Led Zeppelin Review Reaction, Winter 2x Recap, Tournament Pinball Re-Opening thoughts

A Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·20m 22s·analyzed·Feb 17, 2021

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.024

TL;DR

Led Zeppelin review, tournament recap, and Twitch community advocacy.

Summary

Host discusses the production of their Led Zeppelin pinball review video (34 hours of work), upcoming content plans including tutorials on critical pinball skills, reactions to the Winter 2X tournament at District 82 in Wisconsin, and advocacy for supporting Carl D'Angelo's i.e. Pinball Twitch channel toward partnership. Additionally covers reflections on tournament reopening, COVID safety protocols, and the importance of tournaments to arcade location sustainability.

Key Claims

Led Zeppelin review video took 34 hours from production start to YouTube upload
high confidence · Host's direct statement about production time for their YouTube video
Winter 2X tournament at District 82 had 13 hours 45 minutes of pinball with 11-round match play and 3-strike knockout
high confidence · Host describing the tournament structure they watched
Only 2 out of top 50 streams in pinball category on Twitch are partnered (Buffalo Pinball and Mr. Scoot) in 2021
high confidence · Host's statement about Twitch partnership status in pinball category
Tournament pinball has been shut down for nearly a year
high confidence · Host's reflection on tournament closures due to COVID
District 82 has held 80+ tournaments since the initial shutdown
medium confidence · Host's statement about District 82's tournament history: 'I believe, 80 plus tournaments now since everything shut down'
Winter 2X stream peaked at 120-130 viewers with average 80-105, over 2,000 total unique viewers
medium confidence · Host's estimates of viewership numbers: 'there was easily 120, 130 people at the peak'
Palooka is a 2.5 inch flipper game with fewer than 5 locations worldwide
medium confidence · Host's assessment of Palooka's rarity based on gameplay footage
Host's wife has worked directly with the CDC on COVID vaccine coordination
high confidence · Personal disclosure about wife's professional role

Notable Quotes

“I am truly humbled by the reaction to that video. And I want to express as much gratitude as possible to everybody out there that took the time to watch the video”
Host @ early in episode — Shows genuine appreciation for audience engagement on Led Zeppelin review
“I want to thank Carl D'Angelo personally for actually canceling one of his showings... This person is incredibly selfless, incredibly selfless.”
Host @ tournament section — Highlights community values: supporting peer streamers over personal gain
“Partners get transcoding option priority... for a game that basically requires 60 frames per second in order to fully show it properly, that is so important.”
Host @ Twitch partnership discussion — Explains technical importance of Twitch partnership for pinball streaming quality
“District 82... I think before long, it will be a place that will hold a major tournament at, or at the very least, a Stern Circuit Pro Tournament. I think it's that good.”
Host @ venue assessment — Positive prediction about District 82's tournament potential
“The only one that's not right now is mine which happens to be pinball so i'm kind of the odd man out right now”
Host @ tournament reopening discussion — Personal frustration about pinball tournaments remaining closed while other activities reopened
“I'm very confident, actually, that by April, May, that we'll see that we're actually, it's, we're finally getting towards the end, finally getting towards the end.”
Host @ tournament reopening prediction — Specific timeline prediction for tournament reopening based on vaccine rollout and COVID trends
“Mask, temperatures, encouraging distance, everything was wiped down. I felt completely safe.”
Host @ safety protocols discussion — Personal testimony about COVID safety measures at tournaments
“I would highly recommend watching this because you're basically guaranteed to see a lot of classics that don't show up too often in tournaments or on streams in general.”

Entities

Host (A Pinball Podcast)personMonicapersonSeanpersonCarl D'Angeloperson Eric ThornepersonJordan SimropersonMatt McCartypersonLuke NahorniakpersonBrandon PhillippepersonRaymond Davidson

Signals

?
business_signal: Arcade locations facing sustained revenue loss due to tournament closures; competitive pinball players cite lack of tournaments as primary barrier to venue visits
medium · Host statement: 'I've heard it from multiple people before that one of the main reasons why they don't go out, quite frankly, is just because there's not any tournaments going on'
?
community_signal: Host advocates for supporting Carl D'Angelo's Twitch channel toward partnership as a community priority, emphasizing technical benefits (transcoding priority) for pinball streaming quality and ecosystem growth
high · Extended discussion about Twitch partnership importance, specific call-to-action for lurking/viewing to boost metrics, recognition of Carl's selflessness in canceling competing broadcast
?
community_signal: Tournament reopening sentiment positive among active community members with health-conscious safety practices becoming normalized expectation
medium · Host's personal travel to multiple tournaments with masking/distancing, wife's CDC work informing confidence in timeline, prediction of April-May reopening acceleration
?
community_signal: District 82 established as emerging major tournament venue with potential for Stern Circuit Pro or larger events based on execution quality and infrastructure
medium · Host prediction: 'I think before long, it will be a place that will hold a major tournament at, or at the very least, a Stern Circuit Pro Tournament'
?
event_signal: Winter 2X tournament at District 82 successfully demonstrated viable tournament operation with strong safety protocols and community engagement during pandemic restrictions

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.061

0:00

All right, guys, welcome back once again to another episode of a pinball podcast. Thank you guys so much for being here once again. I greatly do appreciate it. And this is episode 44. My God, we're just turning right along. I can't believe we've actually gotten up to 40 plus episodes. Just me sitting here in front of a mic talking to you guys. Just crazy. It's crazy to me, but not as crazy as the weather's been around here. We just got our second snowstorm that went by just yesterday. I don't even know how many inches are on the ground here in Oklahoma City. And the kids, they're still out of school, so naturally it's just insane chaos around here. But I'm in my little man cave slash arcade room upstairs. I got the door locked, keeping the kids at bay. So if you hear screaming and yelling, don't worry. There's still other adults in the house tending to them. I'm just letting you guys know, just in case you hear them on the mic, not ignoring my kids. I wait until the evening time to do that. I'm just kidding. I love my kids. Love my kids. All right. So we're going to discuss several things. First and foremost, I want to thank everybody who has watched the Led Zeppelin review video that I put out on my YouTube channel. Just I believe is two or three days ago now. It might even been three days ago. I think I put it out Sunday. And I just want to tell you guys that I am truly humbled by the reaction to that video. And I want to express as much gratitude as possible to everybody out there that took the time to watch the video that gave a thumbs up, thumbs down, that commented on it, that shared it. I appreciate it more than anything in the world. Thank you guys so much. That video in general, to give you guys a little bit of background on it, it legitimately took me right at 34 hours from beginning of production to the end of production to getting it up on YouTube. It took me a long time just playing, and that's not even counting playing the game. That's just formulating where I wanted the review to go. And it did take a lot because I personally, I struggled mightily trying to figure out the balance in between reviewing a product or giving it an overview. And I was trying to keep away from giving it an overview just because that's something totally different. And I wanted to be as honest as I possibly could in my assessment of the game in general. And of course, with all that came plenty of bloopers. I nearly broke my camera doing this. And the way that I did it, I ended up putting a little foam pad on the end of my camera and I was shooting down from the play field itself. And a couple of times I legitimately forgot to even raise the camera up off the play field and the pinball just smacked right into it. But thankfully the foam rubber actually worked or the foam padding actually worked. But that was a little bit of a moment for sure. If I broke a $500 camera with a pinball, I would not be able to forgive myself. But I do appreciate you guys. And I want to extend a thanks to my wife, Monica, who actually helped me a lot with that. Some of the gameplay you saw was actually her playing. Then other times she was helping me stage different shots and she was kind of giving her feedback on things. And that really did help. Anytime I can get any type of feedback, especially in real time, I take it all into consideration. I also want to thank my friend Sean, who is here local. I won't give out his last name just because I know privacy, but he was here local, and he's very much into filmography, videography,

3:32

all things like that, and he helps me out behind the scenes a lot with this channel, and he helped me tremendously in terms of giving me ideas on how to properly edit this thing. He was giving me tips and tricks, and I was using as much of it as possible and my amateur way of doing things. And I just want to express gratitude to him for taking time out of his day away from his family and helping me, whether it's on text or the phone. And he is really a great help to this channel. All right, and besides that, as I posted up on my YouTube channel, I am researching several more topics to provide videos and I want to provide the best value I can possibly for you guys. And that goes also with podcasts in general. So I'm trying to curate this content in a way that it appeals to as many people as possible. But at the same time, I have to focus in on certain topics at a time because I don't want the podcast to necessarily be about 10 different things at once, which is pretty much what this podcast actually, ironically, is going to pretty much be about. But I want to try to stay as precise or concise or just as focused as possible with my information, as concise as possible. That's what I'm trying to say. And then I will be precise with the information as I can be. So that's really what I'm going for. You will start to see more tutorials come out, some strategy roadmaps. I'm going to work hard on those tactics when we're talking about dealing with developing your skills in pinball. I feel like there not much content out there that really talks about tactics And I actually working on one that I very happy with I feel like it the most critical skill in all of pinball that hardly anybody ever talks about And it just it kind of shocks me because I was trying to look up information on it and see what other people had to say about it, just trying to gather up all these resources. And then I realized there was practically nothing out there about it. Yeah, it's the one thing that I work on all the time. And it's really helped my overall pinball game truly develop. I'm not going to give it away right now, but that video is coming out here hopefully next week, maybe in a week and a half or so. And, of course, we will have more reviews moving in, but those reviews are very difficult to do. It's one thing to get on this mic and just review over a game in general because I can go off my notes and everything, and I don't have to worry about the B-roll content with it. And, of course, if I'm putting it up on YouTube and I'm doing a lot of B-roll with it, that is very intensive work. and it takes a much longer production time in order to get across my thoughts in a coherent fashion with that. But I will do that. Mainly the reviews in that way will just be with newer titles in which I do have direct access to. If I don't have direct access to it, it's gonna be awfully hard to get any type of B-roll, obviously. But look for Avengers Infinity Quest to be coming out hopefully within the next two or three weeks or so. Again, that'll take a lot of hours. So no guarantees on exactly when they'll come out, but that's a general timeline. All right, pushing forward, we're going to shift towards tournament talk. So if you guys don't want to hear a tournament talk, this will be your stop for the day, and I bid you guys good day. Thank you guys for hanging in there with me just on our basic overall chat so far, and I hope you guys have a great week. For those that are staying on this train, let's get right to it. The Winter 2X tournament that was up in Wisconsin was shown this past weekend on Fox City's Pinball on Twitch, and it was an excellent event. Now yours truly was supposed to be there. However, of course, snow storms moved in and that kind of prevented me from being there. But before I talk about this tournament, I want to highlight something that I feel is insanely important. And I think that the entire pinball community needs to be made aware of this and needs to know how important this is. And this person is incredibly selfless, incredibly selfless. And I want to thank Carl D'Angelo personally for actually canceling one of his showings of a former event of the Indis 2019 Classics 1 and 2 and the Women's Final as well on his channel, i.e. Pinball. Now, what Carl's doing is all month long in February, he's showing events that he has that has happened. That's tournament events, and he's rebroadcasting those each Saturday on his Twitch channel, which I highly recommend everybody go check out. And we'll get to that in just a few. But I want to thank Carl for doing that because this is somebody who is aiming for partner and who deserves partner on Twitch. And he went out of his way to make a personal decision to not show that event so it didn't interfere with a current live event. And the fact that he was able to do that to me is such a selfless thing. It speaks volumes on his character. And I really do think that that needs to be highlighted right there. because he could have easily went ahead and posted up his stream, could have shown that tournament, and he would have gotten a lot of views. For sure, he would have gotten a lot of views. And it would have diluted the whole viewership in general for pinball, but he was looking out for other people. He did something that was incredibly selfless, and to me that needs to be recognized because obviously he didn't really announce that too much publicly from my knowledge. So that's excellent. And what I would recommend everybody to do is that if you have a free Saturday or even if you know you're not going to be watching Twitch or anything like that, I would still encourage you to go on his channel and open up a window. Like, watch it. Even if you're just lurking and you're walking away from the computer, your phone, whatever, that's fine. But support this channel. Support Carl's channel, i.e. Pinball. It's so incredibly important. And the reason why it's incredibly important is because he needs a certain amount of viewership in order to get partnership with Twitch. And the reason why partnership is so important with Twitch is that we do need more partners in the pinball category. If we look at it, I believe just this past year alone or this year in general right now in 2021, there's only two out of the top 50 streams in the pinball category that are partnered. that stream in the pinball category, and that's Buffalo Pinball and Mr. Scoot. And a lot of you probably haven't even heard of Mr. Scoot. I'm sure most of you have heard of Buffalo Pinball. Mr. Scoot is not traditional pinball. I believe it's more of the virtual pin, but he does have a pretty clean channel. If you haven't seen it, he deals a lot with retro gaming. I think he's actually a comedian as well. But again, it's so important to get more partners in the pinball streaming area because that'll just bring more attention. And then on top of that here the number one reason why it so important that we can get Carl to partner It because partners get transcoding option priority And what this means is it will create a better experience for the viewer because partners will get priority when you dealing with options for resolution options meaning that the viewers can switch up their quality if they're not able to see the stream very well. And for a game that basically requires 60 frames per second in order to fully show it properly, that is so important. And when we're talking about future pinball content, we're talking about top-of-the-line tournaments, we're talking about somebody that already has a top-of-the-line stream. I mean, he is the bar. He has set the bar. And Carl's streams are excellent because, one, you have great quality. Two, you have somebody that is legitimately a world-class pinball player. And three, he's somebody that will readily discuss what he's doing, why he's doing it, and it makes sense. There's nothing about his streams that are chaotic to where you get completely lost. It's amazing to see, and I would highly recommend people start doing that. I know me personally, I'm going to do that. Even if I'm not watching this weekend, I'm going to make sure I'm lurking at least, so that way it gives another viewer, and I think that is really important to do. All right, so moving forward with the Winter 2X stuff, this is a tournament. obviously that I was unfortunately able to not attend, but the place itself is ran by Eric Thorne, and it is incredibly awesome. If you guys have not been to District 82, I know you guys have heard me talk about this place before. I would highly recommend checking it out online, on YouTube, wherever you can. It is an incredible place, and I think before long, it will be a place that will hold a major tournament at, or at the very least, a Stern Circuit Pro Tournament. I think it's that good. And the event that they had, I'm all over the place. Sorry, guys. Let me take a drink real quick. I'm going to take me a quick break.

12:05

All right, break done. The event that they had was basically 13 hours and 45 minutes or so. And they actually had two tournaments rolled up into this, in which one was an 11-round match play. And then it was followed up by a three-strike tournament at the end. Now, of course, this had a couple of breaks in between. So it wasn't necessarily just 14 straight hours of pinball. But it was still a lot of pinball. And the winners of the match play, I believe the winner was Jordan Simro. I hope I'm getting your last name right, Jordan. And that was followed up by Matt McCarty, Luke Nahorniak, and Brandon Phillippe. I think I got that last name right as well. Now with the knockout portion, Luke Nahorniak won, and then Raymond Davidson took second, Ryan Spindler took third, and Neil Graff took fourth. Obviously, Neil is the better Graff. Sorry, Tom. It just is what it is. but for people that are into tournaments, I would highly recommend watching this because you're basically guaranteed to see a lot of classics that don't show up too often in tournaments or on streams in general. There was games such as Hot Hand, Flight 2000, Electronimo was in it, Melody, Swords of Fury, Pop a Card, Magic, and I believe the last game that was played was Palooka, I believe, which is a two and a half inch flipper game that you will rarely see. I think there's probably less than five locations in the world that even have that. And this was the final game of a tournament with two world-class pinball players. So that's exciting to see. But I was very excited to see just that tournaments in general that a lot of people were watching it. I mean, there was easily 120, 130 people at the peak. I believe it averaged out somewhere between 80 to 105, somewhere right around there. But a lot of people were truly engaged in it. And I think there was probably over 2,000 people that actually came through the stream watching it at any given point. And that's insanely important because obviously Tournament of Pinball has been shut down for nearly a year now. It's nearly a year. And, you know, me personally, I can't really speak to whether or not it is truly time to reopen because I don't have a vote in it. It's just all about the state reps. And I'm assuming other people from across the world that are voting as well for their particular communities. But for me personally, I'm ready to start playing again. And I have been traveling for tournaments, and I feel safe enough to travel for tournaments. And there's several different reasons for that, mainly because I'm not in the section to where COVID would truly, where it's truly dangerous for me. Now, I'm not saying I can't suffer from it, but I don't have any preexisting conditions. I take care of myself the best that I can. and my family in general takes care of themselves the best that they can. So we're not at a high risk is what I'm saying. And then I also feel like it's important to try to promote these places and try to support them the best that we can because obviously there's been a lot of businesses, especially dealing with arcade and pinball, that have truly suffered this past year. And I really want to see that suffering end as quickly as possible. So I hope that we getting closer to reopening I know me personally like I said I willing to travel I wear the mask I do whatever needs to be done in order to get it done But you know at the same time tournaments like these at District 82 have shown that with proper precautions taken that you can get far with it. That you don't, you can still function even today's age in a tournament because they've had, I believe, 80 plus tournaments now since everything shut down. And they've been doing it right. And I got to say, when I was up there, it was done right. Mask, temperatures, encouraging distance, everything was wiped down. I felt completely safe. And I've done the same thing. I've gone up to Wichita to play. Same thing. They encouraged distance. They had masks. I played locally. Same thing. We're staying distance the best that we can. And that's essentially all you can do right now. But thankfully, numbers are obviously starting to go down thanks to the vaccine and thanks to us getting into the springtime when hopefully gets warmer. We'll probably see numbers continue to go down. And I do have a little bit more of a privy view to it just because my wife has worked directly with the CDC before when dealing with this. And she's gone out on just COVID vaccine runs where she's headed up the local region for that. So I've kind of seen everything in real time for the past year. And, you know, it's kind of funny because you hear it all the time, fake news and all that. And I don't want to make this political but truth be told there is there always is a lot of misinformation every which direction so it's very difficult to do but the best that i can say about this is knowing what i know and seeing what i see i feel very confident that tournament pinball is right around the time that it's ready to come back i know all my kids stuff they're all ready to go but they're going in person for chess they're going in person for jujitsu they're going in person for dance so legitimately every single thing that my family does extra activity or hobby they do they all are open the only one that's not right now is mine which happens to be pinball so i'm kind of the odd man out right now but that's okay i think we'll get there i think we're right on the right on the brink of getting there and i would encourage anybody that's kind of on the line about this or what's the word i'm looking for anybody that's going back and forth of wondering whether or not we should reopen or not reopen, I would encourage you to watch this tournament and at least take a peek and kind of see how it works because they did a really good job at making sure that they stayed as safe as they possibly could. Now, of course, nothing's perfect and nothing ever will be perfect, but I think us as grown adults, we're to the point to where we understand what we're dealing with, we understand the risk, and we understand how to take care of ourselves. And obviously, if you are at high risk, of course, you got to do you. I would not, if I know me personally, if I was truly high risk, I would be so much more worried. I would be taking a ton more precautions, just basically not going out at all, not dealing with any of that. And I totally get that. I totally understand that. But I am excited to see the possibilities that there is the end of the light, end of the tunnel here. And the main reasons for that is not just from selfish point of view of wanting to play tournaments again, because of course I do. But I also think it's important that these tournaments, obviously, they're not necessarily held at homes. They're getting held at locations. And when we're playing tournaments at locations, we can keep those locations going. We can keep pumping in the quarters or keep pumping in money to the concessions or entry fees or whatever it could be. Just we're being customers at places to where they need the income, they need the revenue, and we are able to provide it because we have more reasons to get out. And I know that that may not sound like much, but I know it is a big deal because I've heard it from multiple people before that one of the main reasons why they don't go out, quite frankly, is just because there's not any tournaments going on. And who am I to judge why they're going or not going to a location, but that's just the truth. So hopefully we get to that point. I feel like we're getting closer and closer. I'm highly confident that by this summer, we will be in really good shape. I'm very confident, actually, that by April, May, that we'll see that we're actually, it's, we're finally getting towards the end, finally getting towards the end. Now, obviously, it won't ever completely go away, unfortunately, but we're to a point to where I think we can function as a society, especially when we're dealing with being functional with pinball in general. I think we're right at that point. So that's all I got to say, guys. I just wanted to kind of talk about a few different topics, just get it off my mind, get it out of my system. But other than that, again, thank you guys so much for listening. Thank you guys for watching the videos. Watch IE Pinball this weekend. Support Carl. Let's get him to partner. That's the goal there. If you want to see tournaments, look up Fox Cities Pinball, I believe. I don't think it's on YouTube yet, but I know it's still on Twitch. You can see the VOD there at Fox Cities Pinball. And again, keep supporting everybody that you can. Stay safe out there. Until next time, I'll see you guys soon. Later, guys.