It's time for another Pinball Profile. I'm your host, Jeff Teolis. 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 either iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play. I certainly get around playing a lot of tournaments. And how this all started for me, well, you have to go way back to when I was a teenager or even before that, playing in arcades. And, of course, pinball machines were fantastic. They had video games, too, at the time of Space Invaders and Pac-Man. But pinball games, you could put a quarter in, and if you were lucky, maybe you were good enough to win a free game or get a match. And that quarter would last a lot longer. Well, as we know, arcades kind of went goodbye. And once video games became more popular and pinball machines were maybe harder to fix, and even companies like Williams said, you know what, we can make more money doing slot machines, we lost the arcades. Thank God here in 2019 and over the last few years, we're seeing more and more arcades pop up because that will get more people interested in pinball. Things like the IFPA certainly grow the tournament players and the competition, but it is the owners and the operators that are the lifeline of the future of pinball. So I'm going to, in 2019, make sure that I talk to more owners and operators. In fact, if you know some, please email me, again, pinballprofile at gmail.com because, again, we want to promote these places of pinball that are very, very important for people to be exposed to it for the first time. I'm here at one such place right now. You can probably hear some stuff in the background. The place is called Pinup Arcade Bar, and we're in Waterloo, Ontario, so just about an hour west of Toronto. And I've known this owner-operator for a few years. He owns a few different places. We'll talk about that in a second. Che Kernu. Che, you've been open for a year here now, roughly, and what this format is is a lot of great pinball machines. You'll see the pictures on our Facebook page, but a lot of great classic video games. You've got Donkey Kong, you've got Tron, you've got Burger Time, and you've got the Dance Dance Revolutions. What made you decide to open this pin-up? I've been collecting games for about, oh, I guess longer than that now, it was seven, eight years, mainly pinball, but I always enjoyed video games. I went to Hunger in Arcades as a kid, and yeah, I just really enjoyed it and I have another location in Guelph, like you mentioned and I've been running pinball machines and video games there for seven years and people really liked it and it went well and yeah, I live in Waterloo so I wanted to do a place in Waterloo. So Pablo's is the place we're talking about in Guelph and it's a big university town so it's right downtown and there's a lot of action there and certainly the bar scene is big and then you probably sprinkled a few pinball machines in there and wow, people are like, what are these? Yeah, so Guelph's a little different because it's mainly like a live music bar, and I had another side that was kind of holding tank for that, and it was sort of ripe to do something with, so we started adding games to it, and people really liked it. Now that's a traditional arcade in the sense, now it's actually a bar, as you mentioned, with bands, but it's a traditional arcade that we normally see where you pump your quarters, your dollars in. Where we're at right now with pin-up is a little bit different, and we've talked to our good friend Dan Beeson about what he's done in Toronto with Tilt. This is kind of similar to Tilt in a way that you pay your admission to come in, which right now is $5, and everything, everything except the bar is on free play. Yeah, the games are all on free play. It's a concept that Dan and I actually talked about for quite a bit before either of us really did it and thought it would be a great idea. So they got their kind of first shot at Tilt in Toronto, and it went really well there. and we do the same thing here. It gets a lot of people who are new to arcades. There's lots of young people who didn't experience arcades like us old guys. Speak for yourself. It gets them out and trying it, and it gets them trying all the games. In a coin drop setting, I found people are really timid, especially to play pinball because they hadn't experienced it before. But in this environment where the games are free, pinball is the first thing they play. Isn't that interesting? Because you and I, being older, and yes, we are older, we are not afraid to try the pinball machines. I never thought of that mindset for some of the younger players that grew up on home video game systems, you know, playing at home on their PlayStations or whatever, Xbox, pinball. They don't have these at home, so this is a neat novelty, and it's not exactly as easy as, okay, keep the ball alive, like the older EMs and maybe some of the solid states. There's a lot of rule sets and things, so it's a little confusing for people to maybe put their dollars in. Yeah, even before you actually get to that point, they don't know how to start the game really they often like in or the other location we have where it's coin drop they don't understand that you have to put money in the game to start it hitting a start button hitting the flippers to make the flippers activate like all of that is new to them well you've got a great lineup here and just some of the games i'm thinking of as you mentioned that point would be star wars and game of thrones so even if you do figure out how to start those games then it tells you pick a house or pick a character what what what yeah those games are often really confusing for new players. They kind of sit there dumbfounded and smashing the flippers and waiting for something to happen, and they don't look at the screen. They don't understand that there's a sequence to it. Speaking of smashing the flippers, now, I know you and I were talking before about games at home, and you asked me, how often do I change my coils? And I said, well, if I buy a new, quote, used game, and the flippers are weak, there's where I would do a flipper rebuild. And when I say me, I usually get Ian or somebody else to help me out. That's not the case here at Pinup. I mean, you have a ton of brand new games. Deadpool, Iron Maiden, I see ACDC, Star Wars, Guardians. These are just some of the games here. You have to do flipper rebuilds and other things too, don't you? Because of the volume of play. Yeah, a lot. I think when we first started tracking, we were seeing somewhere in the neighborhood of around 2,000 plays a week on games. And I only know that because the high scores would reset and they would reset weekly so if you had your like second or third place score the grand champion would stay but the other scores would get all the way every week it had to be because i got a high score on star wars and that has never ever in my life happened uh maybe daddy used to shoot the desktop but not this one so as an owner operator you've got a wide mix of games in here i would assume some of the newer titles especially the licensed themes are the ones that attract newer players is that safe to say uh you know what they really it's really a mix they love the old em machines they're not as intimidating they look really simple even though we know that they're actually tough games and they're pretty hard to play or to play well at least they find those games really approachable so sometimes those are the first games people go to and it's really more about theme for those kinds of players than it is about how good the game is or how good the rules are. So a game like that, you know, pinball collectors like you guys will make fun of me for having Super Mario Brothers For pinball players they might not appreciate a game like that as much as kids born in the 90s who grew up playing Mario and loved that kind of game Yeah, you were telling me you were thinking about buying monsters. You only have so much room here and you have, I don't know, how many pinball machines are in there? I think we're up around 15 or 16 now. 15, 16, you said one's got to go and the first thing I said was Super Mario Bros. You said, no, no, no, no, because I don't understand. And you're right. I'm a pinball tournament player. And, yeah, that doesn't attract me, but that's not what this place, Pin Up, is all about. I mean, we try to appeal to both audiences. We do run a league here. We run tournaments here. We get a lot of pinball players out, but we also get a lot of people that are just kind of out curiously playing games. You mentioned you run tournaments, Che. In fact, I think I ran a tournament here last February, the Super Bowl weekend. Being such a jerk, I might have won it too, which is why I've never run another one here, because my name's mud around here. But a guy who does run not only tournaments and leagues here at this location and your Pablo's location in Guelph is my good friend Ian Harrower. Ian, you know very well from obviously being one of the top players in the world, and you see him on streams. He was just recently on InDisc, and you've seen him at other Papa circuit events. Ian, how are you doing, buddy? I'm still recovering from the provincial championships. It was a great disappointment to lose to the second best player in Ontario. I wasn't going to say anything. And you brought it up. The door is wide open. Congratulations to Adam Becker, who won the Ontario championship. I think it was his fifth time, and no one was going to beat him that day. I was just happy to be second. And I had a tough, tough path to get there. John Flinton, who was a winner at Buffalo Pinball Summer Open in the Classics event. The second time he's won that in three years. He is a guy I never, ever, ever beat. Then I got to play you, Ian, which was kind of fun. We were glad to make it to that round. And flip a coin. One day I'll win, one day you'll win. I just got lucky that day. And then another player, Zeus, who was the number one player in Ontario. I can't remember the last time I beat him and got lucky. So thank you for the accolades, Ian. Dexter, it'll be the other way around, I'm sure. Anyway, let's get back to the leagues here at Pinup. Now, do you want to explain how your leagues work for maybe somebody wanting to set up a league at an arcade like a Pinup? Yeah, so there were a few things we considered when we started this league. And most of all, what was important was I really wanted to draw new players in. There's a lot of leagues going on in the area. I take part in four different leagues. You know, I'm traveling for tournaments. But I wanted to expand the player base. That was what was really important. And there's a couple things we wanted. One, flexible start time. So we didn't want to lock people in to playing against other people in a match play type format. Because take tonight for example. Some people started playing around 6.15, others started playing around 8.30. And I wanted to be able to work with people's schedules, their families and things like that. So that was one of the key factors was to have flexible start time. So we play a best game format. We find it is very approachable. It allows for flexible schedule. So we'll play six games each night. We make sure one of them is an EM because we want to give people a broad spectrum of experience on games. Pinball, to me, is about all of the generations. I love classics and I want new players to experience all aspects of that. And so we'll play six nights, six games each night, and we'll count the best four out of those six and then play towards the final. And you use the great papa.org software that Joe Schober put together, which is available for anybody if you want to do a league. Yeah, so the software is really helpful. We have players who love tracking stats, the amount of information that's available on the site. It's really easy to use. Joe is super helpful getting it set up. He did it really quickly. when the person who was doing scores at the time ran into some problems, didn't understand the interface. Joe responded really quickly and helped us through all of our problems, and it's just been great. I set up a league that you and I are in, the TCPL, on Papa.org. If I can do it, anybody can do it. Trust me, right, Ian? Safe to say? Yeah, Jeff knows absolutely nothing about technology. I don't even know how this podcast gets out.