Epic and Most Egregious PAPA Fail. Ever.

There are some weekends when tournaments go well for you, and there are some weekends when they don't; this last weekend at PAPA was of the latter sort.

You know, even though I said that all I was hoping for was to break into the top tercile of C, I was kind of expecting to do a lot better. And maybe that was my problem... I looked at how much better I've been playing in the last year and projected that forward, showing a much better showing.

Anyway, the trip up was OK. We left a little late, but it wasn't like I was on much of a deadline. When we got there, though, I was a little drained. Played a few games to warm up -- which is usually sort of pointless, as my play is usually randomly good or bad based on factors I am unable to fathom.

So, our C Bank consisted of Addams Family, CSI, Iron Man, Terminator 2, The Simpsons Pinball Party, The Rolling Stones, Twilight Zone, Wheel of Fortune, and World Cup Soccer. Kind of a mixed bag for me... Addams and TZ are games I have done well on, but generally others do better. T2 I own, which as I've pointed out in the past is a mixed bag. Stones has been very good to me in league, and I've played World Cup in league and sorta know what to do, but our is so crappy that I rarely deal with it. IM is always pretty brutal, WoF I've played and gotten the GC on the game at Volleyball House, but I couldn't tell you how or why... I just looked up at the end of the game and had 105 Mill. And CSI I'm just not that familiar with.

So for my first round I went with IM, T2, Stones, WoF, and World Cup; I did poorly, encouraging (my score was basically the total of three skill shots and one 3x Jackpot), poorly, poorly, and pretty good for me, respectively. So I put in a second entry, swapping out Soccer with CSI on the theory that if I didn't know it, most other people probably don't either. I managed a respectable IM score, but just about everything else was junk.

I also put in a Classics II entry which was not great, which landed me at 114 out of 128. Considering classics is all skill levels, I usually don't expect much. I play largely for fun and because it helps my World Pinball Player ranking, because C Division isn't counted.

Part of the problem was I felt out of sorts all day. I had a dehydration headache despite drinking water and Gatorade. Even my for-fun games weren't that impressive, though I managed a pretty good White Water game.

After a while I pretty much gave up. The wife and I went to the hotel, then wandered around until we found someplace that wasn't decorated in decaying steel-town chic for a nice dinner. That night I studied the CSI rules.

On the plus side, I did find a roll of tokens that someone had lost, and greedily kept it for myself.

The next day I was up early and ended up wandering around Carnegie trying to find milk for my cereal. While I was walking I found a little rubber snake on the ground, which I was hoping would augur great things for that day and ended up keeping it in my pocket for the rest of the trip... let's see how well that worked out.

So I showed up at PAPA World HQ and dawdled a while before I threw in another entry. The highlight of that one was an IM score that was 150K less than my previous respectable one, and a bunch of crap. I did put in two Classics IIIs... one was kind of a junky one on Mystic, Embryon, Gorgar, and my personal fave Tri-Zone... this was a little sad, because I had some great practice scores on the latter three that morning. After I saw how all the cool kids were ganging up on Embryon and especially Mystic, in my second entry I swapped them out for Evel Knievel and the EM Safari and did pretty well... had a good Tri-Zone which was 8th place overall, Safari was #24 and Gorgar was OK, and I ended up in 36th place out of 117.

Then it was dinner time and I had decided to go to the league dinner -- this turned out to be on par with the rest of the weekend. I talked my usually non-sociable wife into going, and aside from some brief conversation about anime with another guy, generally just watched the TVs in the restaurant (we later found out she was getting sick, so I can't completely blame her). I was seated next to someone who wasn't particularly talkative that night, someone who is like nails on chalkboard to me, and a guy who hadn't even played in league for 9 years who I could not communicate with -- didn't understand my jokes and couldn't fathom anything I said. My wife and I split a meal and our two halves together were what I expected our portions to be. And I still had my dehydration headache. As soon as our bill was paid I was out of the door like a shot. Then we ended up taking some wrong turns thanks to detours, so after dropping my wife off at the hotel I didn't make it back until 10 or 11.

It was time for a change in strategy. First I took some aspirin and started chugging water and Gatorade to deal with my headache. Clearly the games I was playing weren't going my way, so I tried out a Simpsons they had on the floor and I couldn't stop -- granted it was set to Novice settings, but I ended up with the GC and actually made it to Alien Invasion, way better than I've ever done before. So my final entry was an all-Stern lineup: CSI, IM, WoF, Simpsons, and Rolling Stones. Even with the upper playfield left flipper being too weak for me to get more than one ball locked despite numerous shots, I still managed a #29 score. I finally had the Stones score I deserved, which was good for #34. The other scores were junk. But when the dust cleared, I ended up in 50th place: Not just in the top tercile, but in the top quartile! That's a full 8% better! Well, OK, it sucks, but it sucks less than my next lowest entry, which would have put me around 66th place and have been a major disappointment. And on my gigantic 27" monitor, my entry shows one line up from the bottom of the first page. That's good for something.

I was thinking about parlaying my newly energized self into another entry, but I got wrapped up in a good game of Tales of the Arabian Nights (high score #1!) and half missed/half ignored the closing of entries around 2 AM. So my finish was a little disappointing, but at least I moved forward and out of the 60s.

The next day we packed up and got ready to go. My wife was really not feeling well and Ol' Scruffy at the hotel desk would only give us an extra half hour to get out of the room. But get out we did, we made it over to PAPA and I watched the A Div finals, which featured some pretty awesome play and an actual nail-biter final game where any of the top three guys could have one it and it wasn't decided until the last ball. We left pretty soon after that -- my wife didn't even feel like playing a closing game of Pang Pang Paradise.

I ended up driving the whole way home, which I didn't really want to do but kind of had to. About halfway home I realized that I must have left my PAPA swag bag with my t-shirt back at the hotel. Eh. It was pretty typical of the entire weekend, and 1) It wasn't that great a bag, unlike the awesome overnight back we got last year, and 2) I'm a little sad about losing the shirt, but on the other hand I don't need any more reminders of how sucky PAPA 14 was for me. On the plus side, the last hour of our drive home it was thundering and lightninging constantly, which was kind of cool.

And just to top off the suckiness with a suck cherry: I had scheduled Monday as a vacation day but ended up having to work half a day because we had a deadline to meet the next day. And while I was unpacking the car I discovered that I'd left half our supply of Gatorade at the hotel too. It just keeps on sucking.