Multi-ball is hard, like really, really, really hard. So today I'm going to show you some tips so that you can get better at multi-ball and get higher scores in your pinball games. Starting with my first tip, don't trap up yet. Now a lot of people when they're playing multi-ball, the first thing they want to do is get as many balls under control as possible. In fact, our eyes and brains are really bad at tracking multiple objects. That's why every other sport has just one ball, including pinball until you start multiball. But what happens if we trap up right away is we do not train our brain to get better at playing multiball. Instead, you'll just get comfortable trying to hold the balls and get control and you won't wind up scoring any points. So it's super necessary and super important as a training exercise for you to not get in the habit of trapping up the balls right away. Now, I'll make a couple exceptions to this rule. One, if the game doesn't start with a multiball ball save, this is typically only found in games from the early 90s and before. And two, once you're down to two balls in play and you have a very important jackpot shot to hit. Now that we're practicing multiball by keeping all the balls active and in play, my next tip is to keep your eyes down on the flippers. Don't watch any of the balls after you've made a shot. As long as you keep your head down and your eyes focused on the flipper area, you'll have a much easier time saving any balls that are heading toward the middle of the game or to the top of the slings or the outlands. The next thing you want to practice is using your peripheral vision. Staring at the ball in play is absolutely fine in single ball play, but when there's multiple balls in play, you need to get a sense of where all of them are and all of them are going, but you can't look at all of them at once. That's where our peripheral vision comes in. Keep your eyes down on the flippers, but use the movement of the ball in the corner of your eyes to get a sense of where the balls might be headed and how you can adjust to that. Park the ball in ejects, bumper clusters, or on ramps. In multiball, anytime the ball is out of the middle of the playfield, that means you're freeing up lanes of traffic that you can use to make shots. As soon as the ball makes it up a ramp, that's three seconds you have to make another shot. The balls in the pop bumpers, that might be 10 or 15 seconds of totally free play with any other balls you have in play. I often see players not taking advantage of these moments and not using them to score as much as possible. But a ball in the bumpers or on a ramp is as good as a ball being safely trapped in a cradle. So you might as well fire another ball at any other lit shots. My next tip is to use your other senses. We want our vision focused on the flippers and on our shot making because that's the most important way to score points. So we want to use our ears to hear where the balls are, whether they're in the bumpers or on a ramp or in an eject, and we want to feel the game. You can really feel when the ball goes from side to side, especially when it hits the side rail and it's about to head out. Listen for the sound cues that the game gives you to know where the ball may have hit a switch on the play field. This can alert your brain, for instance, if you've crossed an entry switch and the ball is coming back down, that you may want to be ready for that type of return. Or it can tell you if you've made a shot and you've got a few more seconds before that ball will be near your flippers again. And a tip that applies to every game that has multi-ball is never try to aim and flip two balls on one flipper at the same time. In single ball play, you're getting used to the feel of one ball on the flipper and how that weight affects the flipper flip. As soon as two balls are on the flipper, it's doubling the weight of the flipper and it has to use much more force to overcome that weight, sending the balls in completely different directions even if they're at the same part of the flip. Often this will cause the balls to spray out way to the opposite side nowhere near where you aim them and result in shots that send the balls side to side into the slingshots and potentially into the outlets Just don do it Now when you do get multiple balls on one flipper you going to want to separate them instead of shoot them Here are a few tips that be super useful if you playing Stern pinball games On Sterns use the multiball ball save to your advantage On a game like Godzilla a lot of players will pick Titanosaurus right before they go into multiball This gives the players the chance to shoot the dangerous stand-up targets while they have a ball save active. On most Stern games, the ball save time can be upwards of 30 seconds, giving you plenty of time to make and miss shots to your heart's desire, especially those risky and dangerous shots that you may need to hit during some modes. My next tip for Stern games is play as fast as possible. In most Stern games, the scoring opportunity in time modes far exceeds the scoring opportunities in multivode, so prioritizing those mode shots before they go away is often the best strategy. Combine that with the scoring multipliers that are available in most modern Stern games and you're going to really want to start ripping shots as much as possible to take advantage of your 2x, 3x, 6x or even 40x shot multiplier on some games. Now the thing with the scoring multiplier is it also applies to things like spinner points and pop bumper points and things you may not necessarily even know you're earning if you're playing a multiball, but you should be earning at a much higher rate than normal. And all this is why I fully believe that while the ball save is active, you need to be prioritizing shot making and not trapping at all because these opportunities will run out and you won't be able to start new modes until your multiball is complete. My next tip for Stern Games is to shoot everything on the playfield. Don't just focus on the super jackpot. In this era of feature stacking where all the rules and some modes and also the jackpots are all available at once, having the ball on the wrong flipper really should not slow you down from just trying to make a shot to pick up points where you can't. My next tip for Stern Games is to rush the add-a-ball either as soon as the ball saver expires or if you start a two-ball multiball. Stern Games always have an add-a-ball rule and in some cases they have multiple add-a-balls available within the same multiball feature. So it's super crucial that you learn where these are. In Godzilla Multiball on Godzilla, there's always an add-a-ball available at the Mechagodzilla spinner. But because it's a three-ball multiball, I wouldn't recommend aiming at it until you're down to two balls in play or that ball saver expired. Additionally, the Anguirus power-up on Godzilla allows you to bring an add-a-ball into the multiball that you can use at any time on the button. And if you have this in reserves, then no rush at the add-a-ball at all. Just wait until you drain that last ball that would bring you back to single ball play and hit the button to bring you back into the multiball with now three balls in play. Some of the best multiball games are the Bally and Williams games where they didn't have a multiball ball saver. And my advice on these games would be very different. You definitely want to trap up on a game like Whirlwind where there's really only one shot available for a huge progressive jackpot and it requires using the upper flipper to make it. In these games it's super important to learn the feat. How do you get the ball up to the upper flipper reliably and how does that ball come down to the upper flipper so you can make the jackpot shot? On Pat Lawler's games like Fun House, Adam's Family, and Whirlwind, there's usually some saucer or hole that will pick the ball out to that upper flipper, setting you up for the shot. Which leads to my other super crucial tip, which is to learn how to stage flip. Now if you have control of both flippers on one side of the game independently, it opens up your feeds to whatever side of the playfield you want to make the shot and allows you to keep a ball trapped on a lower flipper while you make a jackpot with an upper flipper. And if you want to see how to stage flip, make sure you check out my video on how to flip. So I admit I said something pretty confusing there which was don trap except when I told you that you should trap So let me explain In my opinion players including really really good top players overvalue points in the future and undervalue points that can be earned in the present Another way to say this is players overvalue safety of having a ball trapped on a flipper than they do point scoring opportunities. And after years of playing pinball, I noticed that the players who were the most efficient at scoring points in a game in the time they had did the best. In fact, the players who consistently did the best were the players who had the fastest decision making, the best flipper skills, the best accuracy, the best nudging, and the best overall control of the game no matter how many balls were in play. So when should you trap up in multiball? In my opinion, it entirely comes down to ball traffic. Are the balls an inconvenience and are ricochets going to stop you from scoring points? In the case of Whirlwind's multiball, they will if you don't have the ability to use the upper flipper to shoot the side rail. But in a game like Godzilla where the super jackpot is the building shot right off the middle, then there's very little reason that you would ever need to trap because there are so many shots lit on that game at one time. There's a case to be made that three balls in play is manageable if you get two on one flipper and you can cleanly separate to another. So many times while watching tournaments, I watch people try to trap up with four balls in play and often lose one or even two at once in an attempted separation move. It just doesn't work. People shouldn't be so worried if they go from three down to two. Now, at two balls in play, of course, going to one ball in play will end multiball, so that is certainly a situation to be wary and cognizant of. Now, let's break down some of my decision making when I'm playing a multiball. Alright, so Raptor multiball right away. I get that ball in the in lane and I use it to go up the left ramp. I'm looking at my left flipper, shooting the right ramp. I've got Raptor multiball level one done right away. And now I have to hit Chaos, so I'm still not trapping up. Hit a right ramp, hit a left ramp. I'm kind of just being aware of what shots I need to make. I've trapped up a little bit to hit that left shot, so now I just have two on the right. Ball save still active, not too worried, but I am really focused on getting the ball to the left flipper. That ramp shot is a way to do that. So I've gotten the ball to the left flipper by bouncing there, by shooting the ramp, and I've got the one ball trapped in the raptor lock. That's about to come out. So now you can see that the ball saves expired. I transitioned to way more controlled play. Got two options here. I choose to shoot the right ramp, giving me the three balls on the flipper. I messed up that cradle separation there. Most cradle separations will be very sloppy. And it's mostly a matter now of juggling. I'm being very conservative knowing that if I shoot that last orbit shot, I will get a ball save. So I've lost that ball there. A lot of times you will lose that ball. You'll go down to two balls and play. Here's where I really don't want to lose that ball. So with the control, I nudge back into the in lane, trying to get the ball on the left side. Still don't have it, still messing around. I miscalculated that tip and how that would work. Just waiting and drop catching. Finally, okay, that ball took a lucky bounce and now I'm in chaos. So I don't need to trap anymore. A little late to realize that, but this is like four or five balls coming back into play. Just shoot everything right now. You know, any of these shots, these targets, they're all adding points. So this is all good stuff. My main focus here is to get double scoring running, which it is, and then send balls up the middle to feed to the upper right flipper. That's all I care about. So I'm still looking down below mostly, but when I do see the balls come past the upper flipper, I missed one there. Trying to make sure I take those shots, but mostly concerned about just pushing the balls up the playfield. There's some spinner shots. That's the best way to feed that upper flipper. And there I go. I hit a 200 million jackpot shot, double scoring. And that was accomplished mostly because I got through that first level of Raptor Multiball so quickly to get into this bonus round At this point the scoring is kind of over in this multiball There some victory laps here and they good points but I accomplished what I needed to And now happy to just send the balls up into play, get the shots when I need to make them finally trap when we're kind of down to two balls in play. All right. Now I'm down to one. Take a last second jackpot there and add a multiball. Get the ball save. All right, so I threw a GoPro on my head to try to give you an example of what I'm actually seeing when I play the game. So I'm going for Raptor Multiball in this game at Jurassic Park. I'm in single ball play. You can see my head track the ball in play as it moves around the play field. I look left. It went left. I look right when it goes right. And that's going to change when I get to Raptor Multiball. Now, of course, you've got to get greedy on the Stearns. You get your multiball one shot away. You start your mode. Now you've really got blue shots in the playfield. You're going to have red jackpots on the playfield. This is where you want to be in any Stern game now. And now I've started the multiball. So I've got everything going full timer. And look, my head is not moving away from the flippers at all. I'm not watching these balls go up the playfield. In fact, I'm looking, according to the GoPro, mostly at the action button far more than I would be at the screen or at anything up on the playfield. Yet, I can still kind of make sense of what's going on because I can glance at the inserts. I look up when the balls are up, and I can see which shots I need to make for chaos. So I am prioritizing those chaos letters. Now that the ball save is done, though, you can see me transition to trapping. It doesn't always work too well. I drained out the side there, and you may have also noticed that I only drained one ball. It seems like I only have one ball in play. I got a weird stuck ball. It just hit it there, so I'm going to go grab that in a second.