Portland's a very small city. I think that what's happening is that just other scenes are developing and having tournaments every day like we have in Portland. That's true. And they're having big quarterly tournaments where their weeklies are growing big and kind of unwieldy. Because as you know, as a tournament director, and I want to talk to you a little bit about being a TD. Because you were a tournament director for so long. And we're talking about the growth of tournament pinball. We're talking about the growth of a pinball scene. And sometimes it's just got to be you. And even though this is happening all over the country, all over the world, I'm sure that we have listeners that are like, yeah, it's not happening in my town. It's not happening in my city. And sometimes that's got to be you. So if you're listening to this, you go, well, if it's got to be me, like, what should I know about being a TD? What should I know about being a tournament director? What kind of advice do you have for someone to get started running tournaments? I would ask you that. Your arc with Howdy is exactly what you do. Like you kind of see what's out there. Like there's stuff out there, not for me. And you just go do it how you want to do it. So the best way to do it. So like the IFP is a great resource. They have like all the rules and all the formats and stuff like that. It's very easy to go like register as a TD and, you know, submit your tournament. You got to do like a month. There's some month in advance. There's some like monetary stuff we can go over at some point. But you could just go do it and say like, hey, I'm going to be here at this bar at seven o'clock on Saturday and we're running this format. And so long as you have, you know, Facebook posts or whatever, and it's all public, whatever, people will show up to it. There's an IFPA app and they will just go around the country like so many. I've met so many people just like stumble into a weekly or, you know, a tournament, whatever. That's like, oh, yeah, I saw this on the IFPA and I just want to go check it out. Like, I'm here from Memphis, and we don't play pinball that much, and, like, you guys have a thing. I was like, okay, cool. Here, come. There's this tonight, and then there's four more. While you're in town. Yeah, while you're in town, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Apparently not as many as Toledo. Just pulling nothing against Toledo. We love you, Toledo. Stay gold. But, yeah, I just wanted to talk about, like, what do you – yeah, I guess for both of you, you both run quite a bit of tournaments. I've run a howdy or two. but what's your kind of experience with like like what's it like being that is it just like lots of fun uh it's definitely work i think the thing about it is like you're volunteering you're volunteering your time you're volunteering some of your social battery you know you got to be the salesman you got to be the showman you got to be the person that everyone the point of contact you got to be the problem solver uh you got to be the liaison between the location and you know your event and your players and and you just got to be planning and kind of selling and setting up and sometimes it can feel like a thankless job because if you do it and you do it well it becomes just sort of taken for granted like isaac will always run one it isaac doesn't even want to play he just wants to run one i've long retired you know what i mean but it's one of those things where it's like i wish more people would run their own because i I think there was a period of time in the 2010s especially where it was basically you, Greg, and Zoe running almost every tournament. And I think it led to burnout talking to all three of you on all your parts because as the scene grows, it just feels – it starts to feel a little bit like, well, these won't happen without us. Then nobody will do it, but then we won't have anywhere to play. So then you feel like this burden to always do it. And then you're like, no, but you as the community, as you grow and play, you should start running your own. And I think it's so important for anyone that's ever played in a pinball tournament to eventually run your own. Because being a TD, like I said, it's work, it's dedication, it's sacrifice of your own time. Maybe even you're sacrificing, hey, I'd be playing in this, but I'm running it. So I just I not really going to play in it just to make sure that I could you know rule on things and all that kind of stuff and keep the thing moving along well And at a certain point if you run them you understand what the TD is going through It's just walking a mile in somebody else's shoes. And I think it's very good. And not to mention that everyone will run things a little bit differently. Everyone has different preferences of formats or whatever and that stuff. So just adding more variety to your local scene is always good. and the TDs that are already in your scene, as long as you're not trying to step on their toes and run events on the same days and kind of split the herd, if you are part of the community and you're like, hey, you have one on Mondays, let's do one on Thursdays or let's do it in a different part of town at a different location, that's good for the scene and it helps grow and it'll help you be a better player in tournaments. I mean, you don't even have to go that far. Like if you're interested in helping out, just go help at a tournament. Like talk to the bullet TV side a couple days before and it's like, hey, I'm interested in running a tournament. I don't know how this works. Like what's – how does this – what am I supposed to do, whatever, and just shadow them and like don't play. Just kind of stand behind them as they like work through all the matches and stuff like that and make rulings and things. And you kind of get a feel for like the cadence of it and then you eventually can just do it yourself. It's not that hard. Like the software out there now, they just – they run themselves. So you just have to be competent and just like you have to love it. It's a lot of work, especially doing it every week. So maybe don't start there, but you need you need a good support group. I love getting new people into running them. We have a, you know, a lovely regular who now hosts her own women's format called Gator Queens, Ashley. And she's a lovely player in our local scene. And, you know, she was just like, you know, I want to see more women's pinball events in Portland. And I was like, you know what you got to do? I mean, you got to do it. Yeah. Like, that's all it is to it. You just got to do it. And she's like, well, I don't know. Like, she's shy, too, just like yourself. And I was like, you could absolutely do it. Everyone loves you. You're a great person. And like, you love pinball. And that's really the only requirements that you need. The rest of it you can figure out. The only hard part, I say, is like, when you are the TD, you're kind of, you're going to get feedback and criticism on kind of every decision you make now some of it's constructive and some of it's very friendly and some of it's you know in the heat of battle somebody's gonna come at you with something that they want to see you rule on in a certain way and when you don't they might be upset yeah and so you gotta you gotta learn to deal with i always felt like when i started howdy's and my experience is different because i don't run the serious competitive tournaments like howdy is a different format specifically because i didn't want people coming up to me with this ball was hung up but they kept playing it in a multi-ball for three seconds like what should we do and i was like i don't care the book like i don't care the book or even my case is called zoe and like make her rule on it and it's like you have to have you do have to show kind of like a a sense of like backbone when you're when you're making your rulings be fair yeah listen but don't let people sit in gotta be consistent and don't let but don't let people tell you how to rule no don't let them talk to each other either they pull them aside it's like a crime scene you gotta pull them aside you gotta get separate quick i get the story whatever because they will the better player will tend to let that know that knows the rules and the ruling might be correct but the td has the ultimate say like the td is allowed to kind of just a little bit of break the rule like whatever they say good good or bad like wrong or correct or whatever as a td you're the you're the judge i'll say yeah yeah you're the god yeah you are god that's why you should lord your power over that your players as such you get to abuse people you don't like right and the ip is very clear about that too it's like you are like the last like stop like the buck stops with you like you can't just like text josh and like say like hey is cool. I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine. But I want to pick your brain on some of this because we don't cover a lot of tournament pinball here. Alex and I are not really tournament players. I love playing organized pinball, but I like more like I like golf events or I like, and I know you can do competitive IFPA rolling slip golf and golf. Obviously I do howdy and stuff like that. I like playing dollar games with my friends. Like that's more of like my speed, but I want to get you an expert on here and sort of describe to maybe some of the listeners that haven't made the leap they they're curious about joining tournament pinball I see this happen on the pinball subreddit all the time everyone's like I'm thinking about going to a tournament what like everyone's so like nervous to go to a tournament intimidated yeah because I mean even when I like I've played in a handful of tournaments and I show up and every time I'm like I don't know what to do and people are like you'll figure it out and then you like a lot of the time they just take things people are like well you know what match play is right and i'm like i have no fucking idea what this is man yeah like the first time i saw that and everyone's like what like in like i'm like what game am i playing on you have an ipa number yeah like you're like i don't know exactly and you're like even when you've been playing pinball for a long time you can be confused by the formats and shit and i think there's a lot of jargon here like and sometimes when isaac's talking to me my eyes will glaze over like when he was helping me streamline howdy as it was growing, he'd be like, oh, you know, this and, you know, Swiss match and something like you would just like throw Swiss seating. And so we're going to go. We're going to run. Is this like a rapid fire thing? No, not rapid fire. I want I want Isaac to explain each one of these as clearly as possible. So if someone sees it on like a local posting, they can decide, you know, like, what does this mean? And does that format sound fun to me? I'd like to speak to like the kind of the new player experience and stuff, because it is very daunting at first um i when i finally got the courage to play i would have to get blackout drunk just to like interact with anyone like it just completely smashed uh because i was just so nervous and like i'm just socially anxious anyway and actually the part of the reason i started running the tournament is because like then i had something to do like now i have like now i have a purpose where i'm like not just standing around you have a task i have a task now and i'm like you know directing and like you know moving stuff around and like changing smashes like that but like the new players like that you have to learn to love to like lose which is like i don't want this to like turn like oh yeah get good or whatever like that like that's kind of true but like you have to be humble and you have to accept that like you're gonna lose a lot of matches but the more you play you're gonna get the kind of cadence of the event and you're gonna like stop being so nervous yeah and then you're gonna win your first game and you're never gonna forget it Like, it's going to be, like, the coolest thing ever. Like, your first, like, tournament, competitive rules enforcement, and, like, match win, and, like, you're, like, over the moon. And it's like, now I'm hooked, and you're going to keep coming back. Just keep at it and find the right events that kind of, like, cater towards. What do you think is the best, like, IFPA? We're going to talk about all these formats that I have up on the screen here. But what do you think is like in a perfect world? Obviously, like what's being held in your local scene at any given time that you could make is going to differ. But like in a perfect world, what do you think is like the best beginner entry format? I would probably say anything that doesn't have an elimination aspect where you're not punished by losing by like. Yeah. Like if you lose, then you get knocked out. So like some sort of match play then? any kind of like swiss grid what does swiss mean swiss swiss means it's a kind of seating so everyone plays every round and then they're kind of paired by wins and losses losses or like score or whatever so those could be like two two game two game two to four game matches so at a certain point like the the players that win their matches play other winners and losers play other losers so they're not stuck playing with just, like, people that have lost a bunch of matches. They're stuck playing the best players. Yes. There's, like, different seeding algorithms you can pick, like, when you set the event up, to, like, decide, like, if you want to, like, have balanced players where it's, like, pseudo-random. There's another thing I added to Brackle-o pretty early on, which, like, it's more or less random, but it kind of prevents you from playing the same person over and over again. Right. So you're going to play with people of all skill levels, for good or for bad, but then the Swiss, like chess Swiss tournament, whatever, is like top players, top players, top players. And there's the match play algorithm that was developed out of Pinberg, which is like an advanced kind of Swiss thing where it's effectively random in the first rounds. And then as more rounds get played, the groups kind of get tighter and tighter until the final match is 1, 2, 3, 4 seeds versus 5A down and stuff like that. Okay, so I want to talk about some of these formats. Because the ones that – the first one I went to, the weekly, was a knockout or strikes tournament. It was a three-strike tournament. And so can you describe that briefly, like how a strikes tournament works? so strikes tournament is everyone plays every round until you lose x many games and then you don't get seated in the next round and you're knocked out so so the pool gets smaller and smaller as the rounds go on because people are eliminated and so people accumulate strikes until there's one person left standing right i do not like this tournament format because you go somewhere and you might be thinking i'm playing really good i'm going to be here for six hours and you get three strikes and you're like i'm done an hour and a half or whatever i can't imagine a three strikes everlasting six hours though depends how many people are there i guess but like the beauty of a strikes tournament is that they play faster right because you're eliminating people as the games go on yes so we we do those at the tuesday weeklies in portland because we start at seven o'clock most bars close around like midnight or so sometimes you can get to whatever but we got to get everybody out of there within like three hours so that was a format that i kind of pushed early on as soon as it was kind of viable to do so because i like the aspect of just like just getting people kind of shuffled away he wants you to show up and then be quickly discarded when you prove that you're not good at pinball i want that was my experience in retrospect i actually i do like this format because it's very easy to understand it's it's extremely easy to understand And that's why we started with it. That was the first tournament I ever played was strikes. And I just was like, this is how pinball tournaments work. And that's why the next tournament I went to was like some kind of match play stuff going on with far more many people. And I was like, what the hell is this? The knockout is a variation on the double elimination bracket, which is what we used to do in Portland. So it was actually more fair because you actually got to play at least three games instead of two in the double elimination bracket, whatever. it was a really competitive scene we just kind of wanted people to like show up get in get out like i liked it at first because like i thought it's like oh if i did bad and i'll wait around or anything like that because you're eliminated then you can go home early right and this is one aspect number one goal when you're playing pinball is to leave so that's why we're all happy about i just want to stop doing this stupid thing as soon as possible but there is something really though like i'm joking but there is kind of it's like i think that's a natural thing you're like ah shit well if i'm playing shitty at least i get to go home quick but like going back to what isaac said earlier you have to learn to like the whole thing because if you don't what are you doing because you're going to lose a lot you are going to lose a lot as new yeah it's pretty brutal i mean as a director like you want this thing to finish later so like we towards like 2019 right around me like went hiatus um we were getting like 50 people a week like we were like having internal conversations of like hey what is our cap like is it yeah is it is it can we support 65 people at wedgehead on a tuesday at seven o'clock and the answer is probably not like we never actually got that far but we had to get people out the door if you let everyone play you know 10 rounds that's that's 30 matches to get through yeah and it's insane it's not appropriate for like a late night kind of just like yeah a weekly yeah like event that's got to be like a special quarterly tournament or at least a monthly on a weekend where you have all day or something and somebody can choose to but i want to talk about like so match play is pretty simple right like you get put into a round you're playing a match with other players and then you're ranked based on how you you don't get a strike which goes against you and you collect enough and you're knocked out you get scored based on how you did like how you placed in that match right so there's different like seeding algorithms there's like point structures of like how well not making this sound simple and easy you see what i'm saying absolutely not this is i think the biggest deterrent for most players is like it's just jargon heavy like everything's a jargon and it's intimidating to people like it's intimidating to get just people to play pinball you know like and that's if you're concerned on like the seeding algorithm of like this tournament you're on like you're not a new player like you're not like min maxing like oh if i you know do well in this match but then i might play this person like that's not what new players do like it's easy in the sense like you just show up you ask the td like hey am i playing a game and they say yes because you want a game and you play the game and then the other people in your group record the score for you. Like, it is, like, super simple. Like, and the more you play, the more, like, there's, like, kind of a layer of strategy to it because you just always want to play your best. So, like, you win the game or you don't. But in terms of, like, kind of tracking your path and, like, with those kind of, like, Swiss-style group play things, every round is different. It's, like, non-deterministic, like, who you're going to play because you don't know if, like, if this match, like, loses, is this person's going to be in a different kind of part of the seating arrangement, whatever like that, versus like a bracket where everything's kind of deterministic and spelled out. You know if you win this game, the match next to you, this person won. You're guaranteed to play them next.