Entropy at Pinburgh, 2011

I've been meaning to write about my experience at Pinburgh for a while, and considering Pinburgh 2012 is next weekend, I'd better get my ass in gear.

I didn't have a lot of expectations going into Pinburgh based on my PAPA performance. However, I was excited by the prospect of playing so many different games. So excited, in fact, that I built a study guide for myself featuring pictures and instruction cards for as any of the 150 or so games as I could find (which was all but about 3, as it turns out).

Mrs. Entropy decided to go with me, so on Thursday afternoon we had a relaxed drive up to Pittsburgh and camped out in our hotel.

Friday the excitement began around noon. We were split into groups of four and assigned an amusingly named bank of three games to play. Grouping was based on seed, and I was initially ranked #77 of ~170 mainly because of when I signed up. I was interested to see that my first group included Keith Johnson, game programmer, FSPA alumnus, and at the time just announced new team member on Wizard of Oz. Of course, the first thing I asked him was, "Hey! How 'bout that Jersey Jack, huh? Any game details?" He said what was probably the contractually obligated maximum he could say about it, which was next to nothing, but it was still cool that my first group had a pinball celeb in it (and, thankfully, did not include any games he programmed).

Our first bank was Tripping Balls, consisting of Aquarius, Embryon, and Twilight Zone. The banks were basically assigned to Speed, Stamina, and Skill (coincidentally three of Striker's virtues in World Cub Soccer; presumably Strength and Spirit being too difficult to quantify for game picks), generally meaning a short game-time machine (almost always an EM), a longer-playing game, and a game requiring precise shooting. Points were assigned from 3 to 0 based on your score. I don't remember how I did exactly, but I won the group with 6 points (I believe I came in first on Embryon, second on TZ, and third on Aquarius). This moved me up to 37th place.

Second round was Galactic Bloodshed on Stellar Wars, Starship Troopers, and Cosmic Gunfight. The game I expected to do best on, Starship Troopers (since I had played it in league briefly) I think I lost pretty badly. I believe I won Cosmic Gunfight and had a crappy Stellar Wars but rallied at the end. I tied for second with 4 points this time around, so I went down to 65th.

Third was Paleontology on 4 Million BC, Jurassic Park, Bally Lost World. I won with 8 points this time, and I'm pretty sure I did well on Lost World (a game I knew pretty well) with an assist from a Hail Mary Smartbomb on JP, which awarded me a multiball as I was draining my third ball which allowed me to win the game.This bit of awesomeness pushed me up to 21st place.

Session 4 was Swinging Gofers on Safari, featuring Swinger, No Good Gofers, and Big Game. Because the seeding system was sorting itself out around now, I was playing against other guys in the 20s, notably Pittsburgh local Mahesh Murthy (who I always use as an example to my Asian Subcontinent coworkers as a guy of Indian descent who plays pinball) and Robert Gagno (a top-ranked player with autism who is kind of a pinball savant). I did pretty well with a second place finish and 6 points, which moved me up to 16th place.

Ending Day One was Battle the Elements, with Iron Man, Xenon, and my own Quicksilver. As I recall I did not do as well on QS as I would have liked, but finished up with second place and 6 points to end the day in 12th place overall and comfortably situated in A Division.

Day Two dawned with Cursed and Spooky, featuring Medusa, Monster Bash, and Haunted House. One of the guys in my group was Bob Matthews, an older player who is still pretty formidable, so I was surprised to win with solid performance on the latter two games. I remember that my MB score was not awesome, but I learned an important lesson at Pinburgh: In stark contrast to PAPA qualifying, it doesn't matter if you have a crappy game as long as the other guys in your group have crappier ones. I got 7 more points and moved up to 8th place.

Round Seven was Shoot It or Run Away, with Gator, Cheetah, and Big Buck Hunter. One of the players was Eden Stamm from (I think) New York, for whom it was very important that all other players were out of his field of vision. I found him kind of fussy in general, but he is a reasonably high ranking player so who am I to judge. My Gator was poor, my BBH was terrible, and my Cheetah wasn't shaping up too well when it malfunctioned, forcing us to switch to an alternate game, Tri-Zone. This saved my round because I killed on Tri-Zone... my score for each ball was about the entire game score for the best of the other guys. Bowen stopped by and remarked that I had the best score he'd ever seen on the game in competition. It allowed me to end up in a 3-way tie for second place with 4 points, moving me down to 12th.

Next up was Rolling Stones Not Included, amusing in context because Stern had just released the Rolling Stones game but PAPA didn't have it yet. This included Captain Fantastic, Guns N' Roses, and KISS. In this case I think I had a good KISS game, an OK GNR, and a not as good CF. Here I was playing with Robert Gagno and Keith Johnson again. During the GNR game Robert and I were talking and I realized his Achilles Heel: He can do well on games he knows, but he's not so good with ones he doesn't know, especially older non-multiball games. I don't think I was ever able to capitalize on this knowledge, but it's nice to know if I ever need to defeat him in Pinball Battle and I get the game pick. I tied with Keith for first with 6 points, moving me up to my all time high of 7th place.

The Ninth Round was World Speed Records with the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, and 7th ranked players... Mats Runsten from Sweden, Josh Sharpe, and Robert Gagno. All Top 25 World ranked players, and me. ^_^; The games were Supersonic, F-14 Tomcat, and Corvette. My memory is that I took first on Supersonic and crapped out at the other two, and ended tied for second with Josh, and I dropped down to 9th. Full disclosure here: I totally have a man-crush on Josh. He is a great player, friendly, good looking... I would totally turn gay for him. Since he runs the IFPA, these days I email him a few times a year with FSPA league results, and he's always super-nice and helpful. He also gave me and another league guy Cyclopes tips (his Dad designed it) and pointed out that the game is a little uncomfortable for him to play because his Mom is one of the bikini-clad nubiles on the backglass. His kryptonite? I hope to find out... but on the other hand, that would mean I'd be playing Josh Sharpe on his Dad's game, so that's probably an auto-lose for me.

The final round was Flipper Football: World Cup, World Cup Soccer, and Space Race (sitting in for Super Soccer, which had croaked). This was the 9th through 12th ranked players, including Dave Hubbard from FSPA and #3 World ranked Jorian Engelbrektsson. I found Jorian to be a bit of a cold fish... he just put his headphones on and listened to his mp3 player of choice. I choked pretty bad on this one, coming in last with just 2 points.

This meant that I was tied on the line for the finals with a couple other guys, so late that evening we had to do a playoff with the top two making the finals. Good odds, but I was playing well above my station here, so I was a little tense. The game was Medieval Madness, which I have played in league so I was pretty happy with that, but it's also a game that lots of people know. The results -- on video, this is the A Division almost-finals, after all! -- can be seen here. I am an enthusiastic MM player, kind of not letting the ball rest but taking lots of on-the-fly shots. Cayle George and Adam Lefkoff don't think much of this approach in the video's commentary, but it served me well on the first ball, racking up about 25 million. My last two balls sucked, but the first was enough to put me in first place and into the A Division finals... and NOT as the bottom seed, either. I was third from the bottom. ^_^;

So, on Sunday was the finals. I was pretty nervous that morning because, again, I felt like I was playing with the big kids for the first time. My group in the quarterfinals was with Keith Johnson and a couple of other top players. Unfortunately it did not start well. The first game was Jack*bot, which is good because I play that in league. And initially things went great... I was rocking the saucer, getting my awards, and finally I started multiball. But as with my fatal first tournament hubris ("I'll let him pick the game!") I made a mistake. At some point during multiball one of the balls landed in the shooter lane. Now, looking back on it, of course it shouldn't have done that... I know there's a one-way gate there. But in the fever of competition, the thought that went through my head was, "Oh, this game must not have that gate," like this is some crappy location game with parts missing. So I continue my game, the other ball drains, and then I launch the ball in the shooter and finish the ball with a sweet 1 billion+ score. But of course, everyone in my group noticed that I plunged the ball and threw a red flag on the play. A judge was called in because it was a beneficial malfunction, and I honestly could say that 1) it didn't occur to me that it was a problem, and 2) that I didn't realize that such things were bad in tournaments. Being my first tournament and seeing that after the explanation I agreed that it was an unfair advantage, the decision was made to let the others finish and have me replay the game by myself (without knowing their scores). That's what happened, I was probably rattled by making a huge error in my first major tournament game, and I played one of my shittiest games, ending with under 200 million and last place.

Next up was Tommy, a game which I didn't know that well but had taken the opportunity to practice that morning when I saw that it was in the final group. I had a pretty good game, squeaked into second place by 6 million.

The final game was Centaur, one of my favorite games in the '80s... I played it when I should have been going to final exams in college. And my game was transcendent. I could do no wrong. At one point after doing pretty well the ball drained on the right, and as it drained it lit the last of the four bottom lane rollovers and served me up another ball. This is the game I wish they'd filmed (my wife did get a little digital camera video of it, but it's rough). At one point I shot the ball at the inline targets for double the Queen's Chamber, got the ball back to the right flipper, then hit the same shot again. At that moment I felt Joy with a capital J... it was one of those moments when everything is going right and it all just falls into place (and it's in the video, too!). I finished with a 3 million point score, 700K more than the other three players scores combined.


So that got me a total of 6 points for the quarterfinals, tied with Jorian and Robert Gagno. The tiebreaker game was on Tommy, with the top two advancing to the semifinals and the bottom one ending up in 9th place. Pretty much every good thing that happened in that game of Centaur did not happen in Tommy... and as luck would have it, this craptacular game was filmed and posted on the Internet for posterity. As you can see, I just couldn't get anything going and didn't hit any of my shots. I think I got the skill shot on one ball, which is a quarter of my points. 

And so my stunning weekend came to a close with a 9th place finish in A Division. Although half the games in my finals did not go as I would have liked, my performance was so far above what I expected that I was ecstatic. My spoils were $200, which just about paid for my entry fee, tokens, and my meals.

I'm really excited to see how things go at Pinburgh this year... I think I had a big advantage in that in my role as pinball completest scholar I think I was familiar with a lot more of the games than most players were. But with PAPA posting gameplay and tutorial videos of all the competition games, I expect that won't be such an advantage this year. Ultimately, I'm really not expecting to do as well as I did last year, but as always I'm happy for whatever I can get. And for fuck's sake, I'm spending the whole weekend playing pinball with a bunch of cool people at an awesome facility, so really how bad can it be?