Fairfax Pinball Tournament: Epic Swag!

Here's some extra post-tournament coolness: When I opened up the envelope containing my $62.50 in prize money, I found it contained a coupon for a free pre-registration package to PAPA! Yoink! That's a $35 value. I was not sure if I was going to go this year because it's such a long drive, but now I can't afford not to go! I immediately registered.

Then I asked the lovely and talented Mrs. Entropy if, since she enjoyed the trip to the Silver Ball Museum, she might want to accompany me to PAPA. And she said yes! Not only will it be more fun with the wife along, but she's a lot better at nighttime hell drives than I am. So if we go as a day trip, it won't be as rough on me.

And finally, when I went to pick up Quicksilver on Monday, it had earned just over $52! I gave half to John, which brought my total income from the tournament to $124 in cash and prizes, or about $80 after expenses. Sweet.

To top it off, Wednesday's league night was an ass-kicking, but for a change it was me kicking the ass instead of my ass being kicked. I didn't stay for the final reckoning, but I got 4 points on all my games, which is the maximum score you can get. Yay for our side!

Fairfax Pinball Tournament: Epic Recovery!

Sometimes all it takes is the right state of mind. And in this case, I more than made up for my sucktacular first day at the tournament with a completely unexpectedly good finish.

Here's what happened. Mrs. Entropy is away at the Ladies and Gentlemen of the 1860's conference with our daughter, so I'm home alone with the pets this weekend. I put Darwin into overnight dog storage for Friday night, because I correctly predicted that I would be home late. But I expected to be finished pretty early at the tournament on Saturday, so I took him on two walks (with a little running thrown in to make him extra tired) so that he'd sleep while I was gone. I left at about 3:30 to get down to John's Place before the playoffs started at 5.

I will say that in retrospect, the initial omens and portents were favorable: I found 37 cents on the ground in various places throughout my day, and I'd had good practice games at home on Paragon and Eight Ball Deluxe (Doctor Who is down for board testing). And then at the bar in a practice game on Strikes and Spares I put up a score of 500K to beat Justin, who is a _way_ better player than I am (last Wednesday in league he smacked down the King of Payne in Medieval Madness with an amazingly relentless assault on the castle).

My standings had improved relatively. Whereas on Friday I had been #8 of 10 in B Division, at the end of qualifying I was #10 of 19. Still out of the top half, which meant I was in single elimination... if I lose one best of three match, I'm out (the top half was double elimination, meaning that if they lost they would play winners in the loser half).

Things were not looking good in general, because the bar was having serious power issues. Games were resetting right and left, and somebody mentioned that even the street light outside was flickering. This worked out pretty well for me Friday, because Monster Bash reset on a crappy game and my next game was a lot better. But Saturday it was nuts. They even had Quicksilver turned off, despite the fact that it uses 1/3 less power than a comparable pinball game (I was going to cite a link to that in my blog, but I guess I haven't blogged about it... when I replaced the GI in QS with LEDs, I did a before and after comparison with a power meter and discovered the power savings).

Anyway, so my first match got under way with the #19 guy. I was extremely nervous and tightly wound, because I knew from keeping score for him that he had not developed his competitive skillz, and in spite of my "here to play not to win" philosophy, losing to him would have, to quote my college French professor Mlle Schoonmaker, sucked dead donkey dicks. I need to retroactively amend my philosophy to say that I'm here to play not to win, but not to crap out in the first round either. I just barely beat him on Mousin' Around (another terrible game! what is it with me?), Big Buck Hunter, and some third game which I forget.

By then the power problems were out of hand, so they called a break so they could deal with the problem and I went to dinner with Brian, who I hang out with when I can... he came in first the season that I came in second, and we seem to be pretty evenly matched. By the time we got back, they had pretty much fixed the power issue by bringing in a generator.

The guys whose match would result in my next opponent apparently did not have a dog to get home to so they took their good old time playing their match. But by the time they finally got back into playing, I had entered a state of mind that was extremely conducive to my pinball playing: I didn't really care if I won or lost, because both were good things. If I won I got to advance, and if I lost I got to go home and take care of the dog. Once there, I was nigh invulnerable.

The loser of that round had my same first name and owned a Quicksilver too, so it was the Plate o' Shrimp Lattice of Coincidence round. I think I won that one 2 to 1, and I didn't need to finish my last game because by the time I hit the third ball I had beaten him, including another good game on Strikes and Spares.

Now the pace picked up, because I knew almost everyone I played after that and they were aware of my urgency to not clean up dog poop when I got home. Next up was Ken, who plays in Baltimore. We pretty much trade off beat downs... sometimes I'll school him soundly, and other times he'll knock me off my high horse and make sure it tramples me in the process. I won that 2 to 1, and again the denouement was on Strikes and Spares. This time, I destroyed him utterly and salted the earth he lived on. I frickin' turned over the game and lapped him on the fourth ball. He recovered somewhat on his final ball so that I only almost beat him by a million points, 1.2M to 270K.

By now I was feeling pretty good. I was not scared at all. I just felt kind of... invincible. I had a very positive attitude about it. I think I could have taken on Lo Pan in a game of Chinatown or San Francisco if I had to.

Next up was Brian for 4th place, and I pretty much toasted him on bread, 2 to 0. He had watched me roll over SandS so he knew to steer clear of that train wreck. I think I beat him on Who Dunnit first, getting that ol' reliable spank mode Penthouse Party and becoming Roof Champion. The last game he picked was Sorcerer, and I managed to pull ahead on the last ball so I didn't have to finish that game either.

Then I went against Ralph for 3rd place, a guy I met for the first time on Friday but a lot of people knew. Ralph must not have been watching my previous Who Dunnit game and he picked it. It was touch and go until the last ball, when I got Penthouse Party again for a billion points. I didn't finish the last ball on that one either. I think I won that match 2 to 0 too.

And on to Kendall for 2nd place. He plays in the VA league and is working on a homebrew pinball project like I am, though he's a lot further along. He had a bad game of Sorcerer, then an awesome come-from-behind game of Monster Bash. However, that loss allowed me to pick... wait for it... Strikes and Spares for another erect nipple victory, 500K to 2 or 300K.

And finally, there could be only one. I was playing Jason for first place, another guy I'd never met before but everybody seemed to know. Since he was in the double elimination bracket and I was the plucky newcomer from the bottom, I had to beat him twice. He picked Big Buck Hunter Pro and I managed to pull off a narrow victory there. There was one awesome moment: He hit the Ram target and it kicked the ball straight down the middle. He looked at it dejectedly for a second, then said, "I got ass-rammed!" Working as I do with a lot of Indians, that just made me laugh and laugh. So he picked the next game, which was No Fear. Now, he had put up 1.5 bill on his first ball against Kendall earlier, but this time he just couldn't get it started. He got an easily beatable 450M, but unfortunately for me I couldn't get it started even worse than he did and took a loss.

And here we come to what proved to be my fatal mistake. I lost the game, so I could take a game pick or an order pick. Looking back at this narrative, that choice would be obvious: Strikes and Spares. But because my nascent strategic pinball mind has apparently not developed to the level of even basic common sense, that never even occurred to me. I thought back over the games and what I came up with is how well I did when other people picked the games. So I picked the order and allowed him to pick the game (in retrospect: Fuck you Robert Frost and your road less taken!). He picked Getaway, which was in the bar portion of John's place, hoping that the smoke and incredibly loud and mostly bad karaoke would distract me enough. It didn't really, but even though he did a beatable score, I came in about 8 million short for second place in B Division.

But despite that, I was so happy with my performance. I had six straight wins in single elimination, I played great most of the night, and I placed second when the most I was hoping for was to get through a few rounds. Everyone I played were great sports, we all had a great time, and we got to play a shitload of pinball.

After that we goofed off, watching the A Div players duke it out and playing games here & there for another hour or so until they got around to giving out the prizes. For second place, my prize was $62.50, which pretty much pays my expenses for the tournament and then some. But that also means that I am now a Professional Pinball Player. If/when I go to the Pro-Am Pinball Association Championship in July or August, I can hang out with the Pros and totally snub the Ams. Yeah! I'm quittin' my job tomorrow and following the Dream!

To add a cherry on top of my victory was the fact that Quicksilver -- WHO DID NOT DIE! -- got a semi-permanent fix to the flippers from Scott, the guy who repairs the games for the league. (I'm all about the movie quotes today.) It was turned off initially, but it was on for the bulk of tournament play.... and Scott even put a couple of bucks into it at the end of the night, probably because he was learning and trying to beat the game (they have one at PAPA, so it could show up in championship play some year and it never hurts to know the spank-worthy shots to make, such as the sweep shot on the center targets when 20K per target is lit). I'm going to pick up the game tomorrow after work, and in theory I'll get a little more cash from the quarters that QS has been taking in all week.

And when I got home (9 hours after I left) Darwin had been a super-good boy and managed to keep his wits and bladder about him. So all in all, it was a very good day.

Fairfax Pinball Tournament: Epic Fail!

You know, it's a good thing that I go to leagues and tournaments to play rather than to win, because if I went to win I would spend a lot of time sorely disappointed. On the first night of the Fairfax Pinball Open I suck so hard I created my own gravity well. My two qualifying scores put me at #8 out of 10, though to be fair if the qualifiers today stink up the place I could end up in a better seeding position. As it stands now, I'll probably be in the lower half, which means I could move up in single elimination if I play well; however, based on last night's performance, that's unlikely to happen.

There was also a classics tournament, and I was eliminated in the first round, losing the first two games so we didn't have to play the third. The first game was Mousin' Around, which I picked because it's usually a good game for me. There was a bit of an irregularity, in that I scored an extra ball but the game was set not to award them, so I started playing it (and got the skill shot!) before I realized it was the other guy's ball. But I did the right thing and trapped the ball s

o my opponent could continue playing his ball. I doubt it made a difference in the outcome. Losing the first game means I got to pick the second, so I picked my own damn game, Quicksilver, and proceeded to lose. To be fair, both games were pretty close, but it was not one of my finest hours.

But I did do some volunteer scorekeeping, and did OK under the fairly light load. Today (Saturday) is usually when the biggest turnout is.

And just to give me that extra bit of bile in my mouth, Quicksilver developed flipper problems in its first day on the job in 25 years. The left flipper has some loose screws that probably need to be tightened by replacing them with bigger screws and could use a new coil stop. The right flipper is just weak and might have a problem with the EOS switch. The repair guy said he'd try to take a look at it, and since it's scheduled to be used in the one-handed mini-tournament, hopefully he'll look at it early today. And the gameplay is not very tight... it's got a low angle and the slingshots require more effort to fire than they should. I'll need to deal with that when she comes home. But here is a picture of it on site next to the engorged areolae of Strikes and Spares. A lot of people told me on how nice the game looks, especially with the LEDs, and I was happy to accept all compliments on QS's behalf.

But overall, it was pretty fun talking to people. I met Trent, the #7 ranked player in the world (I looked myself up and it turns out I'm in the high 1,400's), and Koi Morris, who it turns out I'd played a game of Maverick with at Allentown a few years ago (and it actually ended up in the blog... go to the end of the post to see). There was a guy there from my hometown of L.A. who edited reality TV shows for a living and came out specifically for the tournament.

I did get my first, second, and third runs at Big Buck Hunter Pro. My first two games kind of sucked, but the third was OK. I enjoyed it, but I didn't feel like investing $1 per game because I was already smelling up the joint.

And that was pretty much my day. Today I'm heading down in the late afternoon for the playoffs, but I'm guessing I'll get single eliminated pretty fast and I'll make it an early night.

On Location

Well, everything went pretty well. As I mentioned, the game was loaded up, and the next day I drove the car and pin to work. After work I drove out to John's Place, getting there a little after 7. Only two other people were there, so I started unloading everything myself and setting it up. I did get some help when I lifted the backbox onto the game, but otherwise I got everything put back together in about a half hour. I was going to get help putting the back legs on, but then somebody pointed out that there was a pinball cart available. Boy, did that make things easier. In fact, later I realized that I had put the front legs on the back, so rather than adjusting the feet I just put the game on the cart and swapped the legs in about 2 minutes. Suddenly a cart seems like a good use of $300.

The game didn't get a lot of play while I was there. A couple of people played it after league, and a few told me how nice it looked -- it is a visually striking game, and it helps that at the time it was sitting next to Cyclopes, which looks like it was drawn by a 12 year-old on a textbook cover. I don't know if they're going to use the game in the tournament or if it's just going to be there for practice. The tournament starts tomorrow, so I'm going to go after work.

One funny thing that happened on Monday was the comedy of errors continued and I finished the night at #1 in A Division. One of the guys I was supposed to play against didn't show up and had no pre-played scores, so he forfeited. By dumb luck, one of the games we played was Mousin' Around, which usually does pretty well for me in league play, and the remaining guy I played against doesn't do well on it at all. I won one other game, and he beat me on the other two but not spectacularly, so I ended up in first place. I expect that to last exactly two weeks, but only because we have the Monday after the tournament off.

My baby is leaving home... *sob*

I really haven't been posting a lot lately because I really haven't been doing much. It just hasn't been a good pinball year. Work on T2 is stalled because I need to sand the cabinet, and I can't do that while it's cold and there's almost 2 feet of snow on the ground (OK, there isn't that much on the ground right now, but there has been that much this month, and there's still a non-zero amount as I write this). And that leaves league stuff, which is that I'm #2 in A in VA and #Crap in B in MD. If you're surprised by the former, don't be... it was largely dumb luck. I had two average weeks and most of the guys I've played against had crappy weeks. I expect to be beaten back down the ladder soon.

And there's actually news, but I'm going to hold onto it for a while because of this:

The league sponsors a tournament every year that is coming up next week. League members usually bring in extra games, but the problem is that most of those games are trapped in basements by the aforementioned snow and mud caused by the melting snow. The guy organizing was lamenting this fact, and I mentioned that I have one game that is not in my basement, Quicksilver. So before I mentally talked myself out of it, I volunteered to bring it and leave it at John's Place for a week.

Now, for some context: Quicksilver has not been on location for about 25 years, and has been in my possession for 24 of those years. It has been moved a couple of times, but always in a truck... never in my SUV. I have never removed the game's head. Even when my wife and I promoted it out of the basement, I kept one bolt in the head and pivoted the head to get it through the too narrow porch door. But I had agreed to do this knowing that it would be a great big anxiety-inducing adventure.

So this weekend I got it ready for Quicksilver's location comeback. Two of the player displays had problems, so I replaced them with displays from Eight Ball Deluxe. This proved problematic, until I realized that I needed to jump pins 11 & 12 of the Bally displays to get them to work in a Stern game. I tested the coin mechs, cleaned out the coin box, set it to 50 cents per game, verified that the tilt worked, replaced most of the LEDs with normal bulbs because I didn't want to annoy paying customers with the flickering, changed the door lock from the identically keyed one to a unique one, zeroed the audit statistics, verified that the backbox lock worked, removed some magnets I had stuck on the coin door, cleaned some strapping tape residue that's been on the game since we moved to Maryland 15 years ago, changed the replay scores, printed a new pricing and replay card, switched the game to 3 balls, cleaned out the coin box, and gave it a quick cleaning.

Then I did the unthinkable. I removed the head. I set the backglass aside for safe keeping, panicked when it slid down and fell on the ground (thank gooseness it didn't break), and put the backglass somewhere safer where it couldn't fall. I started unplugging plugs from the boards, labeling them as I went. I also had to unscrew most of the wire holders to get the wiring out, and when I rescrewed them I left one end open so I could re-thread the wiring easily later. I didn't realize this, but I had to unplug just about every plug in the backbox, including the displays, because it was all cable-tied together (and I had to cut a few ties before I realized this). I dropped the wiring into the body, unbolted the head and... took it off. It was extremely nerve-racking.

With my wife's help I removed the legs -- the leg bolt-sized socket wrench I got as a prize in last season's league was great for this, btw. Finally, after my wife had cleaned out the SUV, I loaded it up and it is there now.

And tomorrow is Take your Pinball to Work Day. We will find out how it goes.

Where's the knob marked "VOL"?

Happy New Year!

WPC audio boards seem to be a lot harder to find now than when I got my first one for Doctor Who a few years ago. After I got the driver board and spare CPU for T2, I went for weeks without a nibble about audio boards. The pinball repair guy at league says that since no one's made a replacement for it, the supply is drying up. In December one showed up on eBay in the UK but with shipping the final price was over $100. But as luck would have it, one showed up domestically on eBay in the middle of the month, and I was excited to see that it had a terrible title that was not conducive to saved searches... "Williams funhouse pinball soundcard". It missed my "wpc board" and "pinball (sound,audio) board" searches... but luckily I managed to catch it in my Funhouse net. It was a three day auction and it hardly got any bids. So I swooped in at the last minute and nabbed it for just over $30 with shipping. It took a week to arrive, but that wasn't the seller's fault -- the Post Office seemed to just give up about halfway through the holiday season.

I finally got around to trying it out last night in Doctor Who. It was deja vu all over again, because my daughter was watching a Doctor Who marathon on BBC America in honour of David Tennant finally regenerating out of the role... it was just like the old days when I had first gotten the game, which I would work on while the show was on.

The auction had said that you couldn't turn the volume down more than half way with the board. When I plugged it in, I found that I couldn't change the volume at all. After some repair guide reading, the problem appeared to be a failure in the potentiometer chip that controlled the volume, and a quick post to rgp seemed confirmed that. Luckily, while waiting for an answer to the post I found that Marco carries the chips for about $6... I wish I'd known that a few days ago because I had just ordered some stuff, but there you go.

While I was testing the board in Doctor Who and before I had read that in the guide, I could tell that the sound was different, but couldn't pinpoint it. It turns out that there are two versions of this audio board, one that was used from Funhouse to Party Zone, and the other for the rest. The difference is in the resistors used to balance the speech and music... lucky for me, since the board came out of a Funhouse and is destined for a T2, since they use the same board.

And it turned out that my first pinball game of the new year was on DW while I tested the board. It was a pretty good game, too -- I killed off two rounds of Daleks on the first ball -- and it was strange because I was actually playing it half-heartedly from off to the side because I didn't want to move a parts cabinet that was temporarily parked there. I'm hoping that bodes well for my gameplay in the New Year...

Romantic Pinball Road Trip

For my birthday in October, the lovely and talented Frauline Entropy gave me the gift of pinball: A weekend driving around with her playing pinball. After some strategizing and research, I opted for the following itinerary for the weekend of December 4th:

Friday: Drive to New Jersey, stay in a Bed & Breakfast
Saturday: Spend the day at the Silver Ball Museum in Asbury Park, NJ
Sunday: Drive to Castle Video in Branchville, NJ

We also had some other alternate locations for Sunday in case something didn't pan out.

Our B&B was the Lillagaard, a late Victorian affair in nearby Ocean Grove. It was a couple of houses from the beach -- not that the beach in December was such a draw -- and about a mile from the SBM. It being the off season, we were one of only two couples there, the other being a grumpy gus and his wife who seemed to spend most of their time watching Fox News in the common room. The B&B was a lot of fun... kind of creaky, a lot of exposed pipes, kind of shoddy remodeling workmanship coupled with some nice flourishes, a coffin-like shower, and I was able to steal unsecured wifi sporadically from a nearby house. Friday we arrive after dark and ate dinner in an old drug store turned sandwich place a few blocks away. It was rainy and windy on Saturday, but that was no problem since we planned to spend the day inside playing games. The SBM was pretty cool... it was in the basement of a hipster clothing and record shop, and had about a hundred games set up, mostly EMs, a few early solid state games, and an Attack & Revenge from Mars for the kids with short attention spans. There were also a few random arcade games, like puck bowlers and putting games. Admission was $20, the games were mostly in good condition, and a lot of them had toppers with a blurb about the game. We pretty much spent most of the day there, though my wife goofed around in the town for a while. I did get a couple of high scores, which was cool. And the most amazing thing of all was that Mrs. Entropy had a good time... and no one was more surprised than she was. She really enjoyed the puck bowler, but ended up spending a lot of time with the from Mars brothers. At some point she even admitted that she wouldn't mind having them in the house! So now all I need to do is find an unused $6000 and 20 sq feet of floorspace and we'll be in good shape. We ate lunch at a surprisingly tasteless organic food coffee shop, and after I finally conked out we browsed a paranormal bookstore that was doing holiday photos with an abominable snowman, then ate dinner at a much better place than the organic place.

Sunday was a sunny but cold day, so we goofed around along the boardwalk for a bit. Then we drove about 2 hours to get to Castle Video, which is part of a mini-fiefdom consisting of storage, movie rental, and what looks like a couple of other small businesses. But the guy likes pinball, so he had about 15 games set up, mostly Williams and a few DE/Sega games. Again, my wife had a lot of fun, though she got spanked hard by a couple of games so she gravitated to the more accommodating games, like Whodunnit. I again put up a few high scores, most notably on Fish Tales where I scored a massive (for me) 300 million. I like to imagine the chagrin on the faces of the pinball league that meets at Castle Video when they wonder who that Joe guy is on a bunch of the machines. After that it was too late to go to any of the other stops, so we just headed home. All in all we had a pretty good time, and who knows? Maybe Mrs. Entropy will even accompany me to a show some time. This year the Saturday of Allentown falls on our anniversary... perfect for another Romantic Pinball Road Trip!

And speaking of gifts, for Christmas my wife got me an extremely cool baseball jersey from the Pacific Pinball Museum. I love PPM's art... I bought a copy of their Art Nouveau-style poster for the PP Expo a few years ago, and this year they posted the poster as a pdf for free. I printed it at 11x17 on one of the nice color printers at work, framed it, and hung it downstairs in the pinball area. Sweet!!!