experience it on my own, so I did. So I missed all the action, really, with the Classics and the Open tournament. So why don't you tell me all about it, Raymond, about your experience? Yeah, so I had a really good qualifying run, and I think I qualified fifth overall, so I had the most amount of buys you could get. So I didn't have to play until Saturday. So I didn't have to play Friday at all. So that was nice. And so basically Saturday I come in and I'm playing bets of five against, well, let's see, I have the bracket here. Let's take a look.
    85:06
    I was in phase two. That's right. So people that were playing on Friday were playing bets two out of threes, but once it became Saturday, Phase 2 began, and so that's all three out of five. It looks like the first person I played was actually Trent Augenstein. So the Trent who helps run, you know, Tilt Amusements and this tournament. Yep. And, man, that was a battle. So I remember we played a Deadpool game where I put up $600 million as player two. Trent comes back on his ball three and gets to about $700 million. and I only need $100 million on ball three, and I shoot it in the scoop, and it drains me out of the scoop, and I was super upset. I was, like, so angry. So I picked, oh, man, what did I pick after that? I think I picked Avengers, and I was so mad that I just, like, because I was, like, okay, I need to play a game I know I can crush. So I picked Avengers, and I think I did really well. I think I put up like $500, $600 million. So that kind of got my mojo back, especially after losing $600 million. Right, you ray-raged. Yeah, yeah, ray-raged. So, yeah, and then I can't remember what some of the other games we played were, but I think once I got my groove back on Avengers, I was able to keep up with Trent on the other games. I think I might have also played a Deadpool premium. I think Trent picked the pro against me and then the premium. And on the premium, I just had that left loop dialed in. So that's all I did was just shoot the left loop because it gives you disco loops and then disco multiball. And I just kept hitting it. It's a good way to do it. Yeah. So I was pretty happy with my play against Trent. It was a close battle, but I survived. But then I had to go against Jared August, my nemesis, who I just can't quite beat him for some reason. At the last Expo we played against, he also knocked me out of the bracket. And it was, you know, I was up against him 2-0. I actually came back against him on Jurassic Park, and that was on stream. Basically, I played Raptor multiball, and I just played it forever until I passed him. Like, I got to the chaos stage and got, like, a jackpot and a double super jackpot. It was insane, which are the kind of things you need to do at this stage of the game, because these are all modern sterns, set-up factory, with even a ball save. You know, the in-lane posts are, there's rubber on them. So you're going to get to play. It's just how many jackpots and super jackpots and multiballs are you going to be able to get. That kind of determines whether you win or lose. Are you saying these were friendly games? Yeah, these were basically, well, because they were, just opened new out of the box. So however you buy a game from Stern, open it up and play it. That's how these games were. Pretty awesome. It's cool because it's the only tournament like it, and it takes three whole days, Thursday, Friday, Sunday. day. It takes four whole days to play, but once a year, I think it's fun to just let it rip and see what kind of crazy games people can put up. Yes. It evens the playing field in that regard. We've talked before about games that are completely nerfed out and how difficult they can be to play, but how fun is it to play? That sets the playing field one way, but this sets the table another way as well. I think it's great, too. It's fun. Yeah, you finally get to use a lot of the practice and those sessions where you're learning the game, it finally comes in handy because you're going to get to the later stages of the game and you can use some of those tactics. And it's a different style tournament for sure. So I believe I beat Jared on that Jurassic Park and Avengers, I believe. No, actually, no, I didn't beat him on Avengers. I beat him on the games that he picked. So he picked Jurassic Park, I beat him on it. And he picked I don't remember what the other one was, but I was able to pass him on it. And so I was up 2-0, and now all of a sudden he decides to defer. And I was like, no, I was doing good when you were picking. Like, don't put this pressure on me. Strategy, strategy. Okay, go on. I'm like, okay, I need to just eliminate him. Like, he needs to go. I need to win this 3-0. So I pick Rush, and I put up a billion, and it wasn't enough. He passed me. yeah it's just that sometimes that's the way it is yeah and and then also I think I picked um Deadpool the premium that I would did I put up a billion on it against Trent and I didn't even need that many points but I just kept blowing it I just kept fumbling it it was all on stream so you can watch it in spectacular fashion media crumbling to pieces. Yeah, there was not really any excuse. I just kept missing shots and not seeing the ball properly, doing the right flipper moves. Not connected. Entirely on me. And then so I finally, game five, I pick Avengers Premium because I previously picked the Pro. And on Avengers Premium, unfortunately, I started the game out where you normally do, where you have a portal lock and you play Reality Gem and you try to bring Thor in. But what happened was the premium had that long captive ball lane, and I shot it twice in a row while the ball was still in midair because it was so, you know, like the ball was heading towards the target. And so one of my shots didn't count. I drained, of course, and then I didn't start Thor. And so I was in total jail. I had like 10 million points.
    91:05
    Jared plays it forever. He puts up like 500 million, and I'm just kind of done. Like, which sucks because looking back at it now, I don't know why I was, I gave up. Like, I felt like I had given up, and it showed. And if I could do it over again, I would have been like, dude, just get a billion. Come on. You can do this. But I was just so mad because I let the 2-0 lead slip away, and it just got to me. See, I feel you. I feel like that's what I did at Mandalorian. Like, after my third ball, I couldn't obtain the objective. I think I just crapped the bed so hard in those final two balls because I just knew. I just felt defeated. Yeah, I needed to regroup and just really focus better. Well, Raymond, we're both going to focus better on our energies when we have a ball three like that or whatever, a game like that, right? What did we both learn, right? We have to encourage ourselves. Nobody else does it when you're playing pinball. Thinking back to the good games you had, too, can help, too. Yes, for sure. I agree with that. I think about, you talked about Jurassic Park, and last year I played the Open, I had a really big game, came back ball three, and I believe it was Howard, pinball Howard, that I knocked out of the tournament, but it was on that Jurassic Park Pro. And I think about that every single time I play Jurassic Park. I think about that game because it builds me up. So that's a big part of it, too. I agree. Yeah, so guess who I got to play after I lost? Oh, I guess I didn't play him immediately. So I got to play Carlos, which was fun. But unfortunately, he just had a couple of bad games. And in loser bracket, it's two out of three and you're done. So that match felt like it ended before it even started. It was just like lightning round. It was quick. Yeah, so I managed to win on that. But then I had to play Escher. And I was just like, all right, maybe I'll finally beat Escher. and I let, let's see, I won, oh, he picked Mandalorian and he got, I kid you not, less than a million points as his full game score. What?
    93:19
    Okay, now that makes me feel so much better. How did he score less than a million points? I don't know. I was just watching it, and it was literally every ball he would shoot, like, the hunter targets, or he'd shoot, like, an orbit. It would just hit a sling and go down the out lane. Like, just every ball was just instantly death. Like, it was pretty crazy. So, of course, I put up $500 million, and it didn't matter. So that was kind of a waste of that. But it felt good to get a win on Escher, I guess, either way. But then Escher picked Jurassic Park, and I was feeling pretty good because I had gotten a high score on this Jurassic Park. And unfortunately, I don't know if I was just kind of in a weird mood where I was both, like, overconfident, but also wasn't trying as hard as I should. Like, it's not like I wasn't trying hard. It was just I wasn't, I was like, eh, whatever, I'm up a game. I still got game three if I lose. I'm probably going to win this game. I finally, like, I was riding too high, like, too close to the sun, I think.
    94:30
    Sure. I get that. And it impacted some of my judgments, and basically, like, on ball two, I started a T-Rex mode, or maybe it was a controller mode. It was a mode, and I knew that the right ramp, the S shot with the helicopter, had been problematic, where sometimes it wouldn't go all the way around, and if you missed, it would often just kill you immediately. Yeah. And I started the mode, and instead of shooting something safer, I went for that shot as my very first shot and died immediately. And I was like, I should not have done that. I should have gotten some points, like shot the spinner, shot somewhere else first. You know, take that shot eventually, but I didn't need to go for it right away. And so having a zero-point mode just kills you on Jurassic Park because a lot of the points are in the modes. Correct. I agree, yes. But, you know, luckily on ball three, it was actually kind of funny. So I had like $130 million and he had $496 or something. And I was down by so much and I was like joking, sort of. I was like, okay, you know what? This is fine. I'm going to start system boot, hit double scoring, and beat system boot perfectly and get $300 million.
    95:48
    And I actually did. that's the crazy thing I literally started the mode hit the 2x target and did like a 6 way combo and beat the mode and got 300 million and I was within striking distance and all I needed was like 2 more rescues I shot the right ramp the piranodon spirally ramp I got a rescue but then it comes to my upper flipper and I shoot the half pipe and it chunks rejects the half pipe to the right out lane Oh. The bonus tallies up, and I get 492 million, and I needed 496 million. No. I was so, so distraught because I had actually done exactly my plan. Yes, you executed it. Good job. It just fell a little short, and if I hadn't – also, I had tilted on ball one, too, like a rage tilt. So I lost bonus on ball one. I got zero points out of my mode on ball two, and then I fell short by four million on ball three. So it was like the triple whammy of errors. Triple errors. Oh, man. Three strikes, you're out, I guess. Yep, that was a brutal loss. It always is. And then, of course, Guardians happened where I was, you know, I had a billion points, but then Escher decided to get eight billion. Oh, my God.
    97:14
    Is that on stream? Yeah. Yeah, it's on stream. And I am not a happy camper on that. So I was kind of upset. But luckily I got eliminated at 11.45 p.m. So I still had 15 minutes to finally go check out the show.
    97:33
    I was going to ask you that. And I got to play Weird Al for the first real time playing it. Yeah, so that was fun. So I finally got to play that for a while. Let's talk about the winners, though. The A Division winners were Zach McCarthy, Jared August, Carl D'Angelo, and Dalton. Yeah, Dalton slayed Escher twice in the winners and losers bracket. Good job, Dalton. B Division winners were Bob Johnson, Alex Phelps, Jacob Fisher, and Debra Tallman. So Debra had a really good pinball weekend. Jacob Fisher, is that George Fisher's son? I don't know. I'm not sure who he is. and we're going to probably find out after this episode. Or maybe a relative or just unrelated name. Unrelated, right, correct. I do want to talk a little bit about Alex Phelps. He took second in the B Division. He's been playing, he's a District 82 player. He was also my roommate for the weekend. So we were both so excited on Saturday night that we both had these cool Funko trophies. You know, we're both really excited that we both played so well. Yeah, congrats. B Division is no slouch. That's a tough big bracket as well. Amen to that. Congrats to all of the winners of the flip-out tournament. One other thing is that we should do an honorable mention as well to the kids' tournament winner, who is Sterling Matoska. I was told that we have to watch out for this young player from Michigan, and that he is just an incredible player to watch and learn from. So congrats to him as well. Thanks to Jay and Kate for Kimball Olympics. That was a lot of fun as well. Raymond, that is definitely one of the questions that I have for you is, did you get a chance to cruise the actual Expo floor, or were you totally stuck in the tournament lounge? So you did get out and check out Weird Al. Yeah, I basically didn't have much time in there. Every once in a while on Thursday when I was queued up for something, I would walk around. But the lines went by pretty fast because I had 30 games or something. So I didn't actually have to wait in line that long for games. And then I also got stuck. I was doing this World Cup tournament with Team USA, me and Andy Begwell, playing Legends of Valhalla. What was the format and so forth? Tell me about that. Yeah, the format was best two out of three. You and your teammate would play against the other countries and their teammates. So four-player game, two out of three, single elim, and it took forever. And it took so long that Josh Sharp and Zach Sharp, the other American team, just bailed. They just were like, we lose. We're going to not do this anymore. And then also one of the teams we played, after game one, they just said, you're good.
    100:27
    We're done. So me and Angie just fought it out until they grinded out for like three hours playing Legends of Valhalla. okay yeah we won so you kind of got a little bit of a crash course on how to play that game too I love that yeah I definitely learned a lot so that was that was fun but yeah I ate up a lot of my time um I I did actually get to go at some point to the stern area and uh finally actually got to say hi to my co-workers and been like oh there's a whole there's a whole bunch of us here And there's like Stern snacks and even some drinks and stuff. And I was like, oh, wow, there's perks of being a Stern employee at the Expo. I didn't know. I should check with that more often.
    101:17
    So I'm glad I got to do that at least. That was cool. Yeah, that's really cool. I was curious about that because I found, like I said last year, I really got stuck playing so much in the tournament area that I didn't get to explore all of Expo. And so this year I really am glad that I made the choice, even though there could have been points available for me to help with my goals and so forth. I'm glad that I didn't play the classics or play the open. I'm a bit surprised. Can you tell me more about why you didn't play classics? Because that was less of a time commitment because the finals were on Sunday. Because I got drunk with the poor men. That's why. Yeah, the finals did start super-duper early, which was annoying. So I don't know. So I had thought about doing a classic card, okay? So I did think about that. But on Friday night, I may have had quite a bit of moonshine and fellowship and laughter with my tribe multi-ball and the poor man's pinball network, which we are on, Raymond, with our pals there. And I just had a fun time. So I just ended up not getting back over there to do a classics card. And that's okay. And I've learned, though, as a, you know, tournament player, that it's okay to just let go of that. I don't have to play all the things. And I think that I time managed my Expo better this year than last year. I also got involved with the Flip the Script on Autism, the charity stream. So, you know, that was part of my time, too, on one of my... Yeah, so it makes sense. Yeah, you just had so many things going on. You just never had time to put in the entries. Right, right. And I really did actually get pretty hammered. And I'm going to tell you, that's the first time in probably seven years and I woke up with a hangover on Saturday. Right? I woke up with a hangover on Saturday morning, played Pinball Olympics, went and played finals, and I came in fourth. So maybe I have to have a hangover more often when I play. Oh, no. Tell me about Pinball Olympics. There was actually, like, winners? I thought it was just individual games you could win medals on. Is there overall? I don't think there was an overall winner, but I do know that Drew Boyd there got a Drew Sucks at Pinball medal, especially for him, so he might have been the overall winner there. Oh, I thought you said you got a fourth. But did you mean? Oh, I meant fourth in the women's tournament. Yeah, but it was medals for Pinball Olympics. So that was a lot of fun. Just neat modified games. I'm so glad that I cut out time to do that. And actually, I think I'd rather do that again next year than play the main. Because next year I'm going to bring the super competitive Rachel to Pinball Olympics instead of going around and playing, trying all the different modded games. I just want to sit on two or three games, and I'm going to GC it. Oh, you can play the games more than once? I think so. I don't know. I didn't read the rules that closely, but I know a group of players did.
    104:00
    That's kind of far away. That's like an hour drive, right? It was, but they had a shuttle bus this year, which was not a good idea with a hangover on the way there. But I was able to catch a ride with the folks that I actually did the Olympics with, Rodden from Australia and then Nikki and Dave Wachowski from Green Bay. So those four of us, we had a really fun time. It's a really neat event. It's just different. It was a cool location. It was a lot of fun. I think I have one more question for you, Raymond, before we wrap up the show. Do you think when you're playing these big tournaments, and this was, I like to use the word, a sturnament, because besides the classics, it was all stern games. Do you think that it's necessary to know absolutely everything about that game in order to put up the big points? Or is it just much more like find a loophole and destroy the game? so I actually just watched a YouTube video about this some guy came out with a video of him kind of ranting about using Godzilla as an example of losing in a tournament because someone got a 50 million point extra ball and it's not it seems unfair that you have to study these rule sheets to learn how to get the points and it's a lot like why should I have to study to play pinball and I actually don't think that argument holds as much water as people think it does because a lot of the games, with some exceptions such as, I think, Mandalorian because of the 6x multipliers and the importance of multiball in that game and the scoring is kind of crazy like that, and also Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. but games like Godzilla and Rush, I feel ball time equates to score pretty closely, even if you don't know the rules, because I've seen people like Jared August, who beat me on Rush. He said he doesn't really know the rules, but he just played forever and beat me. So, and same with Godzilla. You don't need to know the rules. If you're hitting shots, things are happening, you know, you're going to get a good score. I think the only time the rules comes in handy is you can get the points faster.
    106:18
    So on difficult setup games, I think the rules definitely matter because you're not going to play as long. So you can make up for that by taking advantage of every shot you hit being the optimal shot. So I think that saying I lost even though I played longer than you actually doesn't happen as often as people think. It can happen, and especially if it's certain games more than others, you know, and shot efficiency matters a lot. But I think it's a little blown out of proportion for what people think. But also, even if it was as big of a problem as people are saying, I think that rules are cool and why shouldn't you learn them? Like, that's part of the game. That's part of the fun of discovery and asking questions. And that's the thing. Just ask somebody. That's all you have to do is just ask somebody, hey, how do I get that double scoring on Godzilla? That looks really important. well, you can hit jet fighters and do this, and that will light Rodan, and you'll get double scoring. It takes, like, two minutes. You just got to be proactive.
    107:37
    And I guess, I don't know, people don't want to do that, or they think they shouldn't have to. But, I mean, you don't have to. You're just going to have to play longer. Like, do you want to put in the effort in learning the rules, or do you want to put the effort into the saves and skills required to play a long time? Or if you do both, that's where you get your world champions. You know, that's my take on everything. I don't even remember what the original question was. No, that was an excellent response to that question. Is it more about finding the loophole and destroying or knowing absolutely about the game in order to put up big points? So you feel that's really overall it's a combination of both in order to be a world champ. And I think that's – I think, well, you are a world champ, So it is the right answer, right? Right. Yeah. So in my book. And that's it. That's everything I have for this show, Raymond. Do you have anything else?
    108:29
    No, I think that's it. Nice podcast. Hopefully people are still with us. Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for hanging in there. I know it was kind of a long episode again, but I really like the breakdown of everything that we're talking about, and I just really enjoy spending some time with you, Raymond, and learning together. All right. Thanks, Rachel. All right. Well, happy flipping.
    108:53
    Bye. It's Raymond and Rachel, Rachel and Raymond, turning it thin, but they really know. It's Rachel and Raymond, Raymond and Rachel, giving all of the info for the travels we go. It's like your college and the sterling knowledge, so if you don't listen, you won't know. It's the Raymond Show.
    109:14
    The Rush Time Machine needs a ball safe.