it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff tiolis 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 either itunes stitcher or google play and also check out our under construction website pinballprofile.com this is episode 155 but also the first in our live series here on papa pinball on youtube so thank you very much for joining us listening to this audio maybe after the fact but we are live right now here on tuesday september 18th and we're going out to pittsburgh the home of all things pinball i think for many of us fans doug polka joins us today he is our special guest hi doug how are you good evening i can't possibly follow up that introduction That was super professional. Yeah, but the content you're going to be providing is what we're all here to talk about. And today's topic is about tournaments, too. You've run several. In fact, a great one that I experienced last year is coming up at the end of October in the Pittsburgh Pinball Open. We'll let you talk about that right now. Yeah, so we just threw it on the schedule. We had a difficult time getting the facility ready for the tournament. But it's going to be October 27th through the 30th. Pittsburgh Pinball Open. We have a main tournament, classics tournament, women's tournament, a unique format called Pinkymon, which if you go on the website, you can read the details on that. There's a Facebook page out there now, so if you go on Facebook and search for Pittsburgh Pinball Open, you will find the event. We're in our ninth year, which is amazing because I still remember lugging the games into the basement of a bar to run the first one many years ago, but we're really excited. You know what's great about this tournament too for some of those people that like the throwbacks to the papa familiarity that we see in usually in april when the building's not being sold or whatever the papa ticket system it's so difficult to get in but ppo has that and uh i always find that really benefits the better players i know because i've never even come close to making it with the ticket system you have to have five great games in the main you have to have four great games in classics and then pray, cross your fingers, that you're in the top 24. Yeah, actually, when we created the PPO, me and a couple people in the Pittsburgh area, back in nine years ago, the idea was there wasn't all these tournaments that we see now. We're kind of spoiled that every weekend there's somewhere to go and there's somewhere to go play pinball. But nine years ago, there wasn't that. For us in the Pittsburgh area, we basically went to Papa, and then we would go to another event that was in Fairfax, which doesn't occur anymore, but I hear it may be starting back up. So me and a couple local people got together and said, you know what, we love Papa and we love the Papa format. And while we don't have a building with 400 games in it, we can kind of replicate it in a way. So that's pretty much how the PPO was born, to basically rip off Papa. Well, it's a lot of fun. And I know, was it Bowden who won it last year or Alex? I can't remember. I think Bowden got revenge. I think Steve won it last year. Alex won it the year before. No chairs were thrown last year. That's all I do remember. There were no chairs harmed in the making of Pittsburgh Pinball Open last year. So while we're on the topic of tournaments, I definitely want to talk to you, Doug, about maybe some do's and don'ts for tournament directors and even players, too, because not everyone's going to be a tournament director. So I think of when we first started playing pinball, and for me, it was just playing a game. Maybe it's an arcade. Then you found out about a league, and then we joined leagues, and there's a little bit of competition there, but really it's more about the social aspect, too. Playoffs, obviously, a little more competitive. But then the tournaments themselves. The first time I went to a tournament, it was a pinball competition. I was hooked. It was fun. There was some adrenaline going on. I wouldn't say there were any tensions, but I've been to pinball tournaments where that has been the case too. So at one point, after being in a tournament, I thought, I want to start my own tournament. And I went to Papa.org, a great place, great tips to see, some good advice for tournament directors. And even though you think you know how it's going to run, things always pop up. things you can't really anticipate to happen. So that's why you're here to talk about maybe some of the things that we can do. And we're also going to invite people that are watching on YouTube on Papa Pinball to offer some suggestions. We've got a few questions already, too, that we'll get to and acknowledge, too, because this really is your show as well, too, as we do it live here for the first time. So there are different types of tournaments. And, Doug, I think we're going to exclude some of the maybe one, two-hour, just a light tournament. We're going to be talking about if you want to have a tournament that maybe maximizes TGP GP for the IFPA standings. Maybe you want to have multi-day events. So this is where you're going to come in and maybe give some good advice to some people. Yeah, and as Jeff said, we're going to be talking more about larger formats. Most of the stuff we're probably going to talk about doesn't apply to the knockout tournament at the local pub or whatever. So some of the things I may be saying, you guys may think, I can't do that. I don't even have keys to the game. Yeah, that's excellent to mention too because you're right. The pub nights where you want to be in there two, three hours maximum, those strike tournaments usually are the best too. We're looking at more of maybe you've got a bunch of games or a bunch of people are going to put them together. We're looking at those kind of tournaments that pop out that sometimes even turn up to be on the Stern Pro Circuit because they're so popular. Pro Circuit shirt on today. I've got mine on too. I think it's the first time I've worn it. I always feel guilty because I'm an alternate, but whatever. Shirt fits, I'm wearing it. Anyway, so these are the larger tournaments. So there are different varieties too. We know there are the pump and dump tournaments, so the Herb style score, where that might be multi-day and multi-hour. So it's really your best score, and there's a scoring system starting at maybe 100, and the next score is 90, then 85, 84, 83, down the list. And your best four or five games, whatever the tournament director has determined, will place you into the playoffs. Now, those are big tournaments for people to run, but they're the ones that usually generate the larger amount of people, correct? Yeah, the pump and dump or the herb style or best game, it depends on what you want to refer to. Every format has its benefits and its drawbacks. So like you were talking about earlier how the PPO is the pop-a-ticket system. The pop-a-ticket system rewards consistency across a number of games because your ticket consists of four or five games, and then your total ticket score is what counts. Whereas in Herb or Best Game, what you get is you can play Batman 66 over and over and over and over and over and over again, and you're just going to keep your top score, and your top score is the only one that's going to count. So where that differs from a player's perspective is with the Herb style in the big tournaments, you're always looking to just blow the game up. You're always just looking to destroy the game with the highest possible score. Whereas in the PAPA format, there tends to be a little more strategy when your ticket's playing out. If you blew up the first and second games, sometimes you'll see players take a safer strategy on their last few games so that that ticket sticks. Because you don't want to go for a big risk strategy and put up a goose egg and then basically make that whole ticket worthless, despite the fact you just put the top score of the tournament on NASCAR or whatever it might be. Here's the thing. The PAPA ticket is unique, and we're going to see it at the PPO and eventually at the next PAPA event. We are also talking about match play, which a lot of people are familiar with, too. And that is something that's huge at Pinberg. And that's something, if you're going to do that, you really need a lot of different machines. And you can kind of calculate how many people you can maximize at a tournament like that, depending on how many machines you've got, how much time you've got. I would always recommend a hard number of rounds as opposed to time. I've been in some of those tournaments where they try to do match, and they say, we're going to play for four hours. Well, what if the first group is an hour deep playing Firepower 2 and just stealing a lot, something like that, and then, well, that's one round. We've only got three hours left. I would recommend a hard number of rounds versus a time limit. Do you agree? It depends. It really depends on the tournament. Some of them, match play can even, besides like Pinberg where you're counting wins and losses, is strikes tournaments are also essentially match play tournaments. They're just ones where you don't necessarily get to play the entire time. You're only going to play until you get however many strikes it is and you're eliminated. I've seen tournaments like, for example, the 24 Hours at the Sanctum is a great event. I've personally never been there, but I've never heard anybody speak ill of that tournament. And that's one that's done by time. It's not done by rounds. You're right. If you are doing it by time instead of rounds, you can get into a situation if your games aren't balanced properly that you know somebody's going to sit on world poker tour for two and a half hours and everybody else is going to be standing around and generally players like match play because we're not standing around we're not waiting we're not queuing on a game we're we're playing we're in as soon as our game's over and everybody else's game's over we're going to jump on our next game and then we're going to jump on our next game or like pinberg where you where you have a schedule and you know that i show up at this time and I'm going to play four games and I show up at this time and I play four games and there's not as much downtime so generally match play is the one that I we we receive the best feedback on when we send out the circuit surveys but like you said that there are benefits and drawbacks to everything match play you know you need enough games to be able to have everybody on a game at one time so if you want to have 840 people in a tournament like pinberg you need 300 plus games with your backup games, which obviously not many people can pull off. But there's only one tournament that is that size. True. And it's one of the best. It's one we all flock to. And it kind of makes us want to run our own tournaments, too. I know so many people. I think of Tracy Lindbergh from Arizona, who years ago came to Pinberg and was in love with it and then just took it back to Arizona. And she's a TD now. She's even a TD at Pinberg, too. So you create monsters with these great tournaments. And that's why pinball keeps growing and growing. It's great. So let's talk about some of the things that I think really matter. And the first one I want to talk about, it's the one that I think matters to me the most as a player, and it's transparency in every aspect too. The transparency of the rules in advance so that a player knows what they're getting into. There should be no kind of surprises. You know how the dollars are going to be executed and how they're going to be tallied, what the costs are, what the payouts are, if that's something that matters to you, what the format is, including the playoffs. And when you have that transparency and there are no surprises, I think it makes it much easier for the TD, too. I remember talking to Josh Sharpen. He always said, you know, when you're thinking of the tournament, try to avoid something that's going to create a problem. Try to anticipate what the problem might be and avoid it. It could be a game selection. It could be a rule. It could be something that's a gray area. And I think that's something that all TDs should strive for is that transparency. Yeah, I mean, one of the first things when people come to me and say, you know, I'm thinking of running a tournament, where should I start? And once again, we're referring to generally larger format tournaments when we're talking about this stuff. Number one is a written set of rules. Like, it seems simple, but, you know, you can use the IFPAPA rules that are available on PAPA's website or the IFPA website, which basically are generally agreed upon tournament standards. But make sure you have a schedule. You know, make sure people know when does qualifying start, when does qualifying end. How is everything divvied up? Is there an A division? Is there a B division? What do playoffs look like? Are there any special circumstances in your tournament that you might need to define? So, for example, especially if you're running a Herb-style tournament or best game tournament, you might want to have a rule in your rule set that says, after this time of qualifying, if a game goes down, we're going to leave the scores there. But if it breaks before that, then we're going to void the scores and refund people. So that's one of the things that you should think about. One of the things that trips up a lot of people, I've seen a lot of comments about it recently, is what do you do with the entry fees? I am not of the belief, especially when you're running a bigger tournament, there are a lot of costs involved with running large events, circuit size events. a lot of times besides the sweat equity that the organizers put into the tournament they also very frequently sink a lot of money into a tournament and especially if they're trying to grow their scene like we were talking about the ppo earlier the first probably four or five years i ran the ppo it ran at a tremendous loss because i paid for all all the trophies out of my pocket you know the trucks to transport games you know i paid some text to be on hand you know things like that And that stuff adds up. But as the tournament grows, I don't think it's reasonable to expect the organizers to just eat that cost. That being said, transparency is important. People should know what they're getting into. So like for something like Pinberg, you know what it's going to cost to enter Pinberg. Pinberg also has set payouts. So if you're a person who's thinking about what does this cost versus what I'm putting in, You can look at the payout schedule. You can see how much it costs to get in, and you can make your decision there. For best game tournaments, I have no problem with tournament organizers not paying out 100%. In very few circumstances do I think they should because, once again, there's a lot of expense that goes into it. Just make it clear what the payouts are. In my opinion, you don't need to break it down. You don't need to say 60% is going to go to the players and 22% is going to go to the game owners and 5% is going to go to the trophies. You just need to give people a general idea, like 60% is going to payouts or 80% is going to payouts. Or if you're doing 100%, 100% is going to payouts just so that the players know what I'm putting in. This is the percentage I can expect to get back out if I should win anything. Yeah, I think you're right. You don't need to break down the expenses, but maybe just it would give a good example to people that might not realize, especially if you've never run a tournament, what goes into it. You talked about the hours and hours that people put into it. I don't think anyone's taking expenses for that. But if you're paying volunteer tax to be there, that's a big thing. And I have zero problem with that because we're going to get that later. You want games that work. And if the tax are there to make it work and games aren being pulled and you don have to refund the money that great So those are some of the hard expenses too What about the rental of the hall What about if your machine is being lent to you So those are some of the things you have to think about Yeah, the trophy. So maybe it's, like you say, 60% going back to the players, the other 40% expenses, and they are A, B, C, D. You just have to say what that clump is. I think that's safe. And it's up to the tournament directors to decide what those percentages should be. And then if you're being transparent and it's in your written rule set or whatever, where it's going, then the players can decide if they want to attend that tournament based on that information or not. In my experience, with all the tournaments that I've seen and been to and helped run or whatever, players flock to good tournaments. I've seen there are plenty of tournaments that are charity tournaments that have no payout at all, and people go and play in them anyway because it's run well or they choose to support the charity. So I don't believe that you need to have 100% payout to have a great event. I don't think anybody in a tournament director position like yourself or anyone should have to pay out of pocket. I mean, they're putting in enough already to bring everyone to come. The time, the effort, the games. Without them, we don't get to play pinball. So I don't think there should be any question or qualms about any expenses. Again, if you're transparent, and that's the key, everyone knows before you get in. So what about the predetermined qualifying times and the playoff structure? It depends, I guess, on how many people you have. And I'm really impressed that certain tournaments, and I'll say some by example, the New York City Pinball Championship put on by all those great New York guys, the Never Beef Productions group, they kind of realized this is going to be pretty big. And they capped it at 140 people, which was a smart thing to do. They probably could have taken 240, maybe more. But it was a first-time event, and they realized, you know what, we want people to have a good experience. We want people to be playing the games as opposed to being in long queues. and whether it was guesswork, whether it was their experience from other tournaments, it was the right number, it was good. So that's something I think TD has to think. In an ideal world, it'd be great to have a huge, huge event, but you have to be realistic. And I think of Eric Hortenberger, who's going to be running Pinsonati coming up later on in a few months. He's realized, you know what, we're starting off, we're going to go maybe 64, I think is the number. I could be wrong. I think it's 64 that we're going to do for the first time, And then we can grow because you, again, want those people that are there to have a great experience. Yeah. If you know your space and you know your limitations, then set a player cap. There's nothing wrong with doing that. Yeah, for sure. You know, part of that predetermined qualifying time is really involved in the game setup too, Doug. And Papa does a great job at that. Now, if you're on location, obviously you don't have the keys to the machine. There's not much you can do. But let's just assume you've got a rental hall or somebody's place that's going to be running this. you do have the keys, you can do some things. And you would have to explain. If you get an extra ball, you either plunge it or play it or whatever the case may be. But if you can set that up beforehand where you don't have extra balls, where you don't have to ask questions, maybe adjust the tilts, maybe some of the rubbers as well, these are very important things for TDs to consider. Yeah, and there are many, many ways to adjust the difficulty of a game. A lot of first-time events I go to, the biggest mistake that I think people make is they pitch every game as steep as it goes, and they set the tilt ridiculously tight. You have to give the players a chance to play the game, and, you know, everybody makes mistakes. We've set up games here at Papa where we underestimated or overestimated how long people were going to play them, and they've just been ridiculously difficult before. But in general, what you're searching for is playability based on the skill level of the people attending your tournament. So when I say that, a lot of the games at Pinburgh, for example, are not set Papa A Division tough because Pinburgh has 800 and some people in it. And you want everybody to be able to enjoy the tournament. So you don't want every game you walk up to has lightning flippers and pulled posts and ridiculously tight tilts. You want to give people a chance to play those games. And one of the things that we do leading up to Pinberg is we actually know all the games that are getting used in the event. We'll start to set up the banks. We'll put the banks, you know, we'll pull all the games in a certain area, pop our headquarters, and we have people out to playtest them. Like, for example, for this year's Pinberg alone, we played over 5,000 test games. And when I say test games, it's not just somebody walking up to it, hitting start, and flipping around. like competitive games that people were trying to win and we're timing the games so that we know how the banks are going to time out we did over 5 000 games like that then from january to june just leading up to pinberg be able to get the setups right for those games now i don't expect anybody else to do that because everything everything is in scale pinberg is just ridiculous with the size also who has that kind of time or resources to do that kind of stuff besides, you know, idiots like us. But it's important to sit there and play the games and try and figure out where they're going to be, especially if you're doing a match play tournament. I mean, you kind of want all the rounds to end kind of at the same time so that nobody's really sitting around. And as I was saying, there's lots of things you can do to make a game difficult. One of the things I think people overlook that makes a game exceptionally difficult is adjust the sensitivity of your slingshots. If you have super tight slingshots that when the ball touches them, it's flinging them towards the outlanes like that messes people up badly. And just a simple adjustment like that, spend a couple of minutes in there and get those slingshots tuned perfectly will make the games that much more difficult without cheating the players. You play TNA at all. That's a great game. And you breathe on those slings. Boom, there it goes. It's a great thing. But you're right. It's interesting, too, that you say that about the slings, because I think of other games where, especially in some of the older games, too, where you plunge and you just hope you get a flip, and that's some of the cases with some of the EMs. But when you have a variety of these games, I think it all works out in the wash, as they say. We've got some people who have asked some questions. Mob Roller is a big pinball player. Looks like he's looking forward to the Pemberg points. He must have done very well on that, too. and just to let everyone know that they have been submitted to IFPA. So, Doug, I'm going to say it for you, okay, because I don't want people to say, where are the points, where are the points? It takes a long time when you have 840 people. And also, too, when the names you enter in to register are the ones matching your credit card. My example would be Jeffrey D. Teolis. Well, on IFPA, I'm not Jeffrey Teolis. So that makes it a little bit different. So I know next year you're working on something in the registration, too, that will be identifying by the IFPA ID, which will actually make it faster too. So that's some good news as we move forward. Yeah, there are challenges when you're trying to list into IFPA that many players at once. If you haven't submitted a tournament, some of them you just don't know where you're going to run into the difficulties. The first, we use a custom piece of software for Pinberg, so it doesn't necessarily output exactly the format that IFPA wants. We've been working on that. we used, IFBA player IDs were in it this year. But once again, like as you just mentioned, Jeff Teolis may be IFBA player 10, but in our system, he's Jeffrey Teolis. And then their IFBA system kicks it out. You also have to go through and you have to remove like apostrophes from anybody's name. So if your name's O'Neill with an apostrophe, well, the system kicks that out. Hyphens, if you have a hyphenated name, it doesn't like that. And if you have periods, If it's like Jeffrey T. Teolis, I think in IFPA system you have to have a period after the T if there's a period listed on their profile or it'll kick it out. There's a lot of stuff that goes into ties. Once again, IFPA, it expects a specific number for ties depending on how many people and where they tied at. So that becomes a delay. The other thing that people may not realize, but I always tell them, is that running Pinburgh is not my job. I realize that people have expectations, but as soon as Pinburgh ended this year, I was in the convention hall Monday and Tuesday unloading and getting stuff ready to come back to Papa, and then I went on the road for work for a month. So that makes it a little bit difficult to kind of wrap all that stuff and to get it out when I'm not available, and that depends on any given day of the week and what my real work schedule is. Doug, you rest assured, you put on a great tournament. The points will come out. And again, you're right. That's a good example, too. You know, think of all the prep you did before that and how much time and commitment you and the others there in Pittsburgh do to make that a great event that everyone from the world comes to. So well done on that. And you know what? The points will be there soon. Very soon. In fact, recently submitted. So don't you worry about that. You're not alone, though. I know other TDs that get that kind of grief once in a while, too, about something that happens. But again, it's going to happen. There is that 60 day window. So we'll all be fine. Some of the other questions we've seen, too, about game setup. You see a lot of times in tournaments, some games just aren't used. And some of the ones used in example would be the Simpsons Pinball Party would be one. The Hobbit we've seen eliminated a few times. I think Lord of the Rings. Some of the long playing games. What are your thoughts on some of the longer playing games? We were just in Cleveland. Solar Fire. I think Eric Stone is still playing that game right now. I can still hear that upper play field registering points from here. So, yeah, longer playing games. Well, we'll go right back to Cleveland. In Cleveland, Solar Fire was a backup, backup game that we took up there. It wasn't even supposed to be in the tournament. It was supposed to be in the free play area, and we just had two games go down really early on that we couldn't fix, so Solar Fire ended up in the tournament. Having long playing games isn't necessarily a bad thing. Generally, you want to try and set those up harder than your other games just because, well, they're long playing games, so you want to make the game time shorter. I know that I take pleasure in being able to take games that people say can't be used in a tournament and using them in a tournament. I know that Jim Belsito, the guys out that do Never Drains in Southern California, they're always pulling out some neat things on games where people are like, you can't use that in a tournament, and they'll come up with some way to make it tournament-worthy. And that's one of the challenges of being a tournament director. It's kind of fun to be able to pull something like that out, and people go, you use that in a tournament, you can't use that in a tournament. and then you'd find a way to try and make it work. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you end up with whodunit in Pinberg finals and playing for three hours. Thanks, Kaylee. Thanks a lot for that. I joke, but that was funny when he was describing that. I think Carl D'Python Anghelo right now somewhere is just shaking his head. Oh, boy. Anyway, another tournament we haven't talked about, the Flip Frenzy. I had played in my first one just recently. I love the fact that you were playing pretty much all the time. The one thing that still needed to be ironed out a little bit, I think, was how you score. Is it by the most wins or should it be by a win-loss differential, which I think is the better way because we had some people playing, say, 35 games in the allotted time and other people playing 20 games. So if it was just based on wins, you could have a losing record and still have a better seed than someone who didn't have as many games. I have not run a tournament in that format. I've heard about that format, and I've seen a lot of people that really enjoy that format. But the couple of people that I talk to about playing it say sometimes you just dump a ball or you dump the game because somebody's so far ahead that you don't want to eat that time, and you just want to move on to the next game to try and get another win for those ones that are wins-based. It's 50-50. In a way, as a tournament director, I never want to see anybody not trying to win. but at the same time when that is actually a strategy for the tournament so that I can move on to play another game, I mean, there's some wiggle room there. Okay, let's move on to the next thing and that's rules knowledge. And as a TD, you're expected to enforce the rules. There are things that come up that you've never seen before. So to say you have to know all the rules beforehand, that might not be the case and I think that's a lot to ask of somebody. But where to find the rules and to say something in a default, we're going to use the IFPA model. We're going to use the PAPA model. Whatever the case may be, then you can find the rules. And then it's not about interpretation. It's about black and white right there. And I think one of the things we see in tournaments is there's a lot of gray area too. And one of the things you and I have talked about too is sometimes the confrontations that players have had or the explosions, especially when it's on the stream, it's really disappointing as we're trying to move forward in pinball and you see some people maybe lose their stuff on the stream. I understand, and I'm guilty of it myself, you lose a ball that you should have had, you drop an F-bomb or something like that. You feel bad afterwards, but it's when people go overboard and they're shaking the machine, kicking the legs. That's where I wonder, how do we enforce things like the yellow card? How do we make that black and white? Because it is really a gray area. So we've had lots of discussions, and I know it's been a hot-button topic recently on some of the forums, and there's been a lot of discussion on player conduct. Actually, the league I run, Pittsburgh Pinball League, we just put in a player conduct rule this season. And we've had a lot of conversation based around, like, you know, sometimes the people want, well, what exactly gets me a yellow card? I need it spelled out. And unfortunately, it's not really something that can be spelled out. I can't spell out every single instance that will get you a yellow card. What if you hand them a George Carlin tape or something? These seven words. Don't use these. that's part of what will get you a yellow card. But it's more or less, you know, I think we've, I won't speak for everybody, a lot of people have uttered profane words after playing a game, usually because they played it poorly or they felt that the game screwed them over. But it's one thing to sit there and say, you know, damn or whatever to yourself. It's another thing when you're doing it in a way that is disruptive to other people. One thing that as a tournament director, one of your goals, I believe, is to try and grow the sport. If you running a tournament I believe that you need to try and make the environment as professional as possible Now obviously it different you know if I running a knockout tournament in a bar versus running Pimberg your line can slide Your line can slide. You know, there's going to be adult language at an adult tournament, and maybe you're okay with that. Making that clear to your players is a big step. There are many times in the past, even with Papa and Pimberg, where, you know, this is four or five years ago, where I wish I would have punished a player. I wish I would have gone up to them and yellow carded them before the yellow card, or I wish I would have done something because I later saw that behavior again and again and again. And a lot of times when you walk up to somebody because you saw them do something that they shouldn't do, and you say, hey, man, you're getting an official yellow card. I just want to let you know, X, Y, Z, whatever you did, it's not cool. We don't want to see you doing that. you know, it's disruptive or whatever the downside is, and I'm going to make a note of this. If you get another infraction, I'm going to ask you to leave the event. Most of the time, your players will be fine. We have thrown people out before. I've thrown people out of local tournaments. I've thrown, you know, this past year, we threw somebody out of Pinberg. I don't think you need more layers than that. I know people argue that, like, well, maybe there should be a verbal warning and then a yellow card and then a red card. I think the yellow card is enough warning for most people. I think if I come to you and say, hey, you know, you're being a jerk for these reasons or you're abusing machines or whatever, you need to knock it off. That's when you need to knock it off and you need to be on your best behavior because while a lot of people are hesitant to throw somebody out of a tournament because, you know, they paid money to come there and they've bought entry fees and they're there to have a good time. Everybody's there to have a good time. I no longer think it's acceptable to let one person ruin everybody else's good time. You know, when people come to Pinburgh, for example, it's 800 and some players. So the majority of them are not local. So they're paying for a flight. They're taking vacation time. They're paying for the show pass. They're paying for the Pinburgh pass. And they're coming in. And then you're going to have a guy, you know, swearing up a storm and coffin dropping games and cursing at other players. Like that's not acceptable. That's not acceptable behavior, and I'm not going to let the small, small percentage of people that behave unacceptably determine how much fun everybody else has. I think that's a great point, too. That yellow card is really the TD's way of saying, you know what? We want you here, but not like that. One more chance, and I'm fine with that, too. Walt Moroz is a guy who runs Bluffs Pinball in Scarborough, Ontario. He has a lot of great tournaments, runs a lot of great charity tournaments to build schools in Ecuador. He, even in these charity tournaments and some of these other ones, always seems to be dealing with player complaints. And he wanted me to ask you, Doug, what do you do about those people that are constantly complaining? How do you take it? Because it does beat you down. We heard Nick and Kevin talk about the Buffalo Pinball Summer Open. Easily one of my top three favorite tournaments to go to. They're going to take a year off because it just got too much. I mean, it was a bunch of things, too, but I don't think they're alone in that, too. And when I heard that, I thought, I've got to check myself, too, because I'm sure I'm one of those guys that might say something to the TD that really the TD doesn't want to hear right now. You know, maybe your intent is good, but, you know, they've got other things and you could just be the last thing that they heard and it's enough. So I like what they said. I'm sad to see the Buffalo pinball summer open go, but, you know, it was kind of a reality check for players. So what do you do as a TD about some of these players that just constantly, constantly complain? It's tough. I mean, obviously, with the events we run, we probably get more complaints than everybody else. It's important to remember in most cases that we send out surveys every year. And while we may get complaints from 30 or 40 people, which sounds like a lot, and it is, you really have to look at the complaint and parse it. So is this something I can do something about? For example, year one of Pinburgh at the Convention Center, the number one complaint we had was you need carpet in the tournament area because the concrete floor is too hard. And would it be great to have carpet there? Absolutely. I agree that that is a valid complaint. However, and this is something, you know, sometimes when people complain, they don't have the whole picture either. In order for us to carpet the Pinberg area the first year we did it at replay when it was only, what did we have, 600 people? 400 people. I can't remember. 400. To carpet that area would have cost us $20,000 at the convention center. to have them come down, their interior decorators come down and carpet that. So at that point, would it be cool to have carpet so it's a little bit easier to walk on? Yes, I agree with that. But at the same time, I can't do anything about that. I can't add that cost to the tournament. As far as people complaining about rules and such, as long as you have your rules written out, you always have something to fall back on. You'll notice at Pemburg and at Papa when we run it, every tournament director walks around with a printed set of rules. And that serves two purposes. One, if something came up and I'm not sure what the correct ruling is, I can look at the rules. The other one is you can show the players. You can open up the book if they're complaining about a ruling, and you can say, this is what it says, this is how I'm interpreting this situation, and so therefore the ruling is this. And sometimes they'll continue to complain, which is okay, and at some point as a tournament director you just walk away from that. Here's my ruling. You need to, you know, whatever, you know, you're disqualified or continue playing on or whatever. And I'm going to go because I have other things to do. So continue playing. And, you know, there's a limit to how much complaining I'll take face to face in a ruling type situation before I'm going to walk away. I'll listen to reasonable complaints. You know, some people will argue how a rule is made or how it's interpreted. You know, I can cite past examples. I can cite things we've done previous in that tournament, like at Pinburgh. Between each round, if any of us have made a decision that isn't cut and dry by the rules and might be a gray area, we'll say, hey, look, you know, when I ruled on force two, there was a ball stuck in this specific area, and this is what I ruled. And then everybody else will do that same thing for the rest of the tournament. Now, at Pinberg, sometimes there are tournament directors who are doing things a little bit differently because there are so many of us, and we try and keep everybody on the same page. You don't have that issue if you only have one tournament director, but sometimes you get that, too. Complaints are tough because they can beat you down because I know what it's like to put hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours into an event. and you know you can have 15 people walk up to you in a row and say boy i had so much fun i'll make sure i'm coming back next year this was the best thing i've ever done blah blah blah blah blah and you have one person go on facebook or pin side or whatever and just deliver like some off-putting comment like i can't believe you didn't give trophies to the top four and you're like, oh, really? That's what you took away from this? And it hurts. It hurts because you put so much effort into it and you have someone just slam you. You definitely remember the negative one too. And that's too bad too. You just mentioned about the rule books and people having these. It brings the next point too. If you're having a larger tournament, you're going to need volunteers and you're going to need to reward those volunteers. Maybe it's some entries, maybe it's an hour of play, but also that rule book. The volunteers need to know, maybe not the rules because they're not the TDs, but they need to know some scoring things too. I think you told me at Pinberg, you actually have meetings with the volunteers just to make sure they understand certainly how the software works, which is very, very important. Whether you're using Carl's Never Drain software or the Match Play Events. Is that what it is? Match Play Events? Yeah. Great one too from Andreas. So I think the volunteers need to be given a little bit of time as opposed to their shift just starting and telling them in five seconds, here's what you need to do, because it's a little stressful for the volunteers, too. Yeah, I know with the last Papa that we ran in the facility, Elizabeth Cromwell, who handles all the volunteers for Papa, she had basically a one-page training thing, and before anybody showed up for their first shift, they had to go to the desk, and they had to get run through this training thing, and they learned the basics of the software, and then we set them out on their own. a lot of the Papa style and best game style tournaments, like volunteers are the lifeblood of those tournaments. Like if you don't have enough scorekeepers, it makes everybody have a worse time because I'm waiting to get my score recorded and there's already lines and this and that. And the other thing, you know, thank your volunteers. Thank your volunteers over and over again. If you can volunteer, I realize that not all players want to do that and that's fine. I also don't have a problem with, I've had it mentioned to me in the past, like what's the appropriate compensation for a volunteer? What should you, you know, should you give them tickets? Should you give them extra scorekeeping? Should you give them extra play time at the end of the qualifying so that they can, you know, get last chance dibs qualifying on everybody? And the answer to that is pretty simple. You get that. You give them whatever you need to give them to make sure all your scorekeeping shifts are filled. because when you have a full scorekeeping roster and they're not overwhelmed, that tournament will run so much better than if it wasn't. And if people want to complain that you're giving them too much in compensation, everybody always has the option to volunteer as a scorekeeper if they want. Yeah, you don't have to. And those people, they take abuse sometimes from players. It's terrible to say it, but if they miss somebody when they get their hand raised or whatever to come get their score. They'll take abuse sometimes, and you should never abuse volunteers. Never abuse your scorekeepers. I always say to everybody, like, all the things that I do and have done for tournaments and organizing leagues and all this other stuff, the thing that I like to do least is scorekeep. It is not easy to do. So by all means, whatever you feel you need to give your scorekeepers to fill up those shifts, give it to them. Let them have it because they are the lifeblood of running just about any large event. agree and the more the better too so one of the things i think that maybe hurt volunteers and i'm just throwing this out there because i don't have a right answer for it i'm asking your opinion is a player is like boy it's a pump and dump i only have so much time i can't volunteer two hours to do that because that takes me away from two hours that might be prime time i was always wondering imagine if you had more and more volunteers and you didn't give them an extra hour to play maybe you gave them some entries but what you did do was allow them to queue up while they're volunteering and have almost like an alternate volunteer. And then I'd volunteer like the whole tournament too because here, when I'm not playing, I'm staying in line anyway. Give me the pad. I'll put it in. As long as you cannot enter your own score, then that's easy to do with the software because you log in and you can't even put in your name. I was wondering about that idea. A few people were talking about that recently at a tournament I was at. Just curious your thoughts because then you've heard it. People say, you know, why should these people get an extra hour when the tournament's done? You have to give the volunteers something. You have to, have to. So is this maybe a compromise? Is this something that's possible? Or do you see some maybe problems? The logistics of that seem like it would be difficult. I'm not saying it would be impossible. I suppose if everybody had someone they swapped off with, and at no point in time would both of those people be allowed to be on a machine playing, it could certainly work. It might be a little confusing for the players to figure out who exactly is scorekeeping. The person holding the iPad. Yeah, I would think I wouldn't be opposed to a tournament trying that. I mean, if you can come up with a way that makes it so that there's always people available to take scores, yeah, absolutely. If that's going to get you more volunteers, do what you got to do. All right, just a thought. So, okay, there are a lot of other points here, so there's no real specifics, so I'm going to kind of go all over the map here with our remaining minutes here on Papa Pinball on YouTube. Spacing of the games. Again, we're not talking about you're at a location, but you are at a certain place and you can set up the games. You have to provide enough spacing in between the games so you've got enough room where you're not banging into somebody, enough room behind you, certainly enough power. These are things to consider. And also, too, Ian Ian Harrower brought this up to me, and I thought about it. He's absolutely right. The lighting is very, very important, whether it's sunlight coming in, whether it's direct light above. What are some of the experiences you've had with spacing and lighting, Doug, that you think you could pass on to maybe some TVs? So it's funny because at Pinberg, I always say we use the Imperial system to space out the distance between the games because the distance between every Pinberg game is one dug width apart. If I can walk between a game broadways, then that's the width apart and whatever measurement that is because it's the easiest thing for us to set up. If you're in the position where you can have unlimited space, that's great. I mean, Pimberg kind of has that with, you know, we have a giant hall to be able to put our stuff in, and we can space the games necessary. I mean, depending on what you're running where, you may have to sacrifice space in between the games. And it's also what you're trying to accomplish. Like, if you want to stream your games, well, you're going to need space in between the games to set up camera rigs, because then you've also got to leave space for text to get in there. For, like, Papa or Best Game Style Qualifying, that's another consideration. You want to make sure that somebody can be working on a game and not interfering with the person playing the game next to them, so you can still keep those queues going while a game is being repaired. So, I mean, spacing is really subjective to the amount of space that you have available. I personally would rather have more space. If I had a space issue at a venue, I would take a game out as opposed to trying to jam another game in. I just find that everything works better when you have a little bit more space. Your mileage may vary, but that's been my experience. You mentioned lighting. Lighting is a challenge in a lot of places, and a lot of that is at these big events, you generally get assigned a space, and you have to make the lighting work, and that can be a challenge At Pembroke this year because we occupied a new part of a hall um there was lighting issues over a couple um a couple of the banks of games just because you have to put the games in that hall where the drops are for power but with the way that that third hall was set up it just meant that there were a couple of them that were underneath some of those strip lights and we tried to adjust the lighting up we tried to adjust the lighting down uh and it's on the list of things to improve for next year, but sometimes you don't even realize that's an issue until you're in the facility. You want to try and make it as enjoyable an experience as you can, but sometimes you're just tied up by the facility you're using. If you're running a big tournament, too, something you have to consider, certainly, I know it sounds silly to say, but enough washroom facilities, you need to have food available, maybe even some breaks, too. You think of those playoffs that run. If you're playing a playoff at 10 in the morning and it goes until 6 or 8 at night, Are there any breaks? Are there any opportunities for someone to get some food? Or is there food even available at the venue? I think those are things to consider, too. And you probably don't think of that at first. You're just thinking all about the pinball, all about the pinball. But it really is everything else that makes the pinball tournament and the show complete. That was one of the driving forces that moved Pinberg to a larger facility. The last year we were in the Papa facility, we were at 400 people. And because, well, Pinberg has assigned rounds. So like at the end of every round, the bathrooms would get full. And in the men's room at this facility, we have five stalls. So you've got, you know, mostly men in the tournament. You know, you've got 300 dudes all trying to go to the bathroom at the same time and it doesn't work. And our septic system doesn't handle that. And where the facility is now, you don't readily have access to food anywhere nearby. So you either have to get in a car or a couple of years we brought food trucks in. And when you get to a certain size, all that stuff becomes part of the adventure and part of the quality of the tournament. One thing that has always stuck with me, we were down one year. We went to Freeplay Florida to help them with their tournament early on when the Papa Circuit existed. We were sitting at the hotel, and there were two gentlemen there. They were at a convention that was there for, like, fairs, so, like, county fairs. They send their organizers to this convention to share ideas and stuff. So we got to talking to them about, like, the challenges that they face. And one of the things that the one guy said to me that has stuck with me to this day is that people will judge your event based on everything that happens from the time they get to your city. So even if, like, the airport is a mess, and I know you have no control over that, but, like, those are all factors. factors. If their car broke down on the way there, they may look poorly upon your event because they remember it because your car broke down. The point of that is you want to take as many things as possible that you have control over and make them as good as possible so that even if they had a bad experience outside your tournament, which they may associate with the trip to your tournament, that the things you did right outweigh all of that and give them the will to come back to that tournament or to go to another tournament and say, hey, you know what? Spending time to travel to this tournament was a great idea. Next year I'm going to go to Oklahoma City and go to Cactus Jacks, or I'm going to go to INDISC, or I'm going to go somewhere else because I think that this is worth my time. This is worth my money. This was fun. This was a good deal. There's so many tournaments. It's amazing to see the IFPA player growth just jump exponentially every single year. It blows me away. I think three or four years ago I got in, I was like 23,000. and we're almost at 63,000 right now, and the tournaments have gone up. And the PAPA circuit now, the Stern Pro Circuit, has just been incredible with all the different events. You mentioned the PPO, the Pittsburgh Pinball Open, coming up very soon in October. These are some of the great tournaments and examples of how to run tournaments, and we've seen so many of them. There's a lot coming up. You mentioned the Sanctum coming up, a different variety of tournaments. I don't recommend everyone do a 24-hour tournament, But if you're game, if you're willing, and you're crazy like me and you want to play like that, I'm going to do it once, Doug. I'm going to try it. And I'll probably like it and want to do it again. But it's not a tournament. Do you know, Doug, when you're playing these games and you're in a tournament, you lose track of time. And you're like eight hours in, you're like, I should probably eat. I should probably go to the washroom. I should probably do something that is normal that you would do if you weren't playing pinball. So 24 hours of that, I'm going to forget. and I'm going to be thinking the next day, the two days after, zombie. It's not going to be very productive for me for sure, but it's going to be fun. Something to do, and I'll have to read quickly for Free Play Florida a week later. When people talked about the Sanctum early on, I just actually met Jim for the first time this year at Pemberg. He came in and was one of our techs, an awesome guy. And I remember the first time I heard that they were running that tournament, I was like, who in their right mind wants to do that? Who wants to be up for 24 hours playing pinball? And it turns out, a lot of people. It's a great idea, and they do a fantastic job. Everybody, they sell out instantly. They can't even fit all the people that want to play in that tournament, and that's the biggest praise you could possibly have. While I've got you on here, and we talk about those instant sellouts, City Champs, another one, Pinberg, the Sanctum, some of these events, even once the New York City Championship announced they were going to go 140, it sold out instantly. So once you put a cap on that, we're seeing these just go really, really quickly. Is there ever going to be a time where maybe last year's winner gets a buy or some case like that? I hate to think of, and I'll use an example of Keith Elwin, for whatever reason, doesn't get in to Pinberg only because his computer failed, the power was out, something like that. You'd be like, wow, you're so far down the wait list. I've had people ask me, will there ever be an exemption for that? And my guess is no, but I'll ask you. I would never say never, because that's very absolute. One of the core things we try and maintain with Pemberg is that everybody has pretty much the same tournament experience. So whether you are an unranked player or whether you are Keith Elwin, you're going to have the same experience during the tournament, and that includes registration. We are working on ways to be able to increase the number of people in Pemberg. Believe me, we want to have as many people as possible. I hate having to shut people out of the tournament. I want everybody that wants to come to the tournament to come and enjoy the tournament. But, you know, and it's something in what the guys in NYC PC did. At some point, there's the logistics become too great. 840 is where we were for Pinburgh. We pulled that off really well this year, I thought. And I thought we did it well enough that we can now look towards growing it even more. But every time you add more players to a tournament, especially a tournament of Pinburgh size, the logistical challenges become that much greater. It was a running thing we kept saying. I kept saying to Mark and I said to a couple of people at Pinburgh this year is like running Pinburgh is not running a tournament. Running Pinburgh is running a logistics company because everything you do, you have to do on such a grand scale. I mean, a simple example of that is at Pimberg, our backup banks are 40 games. We have 40 games to use as backups. That's bigger than probably 99% of tournaments out there, and that's our backup bank. So that just gives people kind of like the scale of what you have to go through to pull off something like that. So every time we make a change, believe me, it is bantered about internally between all of us, myself, Mark, Elizabeth, Bowen, Kevin, and we don't make any change without really going through, you know, here's the positive, here's the negative. Where is this going to get us? What do we think the opinion is going to be of this? Every time we've made a change, we receive a lot of negative feedback. And like we were talking about before, negative feedback, I mean, whether you want to admit it or not, it hurts. but at the same time, sometimes you are doing something to better the event or something you think will make pinball better that you feel compelled enough that you still need to do it. A really good example of that is the first year we put the TV stands in at Papa. So the big two-tier TV stands with the 55-inch TVs. People came in, they saw them, and there's a good picture of it there. Shout out to Mike Primo, by the way, who is also up in Toronto, known he's doing all the switching for this broadcast uh nobody thank you mike but he's helping us he's helping us out a lot here shout out to path of play too but we put those tvs in and there's mike we put the tvs in and we actually had people come up and request that while they were playing we turned the tv off because the tvs were in between the games and they were distracting them and i can't play like that and mark and i had a conversation about it and we said well what do we want to do well all along since mark has been at papa like one of the goals is to grow this more as a spectator sport we want people to be sitting there at finals watching the games cheering paying attention to what's going on and we believe that these tvs accomplish that so you know those players that were complaining about it you know we basically said no this is the tournament this this is the direction that we feel we need to go. We'll reassess after this year. We'll take the feedback after this year, and we'll see where it goes. But we feel that this is how we push things forward. This is going to make our event better. This is going to make competitive pinball more visible. This is going to make it more enjoyable. So sometimes you have to take those complaints and those slings and those arrows, and you make those changes, and sometimes they come back, and it's great. And sometimes you make changes, and it's not so great. One of the big things that got talked about this year at Pinburgh was broadcasting of the stream audio into the audience. We talked about this. It's literally spread out over hundreds of emails. We talked about doing this for months. And then we made the decision, you know what? We think more people will be engaged with finals. We think we're going to hold a bigger audience there. We think we're going to make it a bigger spectacle if we do this. We realized all the downsides. The players might be able to hear what we're saying. Is that going to be an issue? Turns out the players couldn't really hear too much because of the way the speakers were facing. But we realized that might be an issue. We realized it might be an issue with the announcers because they're being broadcast out to other people. Is that going to make them more self-conscious of what they're saying? And as soon as people realized we were doing that, I immediately fielded half a dozen complaints. Some from people not even in the tournament anymore. They were eliminated, but they felt they needed to come up and tell me that they thought this was a really, really bad idea. To which I said, you know, this is what we feel we need to do. We are trying to push this forward. We are trying to make this a spectacle. We want to bring in big sponsors. We want people to look at this and say, wow, that was super, super awesome. And look at how the people were cheering in the finals and paying attention and riveted every shot. And in the end, I think we accomplished that. If you were there live for Pinburgh finals, that was, and I'm probably biased here, but that was the best crowd I've ever seen at a pinball tournament ever. I mean, engaged with the action, cheering. I know a bunch of the New York City guys were chanting GOAT when Ellen was playing, and it was just such a great atmosphere. and I'm standing on the stage and I'm observing all this, of course, and I remember at one point I turned to Pete Bart Hendrickson, who's one of the assistant directors. I'm like, yep, we made the right decision. This clearly benefited everything. Now, that being said, are there ways we can do it better? Sure, and we've got some improvements in mind for next year, but sometimes you've got to do something because you think it's the right thing to do. You know, I think it was a great change, too, because the year before there was a good audience there and people could see the screens, but they couldn't hear what was being said. So having that was a great element. A lot of the eSports do that, and they get great audiences. I think it was good too. And I heard some people say that, hey, that's coaching because they're telling you what to do. I think if those players are standing on the A finals, and I think they probably have an idea of how to play the game. Call me crazy, but if I ever get up there, keep talking. I'll cradle up. What do you say? Oh, all right. Start multiball. Good idea. No, but I'm just saying that everyone knew. That's how you lock a ball. I didn't know that. Anyway, it was fun, and I'm really glad you did that. And, again, with all the changes that you made, and we see tinkering in tournaments year to year. Pinberg is a good example. They were all transparent. Everybody knew before you started, and that's key. There were no surprises, too. And, you know, Pinberg does it very well. Well, the audio thing we didn't announce ahead of time. The audio thing kind of dropped on people. That's not a rule. That's an afterthought. No, but pre-registration, that's a big, big thing. I saw Buffalo do it this year. I know the New York guys are going to do it next year. That's a big thing so that you're there, you're ready to go, boom. You don't have to wait in the long lineup, and that's a big thing that, if I can point out one other thing, if you can do pre-registration, that will help your tournament a lot too. So, Doug, we've talked for over an hour here, and by the way, those who don't know, Doug's got a really sore tooth and he's on a lot of medication right now, so I was kind of hoping to get some truths out of him. I think I got a few. So anything I said can't be held against me because I'm under the influence. You got a great hat. That's all that matters. I like that hat. Thank you very much for doing this. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And we will do this again on Papa Pinball on YouTube, and we will post the audio on Pinball Profile, episode number 155. So thank you very much. Thank you to Pindigo.app, the great app. Get your scores in there. You'll love Pindigo. Papa Pinball, of course. Producer Mike Primo and you, Doug Polka, for making this happen. That's it. I'm Jeff Teels. 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. And check out our website, pinballprofile.com. I'm Jeff Teels. Good night.