Yeah, but there's like six holes up there. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Should we do something really dangerous here? Put us on. Yeah, that's dangerous. Let me here. Let me adjust this camera. Yeah, that sounds good. Watch as Justin Masterson does all the things with the See, that was highly technical. Yeah, I'm going to have to charge labor dollars for that. Uh oh, man. I'm glad I didn't wear my Cincinnati shirt today. That would have been embarrassing. Yeah, I know. What are the odds? Actually, I I have it over there and was going to put it on, but now I can't. Now it's too much. It's too matchy matchy. What shirt are you wearing today? This is uh from Labowski Fest, a now defunct Big Labowski festival in Louisville. Oh, okay. And uh it was so much fun. It sounds I mean it sounds fun. Yeah, it was. So, at one point uh my favorite activity was they had the exact car that Labowski drives. Uh-huh. Uh not the one from the movie, but the exact model. A replica painted green. And then um you got in that car and from the passenger seat, you had to fling dirty a bag a bowling bag of dirty undies onto a mannequin of a nihilist. And it was tricky, but if you hit him, you got like 50 bucks. Oh, heck yeah. Yeah. So, not only do you get to really live Big Mowski, you get money to do it. You can even get money for it. You get paid. It turns out nobody did. It's very, very hard. But, but you could you had the opportunity. And just the fact you have the opportunity says it's worth it. Yes. So, we're back. We're back. Cincinnati day two. We were on what uh 10 hours ago. Yep. If I believe my math is correct. We were on four 11 hours. 10 hours ago. 11 hours. about how we did about 11 hours long. 11 hours long. 10 hours. 10 hours ago. Yeah. So, we were on, but you can imagine how it would be if you didn't. That's right. You totally can. Yeah. We're back on. So, uh today is the match play tournament. Yep. Um I believe the number of people we're looking at right now is 76. Uh if we get everybody checking in, I'm watching the number grow as we speak on match play. Uh let me pop that matchplay link into chat for you guys today. There it is right there. We'll have another match play link when we get to A division finals and B division finals. Um I believe not having looked at the rule set in a minute or so, I believe we're looking at eight rounds of group play today. Okay. Um probably a 7531. I will verify all of that for you. Yeah, we'll bring Eric over to check in on that. But yeah, we will. And then I think we're going to have an A division and a B division. Um so this is very similar to what we've seen previously in his Northern Kentucky Open uh the tournament last year as well. So, think of it a little bit like three different tournaments. So, you've got you've got your qualifying, which is one, which is one, which and again, for those who don't uh play pinball tournaments, match play is when you are matched up with another group of players for a game. Correct. And depending on how you score in that game, your position is what matters. First place, second place, third, and fourth. That's how you award points. Exactly. The the uh better you did. So, if you got first place, you're getting more points. last place, you are getting fewer points or less. That is correct. So that's essentially the idea. And then you get rematched to a new group based on your standing. So you continue to play either harder players if you are doing well or perhaps easier players or players who are not doing as well um if you're not doing well. So it's really nice because what it does is it it pretty quickly tends to sift out so that you're playing players of an approximate skill level or having a similar date to you. Correct. So, so that's number one. Number two, once we are done with everything today, the top 16 players will qualify for A division. Y and the top eight players and the eight players below that 17 through 24 will qualify for B division. Y um the only limitation as far as rules, you know, are, you know, because a lot of these tournaments will have some restrictions as far as if you're too good, you can't play in B. We don't have that. But if you're a top hund player and you make B division, you're not always going to win the prize money from it. You can still play. You can't win the money. Can't win the money. Yeah. Which is, I think, a really great rule. I'm sure it's very frustrating if you happen to be a top 100 player, but it is intended to give players like me a chance. Exactly. Right. Who wouldn't stand a chance against a top 100? And in this case, I think the only potential top 100 players I think that we have here, I don't think James Scott is in the top 100. I It was close. Nope. Um I know Tim Ston, our winner from yesterday, rocking an Iron Maiden shirt. I just saw him walk in. Pretty He's looking nice. I I like the look. Um I don't believe he was top under. So we might be looking at just John Del Zapo. And Keith Elwin may be playing. Yeah, Keith is fourth on the waiting list. I know he's hoping to play. And um if it happens that four people don't show up, then Keith is in. So he would certainly be one of those top 100 players. So the ultimate proof that these tournaments are really for everybody. They really are first come first serve. is a stern designer and a top 10 player and he's on that weight list. He designed one of the machines in the tournament and he still doesn't get into the tournament because this is it's first come first serve and it is no preferential treatment. It's for everybody. It really really is. So, we're psyched about that. Let me turn that off here. We don't want to have any drop frames. So, we talked about the qualifiers and then we divide into the A and B. And you will see if you're following on match play that we switch to a different match play link for that. It's a totally different setup for that. Same idea as far as your scoring per game. It's first, second, third, fourth, 7, 531. The way each of the rounds go is you are broken into groups of four based on your seating and then you play three games. So in that sense, if you were watching with us last night and looked at how each round of the women's qualifying went, it's a very similar setup to that except it's one round. you're playing three games and you're um you're you move on or you're eliminated based on that. Top two players in each group move on. The bottom two players do not. So, we will go from 16 to 8 and then down to four. And obviously, when we we have a final four, that is our finals. And in the B division, we just have a semis and a finals, 8 to four. And that's how that will go. Um if there are ties in that um obviously very possible that we see ties as far as points goes. Um we'll have a oneame playoff to see who moves on if it is a a place depending position. Y um so that would even you know be if we have a tie for second and third or first second and third um we would have a playoff for that in the finals if we have any ties whatsoever. Uh we would have a playoff to see who finishes first, second, third and fourth. Yep. So, all of that matters for for prize money, but from a move on perspective, it's top two until you hit the finals at all times. So, we'll do whatever kind of tiebreers we have to make that happen. If there are folks who are thinking, how in the world do you tie in a pinball game? The the the way is because we use points, right? We're not using scores. And so, it may be that you have two people who have the same number of points, three people. Last night, there was a seven-way tie in the women's tournament, but this is where it got really weird. It's normal to have a few people tie. Seven's a lot. It is. And I would expect we're going to see some ties in this because you're only playing three games. Y um and obviously, you know, it's going to be in some sort of multiple of two based on 7531. 21 197 15. You you get how the math kind of works with this. And it's very possible that, you know, we're going to see people tied at 11 or 13 points after three games are played. It's not about your in-game score, as he said. It's about your placement. And you get points based on placement, right? And what happened last night that was really odd for those who tuned in for the women's tournament was not only did we have a tie in that sense. Yeah. But we had this never happens. We had a points tie on a playoff game. I have never seen I I have I've seen it. No, I maybe I have never seen this. To give you an idea of how rare a tie is, I'm going to kind of lean back to Pinberg. And I've asked Elizabeth Cromwell, who is one one of the main directors of the Pinberg tournament, runs Replay FX, about this. Every year, if you go and look at the Pinberg standings, and that's one of the most complex pinball tournaments in the world. It is the most complex pinball tournament in the world. 10 rounds, 12 games per round, or four games per round, I should say. So, you're playing 40 games, a thousand people playing it. Um, and Black, I don't know what the first game is. That's going to kind of be a surprise. We'll see where the random number generator does. See who he wants to focus on here. We'll let you know. Yeah. Um, so literally thousands of games of pinball are being played as part of that tournament and they have tech usually just on points maybe one tie every two years, right? Like you'll see a.5 in there every now and then and that tends to be because someone had to drop out of the tournament. It's usually not because of a score tie. And just as crazy, the score ties tend to happen on older solid electromechanical machines. mechanical real machines. You look at a game like Sweethearts, you might expect a tie because you're literally counting by ones on those scores. Like if you finish with a couple hundred points, that's a decent game, right? Yeah. Almost every time the tie has been in a game like that. Y last night. That was not last night. Last night they were playing big game or sorry, big guns, which is that's a game where you're playing in the hundreds of thousands of points, sometimes millions if you're playing well. It's a system it's a system 11 game. Yeah, it's a William System 11 game. Yeah. um solid state. And so you're you're talking about what are the odds of two players having the exact same score at the end of three balls. It's nuts. Was it three balls or one? Even one. Even one. Even one. I think it was one. Same difference though. The amount of, you know, variation in shots. One switch can make the difference. Your bonus makes the difference. To have a tie in a game like that, you basically have to have two people play almost a mirrored ball, right? you know, hit the exact same switches almost in the same order because that matters too. You saw it last night. If you gave me a week and a a partner to try and reproduce that trying to tie, I couldn't do it. You gave me a month. I don't think I could do it. I mean, really, it's amazing. And that's playing 6 hours a day. That's amazing. So, we are just about ready to start up. You might hear our tournament uh director, Eric Wartenberger, in the background. He's getting things started shortly and we are going to uh figure out which game we're going to start on. One thing I do want to call out is that today we are using a fantastic rig that Eric built. Yes, he did. Um that is totally mobile. So, we're going to be able to switch games just about every round. Instead of being sort of stuck to a game and then waiting for a break, he's going to be he could switch between balls if he wanted to. And we've seen it happen. And we've done it, right? Yeah, we have. All we do is we take this portable rig, we move it down two machines, and we push it back in. Everything is wireless. There's three cameras on the rig. There's a microphone on the rig. It is genius. And I haven't seen another one uh like it before. So, I'm really excited to go back to that today. Uh trust me, every time that I am at one of Eric's shows at his house, I am taking pictures of that rig, even though I probably have a 100 pictures of the rig put away in my iCloud library because I want to take notes. I want to learn how to do that. You know, it's not the cheapest thing in the world to set up, but boy, if I if I have the money and the time to do it, I would love to do that for my own pinball streaming. And and really the wireless rig is where a lot of places are going. Um, you know, shout out to Carl D'Angelo of uh, you know, IE Pinball on Twitch. He was kind of the person that first started this setup probably about a year and a half ago, uh, with equipment and his blueprints have become the format that Eric and a lot of other people use. That's where he got it from to make this happen. That's where he got it. Oh, that's great. Thank you, Carl. So, um, yeah, if you see IE pinball, it's probably going to be a very similar type setup. You see a lot of people do this now. Um, the tech has become affordable enough that, you know, hobbyist enthusiasts like like us can can get some cameras. Really, the really the cameras are the least expensive part of the whole deal, right? You know, you just have to have something that's USB powered, but your transmitters, uh, your capture cards on the back end and enough computing power to handle multiple dig. was the big investment I think was he's been he's been upgrading cards and upgrading computing power just to make this happen. We're talking about all of these video streams simultaneously and wirelessly. Yeah. Takes a lot of juice. Yeah. And I I you have Let Let me Can we grab a few batteries here? You want Can I have some batteries? Yeah. So, we have just stacks of these. There's two. There's I think we have seven over here. Three. I see three more plugged in. Giant USB batteries right here. Y the kind of things that you buy from Monorice that you know they advertise charge your iPhone 17 times or however many times it does. It's not 17. I think it's more like six, which is still stinking impressive. Those are the batteries that are on the rig running the transmitters, running the cameras and everything. So, you know, we've got enough juice here we probably could stream wirelessly for 36 hours on that rig just with battery power. And I think we almost hit 36 hours yesterday. I think we were pretty close. I wish my man Wolf man, he's one of our regulars that comes in chat in in level one and he always says we're cranking it up to 11. And his joke about our our man Carlos laser loss is that Carlos is when he streams he is streaming 37 hours a day and we simply can't compete with that. I think we tried last night. Yeah, we gave it our best shot. I can't beat 37. Wolfman would have been highly proud of our efforts. I really think he would have been. But uh unfortunately we didn't quite hit 37. So, uh, sorry to disappoint him. We We tried. We tried. Got to 34 and a half, maybe. 34 and 12. The half hour matters. The half hour. It was a big difference. Yeah. Actually, that last I will say the last half an hour of last night. So, it's 1:30 in the morning. Scott and I are getting horse from having commentated all day. How do I have a voice right now? Yeah. And it's 1:30 in the morning and we're starting the finals of the women's tournament. And it was from 1:30 to about 1:50 in the morning that I had the most fun of my day. Yeah. Because at that point, most of the show had cleared out. We had closed the show part. We were just doing the tournament and all of a sudden it amped up. We had this magnificent uh set of playoffs, working its way up to the finals. It came down to uh nailbiter on the finals, and I was as energized at at 2:00 a.m. as I was at 2:00 in the afternoon. We just finished um you know and and we we were all a little bit slap happy. We had a great group of people here in the building watching it too. You know the show floor itself had closed but we still had you know operate machine operators that were in here. We had a lot of the players who stuck around to the very end of course Eric tournament organizers. So we probably had 25 people watching that final even though every other machine other than the tournament banks were turned off at that point. So it's like there was nothing else going on. you know, you were watching this, you know, the women had everybody's full attention as they should. Yeah. And it it came down to two players from Chicago and it was I mean it was for me a nailbiter because the So we had um Maya was up against Jane and Jane and they're they're friends they're play they're on the same team in Chicago and Jane uh sorry Maya had started at the bottom of the pack. So there were how many games to get to the end of it? How many games did she have to play? Do you There were 18 games. She wasn't completely at the end of it. So she probably played 11. I would say maybe 13 games of pinball. Yeah. Grant you, not all of them were full games of pinball. But nonetheless, you still have to focus yourself on different machines out of that eight or nine in that bank over and over and over again. You can't get comfortable. And that was 13 just in the actual amazing race. Yeah, there were nine games in qualifying. if you count her two uh qualifying rounds, right? Cuz she started she didn't get a buy in the first qualifying. So, she had been playing pinball, Maya had for 6 hours. Yeah. To get to that final game. That's right. And then Jane came up. Jane won it uh with absolute ferocity. They celebrated together and then it of course it's 2 in the morning so we were like, "Yes, okay, get out everybody." And we all went to bed. We had Jane come over. We talked for about five minutes. I mean, she talked about she's still very much learning and becoming comfortable with the Amazing Race format. It's a new one. It's something we've done in Ohio on a very regular basis, and we're love the fact it's starting to, you know, get some traction around the country. By the way, Aaron Black, thank you for that host. We appreciate it. Yeah. Um, oh, Lra, thank you for watching last night's stream. You were with us all day yesterday. So glad to have you back today. Thank you, Lo Breath. One of our rules experts that we had in chat last night. So helpful. So, it's kind of strange, right? Because we're in this room. I know we look like we're in a dark corner somewhere, but we're in the the big conference room with all these pinball machines, but you guys are our little community here. Like, we can hear and see and converse with you easier than we can with everybody else. So, we're we're taking our cues from you on, hey, did we get a rule wrong? Can you give us more information about the machine? We are not necessarily experts on every machine. So, we had some great help from Loader Breath and some of our other streamers yesterday on and I appreciate it so much. I learned so much. I learn more, I think, watching people play pinball than I do actually playing it myself. Mostly because people are better at pinball than I am. So, I get to see things that I don't necessarily see when I play myself, unless I'm playing virtual pinball. That's right. Which takes away a little bit of the randomness out of the physics that you get on real machines here. Yeah. And I I'll also say that getting to watch from this angle, we get to see a bird's eye view of the game. If you're playing in a tournament, you don't you can't see over the shoulders of the people in front of you. You can't. It changes everything. It changes everything to be able to see. So, I feel like I'm getting a master class on every game that we watch. And the competitors feel the same way. I can't tell you how many times, especially like Tim Ston um was was very much guilty of this. And I say guilty in the best possible way. When his ball was done, he didn't stay around the machine. Obviously, you want to give plenty of space for your players. You know, it's a respect thing that you step away from the machine, you give some space, but a lot of people still stay close enough to the machine that they can see the DMD, they can see the scores. Tim would come over to the TV just to the right of us. I know we're pointing left. Trust me, it's right. Um, thank you. Mirrors. Yeah. Justin Timberlake songs, if you will. What's that? Mirrors. Mirrors. Yeah. I'm not going to sing it for you. No, we don't get to hear you sing. All right. If you guys give a thousand bits today. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'll sing. There's a price for everything. There's a price for everything. Everybody has a price. Deviosi is in Royal Oral, I believe. Oh, nice. Yeah. The Milliondoll Man. Don't worry, I only charge 10 bucks for singing, so it's okay. Um, he would come over to the television set and watch the broadcast to see what's happening with the other players as opposed to saying by the machine. So, people even inside the venue are taking advantage of the local stream of the broadcast to look at it. Load of breath has begun the effort. There is a hundred bits right there. Thank you so much. 900 more and I will sing and embarrass myself on straight down the middle pinball. Um I have no idea if I'm taking requests yet. Um we'll get to that at a at a point in the near future. So you can pay me not to sing. I think it's probably probably a better fundraiser. Um, the bad thing is I always said if I get to 500 followers on my personal Twitch channel, which I have not used in the longest of times, I got to 250, I think. That's pretty good. Um, I I just I haven't had time to string myself personally, that I would do a karaoke stream. So, oh my god. I guess this is my compromise today. If you give 10 bucks in bits, I'll give you maybe a minute of singing or something. So, right now, uh, I'm going to turn up Eric so you can hear him for a minute, but he's basically talking to all of our players, giving them the rules. Let's listen to Eric for just a minute. I don't want them to give everybody the best experience. Oh, he's probably pretty hard to hear from the new thing I came up with. So, please let me know. I don't think that's probably picking up very well. It probably isn't. I did look just for uh the sake of fun. Um our entire Chicago crew that we were talking about, Aaron, uh Jane Jane Verweis are now twotime women's champion. Yes. So, congratulations for her on that. They're all in the tournament today as well. So, Chicago is continuing to represent and uh and show out here. And I have no doubt, you know, they will do quite well today as well. Chicago showed up big time. They did. So, Loader Beth, the format for today is match play and uh it's going to be qualifying first. Eight rounds. Eight rounds of qualifying. 7531 scoring. Yep. And that's going to be is it three games? No, it's single game. Single game. These are singles. Okay. Um and then we're going to obviously award 7531 points for first through fourth place in each game. And then uh points totals will move on. So then we have our uh A division and B division. How many in the A's and how many in the B's? 16 in A, eight in B. Okay. And then uh those folks will also have match play going into the finals. Those will be the three game rounds. Yep. to move on once we hit elimination for A division or B division. Um there are no limitations as far as who can play in what division. The only limitation is if a top 100 player ends up in B division, they can't win cash. Yeah, that's the only thing. So I if say John Delapo ends up in 17th place, comes back and wins B division, he won't get any of the B division money. We'll push that down to second place and let them get it. I would imagine he gets the trophy. I guess we can ask I think you get the trophy. We'll give him the trophy. He he he played to earn a trophy. Yeah. But no money for you. But but no cash for you. All right. John has won more than his share of of money and and he's earned it. He's a damn good player. So we're we're glad to see that. That's why I think yesterday was one of those heartbreakers. Right. Another thing I want to show you guys is and I believe we'll go through this here. Yeah. We'll talk about um player selection, order selection, and bank selection later on. This is something that's really cool for the finals is there are banks for all these machines. You can see a quick change in there that he did for fast draw. Um, every bank that you're going to see in the finals, every three game group has an old machine, a mid m, what we call a mid machine, something from the 80s or very late7s and a modern machine. And in this case, modern can be anything from, you know, '90s Williams, we'll call it a DMD machine or newer. So basically when they pick a machine, they're going to have to play one of each and be proficient at every single type of machine. I love this format. I I love it, too. I mean, imagine, so if if you're in bank six, and you come in and you're like, "Look, World Cup soccer is my jam." Yeah. What are the odds that you're going to play World Cup soccer and Sweethearts, which is an old single player EM, right? You can't. They're two just wildly different play styles. and then Stars, which is a mix of really both of those, place really fast for a for a mid-range machine. So, you've got the speed of a World Cup, but you've got the, you know, the the idiosyncrasies of a classic machine in there, too. A little bit of both. And I I love to see these, we talked about it a little bit yesterday, but these sort of leveler machines like like sweethearts that just they and Grand Prix is another one where they just kind of reset you. Surf Champ is a great leveler where if even if you are just absolutely killing it on AC/DC and you move over to Surf Champ, you have to re you have to level set again. You do cuz it is not going to be the same game. And Fast Draw is our new addition I believe for today. I actually we both played a shared game of that last night when we were not streaming. Uh you played ball one. I think I played ball two. I don't even remember who played ball three, four, and five. All I know is I had a very good ball, too, and I was happy with it before I went and called Veronica because I wanted to catch up and tell her I loved her. Um, she's wonderful. When we get to that one, fast draw, then you're going to have to be our expert cuz I booed ball one. So, you can speak to how to win at fast draw. I will do my best. I did not do well. I I will do my best to talk about the places to get 5,000 points, which is, you know, the magic number on a lot of those old machines. You know, light your shots, get your 5,000 points, and you're in good shape. We'll take it back over here. It's on Game of Thrones right now. Do not assume that we're going to be on Game of Thrones, however. So, that could change. I think that's just where we left it last night at the end of the women's tournament. Eric is getting ready to hit the big red button to to say go. So, if you're looking at the bottom of the screen, you're probably wondering what's all this white space for down here. It's about to fill up. It's about to fill up with all kinds of names and brackets. We might also see this camera move as our first game comes up, but we have to see uh Eric is in charge of choosing who we're watching, so we're going to let him make that that choice. Absolutely. And a reminder for all of you, um