We're in the group. We're in the group that's playing tonight. You go right straight through this door here, down the hall, turn right, and then there's a little jog there, about 30 feet, jog to the left. We don't have time for that. Go straight ahead. We'll trust you. Go straight ahead, turn right the next two corners. First door you sign, authorize personnel only, open that door. That's the stage. You think so? You authorize. You're musicians, aren't you? Thank you. Thank you very much. Rock and roll! it's time now for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teols you can find our group on facebook we're also on twitter at pinball profile email us pinball profile at gmail.com and please subscribe on your favorite podcatcher let's take a look back at the stern pro circuit event in Independence, Ohio, Kleepin. You know you're in Ohio when you see this man. Evan Bingham joins us. Hey, Evan, how are you? I'm great, Jeff. I'm here just having some fun playing pinball. Now, you only got here today on Saturday. Were you busy? No, I had nothing going on. But you know what? You're such a great player, you can probably put up a few scores and boom, there you'll be in the playoffs. But you come to the show every year? Yeah, I've been here since the first one. Thanks for the compliment. I'm not really taking competitive pinball seriously at the moment, but But still having fun. I had a free day, decided to drive up here and play a couple entries in all the machines that I can. You're not alone when you say that about taking competitive pinball seriously. There are peaks and valleys, and I know some great players like yourself that, you know, just step away for a little bit before they get back into it. Just was it too much, or what was your reasoning? A couple different reasons. Mainly it was health reasons. I was starting to not take care of myself, so I started exercising, eating better, and ever since stopping playing, I've been feeling pretty good. Not that I'm trying to tell anybody else to do the same thing, but you need to put a limit into how much you put into something, anything you do pretty much. Tell us about the Amazing Pinball Race, your big event that you had earlier this year. Amazing Pinball Race was great. We had 70 players. I think 67 were rated. First place ended up having 49 Whoppers. It was awarded to John DelZappo. Chris Stevens got second place. So that's a big deal for Columbus, Ohio. That's an event I imagine we'll see on the calendar again next year? I have no plans to do it as of yet, but usually around January or February, I start getting the itch to run a tournament. So around that time, we'll see where we're at. We actually are running the state finals at Level 1 Bar this year, which is where I run the Amazing Race. So maybe after the state finals, we'll see how things are going. Okay, Evan, all the best. Thanks, Jeff. Hello, Sanjay. How are you, buddy? I'm doing good, Jeff. How are you? It's good. You like this show? I've seen you here before. Oh my gosh, it's amazing. I think I may have missed it only once, I think. I think you were even streaming last year on Papa Pinball, if I recall you, Elizabeth and Keith. I was, that's right. It was such an honor to be with Keith and Elizabeth. You'll have to do it again. You'll be able to see the archive of this by the time this airs on Papa Pinball on YouTube. How are you playing so far? I was playing well, I thought, on the first day. And then the second day I decided to do something I don't usually do, which is play classics. So I went over and I thought I qualified in classics as well. So I was sitting pretty. But by the end of day two, I was starting to go down in both groups, which is not unexpected. But I thought, okay, I still have a pretty good margin. And I thought, okay, but then coming in today, right now, this is the third day, by the way, I am at the bubble in both of the tournaments. So in Classics, I am 25th, and in Maine, I am 24th, tied with Tim Sexton. My money's on you over that, Tim Sexton. He's got a seminar, too, so that's going to take him away. But Tim and I actually were playing back-to-back on a game, and I said, all right, highest score gets a dollar. It just paid for my trip from Canada, all right? I beat Sweet Tim on Flash, Gordon. Anyway, it's interesting you talk about where you were on day one, because I don't know if there's a longer grind of a tournament than Cleveland, because it is three days of qualifying. And that's a lot. It's a lot, but I think, I mean, I always kind of assume, okay, the competition's not going to be as fierce as, say, Pinberg or Papa or something. But, man, it's like everybody's so good. People are coming in at the last minute and putting up good scores. There's some guy named Keith Owen who just came in yesterday evening, and he's qualified with a bye. So, I mean, how do people do that? I just don't understand. He is the greatest for a reason, but there are a lot of great players here. I know Alex Harmon's here. Bill Mason's the guy everyone's talking about. I'm going to try to get Bill. Bill's got a bunch of high scores. Actually, he just walked by, and he's doing well in Classic. So I want to find out more about who this Bill Mason is. I'm sure the locals know him. Same here. So I hope I'll be able to hear this to find out who he is. All right. Sanjay, best of luck. Get in there. Thank you. Oh, and by the way, Jeff, you're doing an awesome job in both tournaments. You are nowhere close to the bubble. That is the kiss of death. You just... Oh, Sanjay. All right. I guess I'm out now. Hey, thanks, buddy. No problem, Jeff. I will see you soon. A person I've had the pleasure to meet here at Clee Penn, Bill Mason from Charlotte, North Carolina. Hey, Bill, how are you? Doing great. I'm enjoying my time here. Bill a lot of us are watching you play and going who this Bill guy as you get the GC on all these different machines Tell us about where you play and how long you been playing Okay, well, I'm living a little bit outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and we have a place there called Abari. Yeah, I know. Run by Zach Pulliam. And Kevin, too, right? And Kevin Shanus is our turnover director when we're there. Zach does a good job. He keeps about 20 to 25 games on the floor. He's got a full-time tech that keeps the games operating properly. A good selection of games. There's really a nice atmosphere there, too. People try to teach other people how to play the games, and we're all ready to learn, you know. And how long have you been playing? Started back up in January last year. Get the F out of here. Yeah, well, I played a little bit when I was younger, back in the 90s and stuff like that, and it took about a 15-year break, and then last January. Hold on a second. How old are you? I'm 51. Okay, we're in the same ballpark. I'm much, much, much younger. Same thing. Fifteen years of not playing one machine. Just found it a few years ago. And wow. And you're into it. You're all pumped. You're going around, obviously, coming up here to Cleveland. Yeah, that's how I am. I'm all in. I played in New York. Of course, I played in Pinburgh. I'm going to go to Flippers later on this year and, of course, here. And then I hope to do Pittsburgh as well. A name to watch out for, everyone. Bill Mason out of North Carolina. This guy can play. Trust me. Bill, thanks a lot. Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate it. Well, this man knows a thing or two about shows. He's here at Cleapin. We're all going to be seeing him in Chicago at the 35th Annual Pinball Expo. Rob Burke joins us right now. Hey, Rob, how are you? Good. Glad to be here. So what do you think of this show? I know your show is certainly the Cadillac, but this is pretty good. Very good show. In fact, it inspires me. It gives me more ideas for our show. But it's always good to see people like you and other people here. Derek is everywhere. but couldn't see everybody and it's always nice to see friendly smiling faces. Well last year was my first expo. I had an absolute ball. Love it. I'm going again this year. Looking forward to it and you've got some big things lined up for the 35th. We do. In fact we just updated the website. There's so many things happening I can't even remember half of it but I will say this on the 16th of this month we're going to announce a special guest that's going to be coming to the expo so So be ready. Put the word out. Gentlemen, tell your wives you won't be in town because you'll be at Expo. Ladies, tell the husbands and boyfriends you're not going to be around. You'll be at Expo. I'm excited. Very, very excited. You don't even need that great special guest. It's going to be packed, but that just makes it all the better. You've got so many things that go on there. And 35 years, that's a real testament to a lot of hard work and a real passion for pinball. Yeah, I appreciate that. But sometimes I don't think people realize the labor and love behind it. But, you know, when you enjoy what you're doing, it gets easy. You do a great job, Rob. I'll see you in Chicago. Thank you. See you. See you there. When you go to a show, usually there's all kinds of neat vendors. This is a very interesting one. It's called Battle Toss. It's a new game. And creator of the game, Russell Horner, is here right now. Hey, Russell, tell us about what you've done. Okay. Actually, it's a wooding product. It's a combination of beer pong and Connect Four. So you take turns throwing a colored ball into the basket, and you try to get four in a row of your color, horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. I like it, too, especially when you look at how popular beer pong is. This is really taking it to another level. I've seen a lot of people play it. It's a lot of fun. How long did it take you to put this together? To construct one, it takes 45 minutes if I have the material. But to come up with the idea, how long? Oh, I've been working on this for a year and a half now. So we're finally rolling it out across the country. We're taking it to colleges, college campuses, bars across the country, and families just for picnics and that. Do you know why I like this better than beer pong? Why's that? Because I find beer pong fun yet completely disgusting. It's just so gross with the beer everywhere. I want to take a shower right after playing beer pong. This is a little nicer. Same kind of idea, but a lot of fun. And then you add the Connect 4 element to it. Very, very cool. I'm going to take a picture, and please check out our pinball profile Facebook page, and you'll see what Russell has done here. It's very, very cool. I wish you the best of luck. All right, thank you very much. And they can go online, www.battletoss.com, to see it in action. There's video of some bar tournaments that we've had. Go to the website, and they can see it in action. All right, thanks, Russell. Thank you very much. I'm with Kim Martinez here, and she ran the women's event here at Cleve Pin. Yes. How was that? I heard it was pretty good. 44 women? Yes, so 44 women came out for the first all-day women's tournament. Match play. It was a match play qualifying until 3.30. We actually had a break, met back for the finals. So honestly, we wrapped up at around 10 o'clock at night. So it was like an all-day event, and a lot of women showed up specifically for this. And it was in a dedicated room, so that was a nice change this year too. You did a very good job there. And you do a lot at Level 1, don't you? Yeah, so I'm our main pinball league organizer for our co-ed stuff and all of that. That's big because, again, you're providing great pinball action too, and you've got a pretty good player there in Holly Koskinen who won the WIP tournament. I saw her this weekend. Yes, absolutely. We couldn be more proud and honestly Holly a great player She actually one of the people that got me to take competitive pinball a little bit more seriously because I kept losing to her when I first started playing pinball and I kept telling myself no I have to figure out what I doing because I can keep losing like this sucks But no, she's an amazing person and an amazing competitor. And honestly, I'm really proud of the Columbus scene because we do have such a strong showing in women. Amy Kesting is another Columbus player? Amy Kesting is another person. We have Debra, who also comes out and plays. Jen, Bree. We just have a very awesome group of women that do love playing competitive pinball. A lot of great names in pinball. and your work at Level 1 brings them to the forefront. So thanks very much, Kim. Well, thank you, Jeff. Finally, we have discovered the brains of the IFPA. It is not Josh. It never has been. Zach, he's just there in name only. It's Brian Shepard, the man behind the wonderful website. How are you doing, Brian? Pretty good. And you're in good spirits, too. You were just in the toughest tiebreaker, 7-7-7, and one game to it. I guess you had to be in the top two. Yeah, and on the hardest playing jackpot, I think, ever. It was tough, too. I mean, it's from Papa. I don't know if people know the jackpot, but it's very tough. It was used in finals at Pinburgh this year. Same one. So if you watch Pinburgh, you know the one. So give us a little details about your day-to-day with IFBA. I'm an IT person by trade, and basically I'm in the tech. So that's what my get out of IFBA. So working on the website, working on the rankings, anything else I want to do. So don't do day-to-day unless there's a problem. But the goal is I love data. So I'm in the data field. And so I love stats. I love tracking everything. So it's just an enjoyment to be able to contribute. So I can't run tournaments and can't do other things, but I can definitely do this. Brian, I was in a tournament recently called the CNEPC. And there were five tournaments, four tournaments. There were five. the women's also but I played in four of them and I did quite well in those tournaments and then when I went to IFPA I noticed I was sixth in the world after the CNEPC pretty much everybody played in the CNEPC there was a bug in the system and we were all you were I never heard of this nobody told me I think I had 1400 whopper points there was some weird bug where it was multiple tournaments on the same day or something like that no I've never heard of this oh I've got a screenshot of because I'll never be in the top ten. No, because when we rebuild, nothing's live until everything's done. And the only thing I can think of is we retired the old data from before Whopper 5.0. So there might have been something like that, but no, nobody told me. So he must have just rebuilt and it fixed itself, and those are the good bugs. You'll have to talk to Joshua. It was a great bug. Are you kidding me? I'm like, sign up for IFBA 17 right now. Anyway, it was obviously fixed, but I had a lot of people email me like, what is this BS? And I was like, hey, I just play the tournaments. Everybody does a great job. When there's something wrong, usually we know. I know there's a few bugs that exist now, like with comparisons with players, but I'm working on a redesign on the website, doing a lot of other stuff that I want to get to first. So if it's critical, we'll fix it. If not, we'll wait. But, yeah, please let us know. I'm always interested. Shep, it is a great website. and it's always nice to look at that front page. I noticed a glitch, though, a few months ago where the top 25 became top 26. I thought that was rather odd. Yeah, I noticed particular players like Josh was starting to fall down a little bit. 26th exact. Yeah, the goal was actually to have it keep going down if he kept dropping. But he's so far down. Well, there was a tournament he played in that weekend that he did good in that moved him back up. So it kind of ruined the joke a little bit. But the goal was if he was going to go down, that list was going to keep going down with him And him and Becker, actually, because they were both starting to fall down a little bit. But, yeah, he's got to play more. There's a lot of great players playing now, and that top 24 or 5 is really hard to get into. Yeah, you know what? When you say he has to play more, one word comes to mind. Boo, frickity, who? He's got to win a major. I think that's what it takes. Yeah. Come on, man. This is the real world here we're talking about. But, anyway, he's got a few events. Expo is going to be big for him. He'll be at Freeplay Florida. So we certainly wish Josh the best of luck. Yes, but I can get one more dig on him. That's why we're creating another major for next year, the U.S. Open. Yes. Oh, what a weasel. Oh, well. You know, he did win the Stern Pro Circuit, not a major. He won that a couple years ago. He's still got some skills, but most of them are now involved changing diapers. Yeah, there's a little bit of jokes on there. If you guys have fallen the IFP World Championships last year on the standings, I had a little joke with him on. I forget what I had, but it had something next to his name that followed him, too. So we kind of do that. There might be a few things on the website you find that's kind of jokey, maybe not taken in good nature sometimes, but we're trying to be a little lighthearted with some of this. Hey, you know what? It is the IFPA. It is the website. It is the ranking system that gets a lot of people into the competitive side. You do a great job, and thanks very much, Brian. Well, thank you. It fun The Stern Pro Circuit here at Clee Pin is over and we got our final three right now Steve and Bruce are right here from Cleveland Congratulations on third place Thank you very much I appreciate it. I have not got to see you play that much, except we saw you on Papa Pinball, watch you on the stream, the drop catches, the control, the comeback on that last game. Even when you're out of it, you're standing on the stream. What's he going to play for? He can't win. Well, you know what you do? You play for pride, and you play to do the best you can, and you showed that on Deadpool. Yeah, I think Deadpool is an amazing game. I've been killing it all day long, even qualifying. I was the first qualifier, and I had a really good game and a really good score on basically all the games. But you did it on disco multiball. You got a lot of points on that. That's one of my favorite multiballs. It's easiest where you can hit the snake shot to get the 2x3 exploring. That's basically my goal for doing disco multiball is just the multipliers. Steven, you're a great player, and I know everybody in Ohio knows that, And now everybody watching here on the Stern Pro Circuit saw that too. Congratulations on third. Hey, thank you. I really appreciate it. Okay, thanks very much. Louis Bevins is here, and boy, is he having a great 2019. Almost won the championship. It came down to a tiebreaker on jackpot. Louis, I know you're disappointed, but I'm really proud of you because it was not easy to get to where you were to be second place. Oh, thank you. I mean, I've had almost, I would say, a magical day again. And then, unfortunately, the magic ran out in the end. But, hey, I mean, that's pinball. Sometimes you get the good shots. sometimes you get the bad breaks and hey i'll take another second i don't know if i'm Josh Sharpe level yet but i'm definitely getting up there with all these seconds now you are way better than Josh Sharpe oh but then so is everybody but anyway lewis you're a great player i want you to reflect on the final round what was the one missed opportunity you're you're regretting right now because there was tilts on deadpool i think on deadpool i did everything i could to fight the game the game was fighting hard back one of my bigger gets regrets is probably my ball two or three on metallica where I left a snake on the table. I could have been able to motor another $10 million out of that and probably walk away with this one right here. Again, second place, a beautiful trophy, huge Stern Pro circuit points too. Exactly. I'm excited about that. Where were you going into this? Do you know? Before they threw Pinbergen, I was sitting fourth, so I should be sitting well now. Wow. Okay. So can you imagine that Stern Pro circuit? Let's say you're top four. You have a one in four chance of being the Stern Pro champ and winning a brand new pinball machine. That would be fantastic. I mean, I'm trying to get as good a position out here as I can. All these trophies and stuff are great, but at the end of the day, there's a belt coming in 2020, and I want to win it. Hey, Lewis, if I have to think of three people in the world of pinball who know rules, you are right up there. I think of Bowen, I think of yourself and some other greats, too. But the thing that separates you from others is you share that knowledge with people, even if you're competing against them. And I think that makes you such a genuine, awesome guy. Oh, thank you. I'm looking to see if there's any new outlets to sharing stuff with people. I've been really busy recently. I've been thinking, oh, man, I want to sit down and actually write some rules, write some stuff. Maybe I'll actually get down to that now. Good player, good rules knowledge, and a great guy. This is well earned for you. Congratulations. Oh, thank you. Okay, let's go to Luke Nahorniak right now from Minnesota, the grand champ, who drove how many hours to get here? Just 12. Just 12. All right, so anything under six is like you going to get milk, I assume, right? Yeah, for sure. 12 hours. Have you ever been to this? I have not been to Cleveland at all. What made you decide to drive 12 hours? I mean, you could have gone to Northwest. It's a little more than 12. But why did you want to come to this event? Well, I'm going to be missing Pinball Expo this year, unfortunately. It falls on pheasant hunting season, and I'm going to be hunting that week. Sure, sure. So I'm looking for other shows, and this one happened to be on the schedule. I was like, let's do it. Boy, I'm very impressed with your games today. And we talked to Lewis about some of the regrets. What was the game that really put you in the spot where you thought, okay, I've got a real shot at this? That comeback on Metallica. Yeah. Okay, good point. Let me just set the scenario. Lewis on ball one had $82 million on Metallica, your player three, and you came up and got $63? Yep, $63 million. I was feeling good after that. I know I was still $20 million down, but I was within shooting range at that point. It was game one, too. So it's like, oh, it wasn't the final game that was going to decide things. And you just came back in almost the same pattern that Lewis did. Started with Sparky, then went to the grave multiball. And you almost copied him note for note there and got very, very close and then came back to win that game. Yeah, I think the difference was on ball one there is he collected his crank it up for $20 million. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. Boy, how good does that feel, that trophy? It feels great. You had a 12-hour drive, but you're going to be wide awake, aren't you? Oh, yeah, for sure. Nice little passenger beside you and some good cash to go with it. Yep. Congratulations on your Stern Pro Circuit win. Thank you, Jeff. All right, Luke Naharniak, your champion here at Cleapin. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find our group on Facebook. We're also on Twitter at Pinball Profile. Email us, pinballprofile, at gmail.com. And please subscribe on your favorite podcatcher. I'm Jeff Teolas. And yo, I need a song Could you help me in?