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A diary of a beginner tournament player

A chastening first experience of pingolf at SWL today!

Struggled a lot with not being able to warm up on the competition machines and evidently 18 “first games” in a row is something I did not excel in today. Just too slow to adapt to each machine and I was climbing too many big mountains on ball 3. The pinball gods were not bathing me in their generosity either; just one of those days where nothing quite went right, narrowly missing score thresholds and finding new and innovative ways to suck. 122 “strokes” and 12th/14.

Still, great to get some experience of the format before the Pinball Office next weekend, and some more valuable lessons learned in the journey to get better!
 
The tournaments are coming thick and fast at the minute, longer entry so the TLDR is that I am still pretty bad but do have some good moments!

Pinball Office Weekender - Pingolf

First time visiting PBO and the Saturday was 18 holes of pingolf. First off, love PBO, really eclectic mix of machines and AIR CONDITIONING! Oh and some nice people too. But mostly air conditioning. Anyway!

Tried to quickly get to grips with the machines that were new to me inc. all of the Jersey Jacks (except Dialed In) and American machines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for the second time in two weekends my pingolf went terribly; a score of 142 (!) which ended up being 11th/16. The scoring bands were a bit tough with high floors to get anything less than a 10, so I tended to score either 2 or 10. Unfortunately, far more of the latter. Onwards!

Pinball Office Weekender - Matchplay

After a refreshing sleep on a farm in my campervan I was back for another bite at the cherry in group matchplay. After a tough start with a 4th on NBA Fastbreak with an amazing score of 15 (seriously), I got into some rhythm and got a few wins and 2nds. Fish Tales ended up being my best machine of the day, getting a 1st and a 2nd with a strong video mode in each. Final result was 13th/25 and I was warmed up for PinFest.

PinFest - Main

I only had 8 hours on Friday to qualify before carrying on further up north for a wedding, so had to really push to get to grips with the machines quickly and get some cards in. My first time playing a card-based tournament and boy, it’s a rollercoaster. The joy of getting a great score, followed by the disappointment when your next two scores are duds and you ruin your card.

I was quick out of the blocks and very briefly led the competition with a perfect score of 1,000. STOP THE COUNT

IMG_9298.webp

I did lots of homework beforehand and after taking a walk down the bank I decided to build my cards around Creature, Bond 60th, Jetspin, Taxi and World Cup Soccer, with maybe one or two or those changing out depending on how things were going. My third card of the day ended up being my best, with 64k on Jetspin (99 pts), 378m on WCS (137 pts), 1.2m on Taxi (168 pts), and 7.9k on Bond 60th (164 pts). Sadly, my card was completed with an awful two house ball 13m on Creature which scored 0. My card came to 568 pts. If I’d matched my first Creature score of the day of 47m I’d have ended up with around 710 pts and just outside the finals, but I’m sure everybody else could have said the same at some point in the event!

I kept trying to improve but I was tailing off with frustration and making poor machine choices. I kept going back to Creature despite continuing to score poorly on it, and I was doing the same with the ultra fast Tron in an effort to finally get to grips with it as I know I can on other examples of that machine. Silly stuff and I voided all of my afternoon cards as they were all trash!

In the end I finished 65th / 147, which I am really happy with for a first attempt at a huge tournament like this. It absolutely could have been better (or indeed, so much worse) and I’d have loved to have had Friday evening and Saturday to continue to try to improve, but it is what it is!

My biggest learning points were around card strategy (in terms of both machine choice and in voiding / submitting), and also on playing on hard machines. Some of the machines in the main bank were on another level of difficulty from even places like SWL which themselves are set up with better players in mind. I completely avoided some machines (Rush and Iron Maiden in particular) because I was watching many players much better than me getting absolutely reduced by them. I suppose the next level of “git gud” would allow me to get something out of those machines; something for me to reflect on before the UK Open.

Consistency is of course king in this format, which I just don’t yet possess to any degree. That is certainly the next level I need to work through to end up a much better player.

PinFest - Classics

The best tonic to card-based misery! No consistency required; just score and score big.

My initial tactic was to play two machines exclusively, being Space Shuttle and Seawitch with a view to getting a high score and a backup. I put up “mid-table” scores on both with my first five tickets. After putting another five tickets on Space Shuttle with only minor improvement, I started to hedge my bets and play a wider selection.

Seeing Flight 2k with no queue, I jumped on to play my first ever game on it and boom - just short of 900k sent me to the top of the board. This beginner’s luck incurred the wrath of Josh Iles who jumped back on a few minutes later and put up a much bigger 1.6m; but it was the solid score I was looking for.

Overnight I was in a finals qualifying position, but on Saturday I was quickly demoted and I ended up with the 7th best score on F2k and 32nd / 109. This far exceeded my expectations going in. Again, would have loved to have had Saturday to try to improve but seeing the qualifying scores I don’t think I’d have made it anyway!

Overall I loved the PinFest competitions and look forward to having another go at it next year, with the benefit of another year of experience and (hopefully) full availability. Qualifying was so well organised and user-friendly and I did appreciate the variety of machines in the two banks; all thanks to @Lecari @David_Vi and the cast of scorekeepers who worked so hard to keep everything moving. And good luck to the deserving finalists for the rest of the weekend!

Next up: hopefully a trip to PBR next Sunday for yet another list of machines new to me to get a handle on. Then, a break before the UK Open…
 
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Just home from my weekend at PBR, plenty of other PBR review threads so will skip the finer points, but long story short it is great and is going to be an amazing asset for UK pinball. Also really nice to spend some time in Spoons on Saturday evening with Kevlar, Martin and Graham having a couple of pints at 2002 prices!

But this is a tournament diary and today was nine rounds of group matchplay (a modern and a classic each round), with a whopping 47 entrants. Coming off the back of a couple of half-decent showings at Pinball Office and PinFest but also bearing in mind the very strong field I had set myself a target of finishing somewhere in the region of 30th-35th.

Well, reader, I did not achieve this. I managed 54 points (so averaging bang on 3rd on each game) which was good for… 44th/47! It was so bad.

I’m at a bit of a loss as to what else I could have done: I had five hours of practice yesterday, did stacks of homework and knew the rules, but in general my accuracy felt poor. At times I felt like I couldn’t hit a barn door, and indeed on The Walking Dead I drained one ball after missing the barn four times in a row. It was quite poetic in a way.

Trying to take positives, the highlight of the day was a win on No Fear with a solid 1.2bn. Otherwise I’m struggling to pick the good out of:

- 10m on Deadpool without even qualifying a mode
- 5m on Iron Maiden (yeah, really)
- Trying to live catch with the bottom left flipper on Harlem Globetrotters with highly predictable results, despite reminding myself very strongly not to do this in my machine notes:

IMG_9575.webp

This all being said, it was great to get some tournament practice on a bank of machines which I suspect I’ll be seeing quite a bit in various places over the coming months and years.

I’m a bit sad to have lost a load of confidence going into the UK Open, but I’ve got a month to work on some things and see how it goes.
 
Morning Simon. I’m enjoying reading your journey into competitive pinball as it was the same for so many of us. Similar to you this year, I went to pinfest last year with a predetermined list of 4 pins that was going to make up my attempt to put 3 games together on a ticket. I tried many times and failed miserably. I did similar at the UK Open. Obviously I’ve played a lot of pinball in the meantime and am a better player now but my strategy going into pinfest this year was very different. Being a 5 game card it was already going to be tougher but I didn’t go in thinking ‘I must play these 5 pins’. I used my first ticket to play the games that wouldn’t be my first choice to see how they played. I also played the pins I would have blindly focused on normally as I know them well. The result was although I know them inside out, i was going to avoid creech and wcs as they were way tougher set up than what I’m used to and my muscle memory for the shots was way out. On the flip side other games were now in consideration. 1) Bond 60th was playing really nice with a not too tight tilt. I needed to read up the rules having only played it once before but definitely something I felt I could put a decent score on
2) Rush although set up tough also didn’t have a super tight tilt. The ball save was off but possible to activate with the skill shot. I’m not really familiar with the rules but know which modes are rewarding and I could see a path to multiball. Post passing to get the ball on the left flipper was quite consistent.
3) Jetspin. No one would really be familiar with it. Yes there would be house balls a plenty but also a soft plunge put the ball in the top lanes to rotate the wheel and then keeping it alive achieved a decent ish score. Rotate the wheel a couple more times to the star and happy days if possible

The 2x practice cards also told me that bksor and twd were definitely my banker games and I felt confident I could put 100m or close to it on both. The end result was I put a really good card together with 4 good scores and 1 really average score that was bleeding all through the qualifiers. The card held up and I got through to the business end of the tournament.

My strategy will be the same for the Uk open next month. Play everything once if possible to see how they play. Make sure I’ve done the homework on the rules of games I’m not as familiar with. Finally, talk to other people as much as possible to find out how games are playing!
 
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Morning Simon. I’m enjoying reading your journey into competitive pinball as it was the same for so many of us. Similar to you this year, I went to pinfest last year with a predetermined list of 4 pins that was going to make up my attempt to put 3 games together on a ticket. I tried many times and failed miserably. I did similar at the UK Open. Obviously I’ve played a lot of pinball in the meantime and am a better player but my strategy going into pinfest this year was very different. Being a 5 game card it was already going to be tougher but I didn’t go in thinking ‘I must play these 5 pins’. I used my first ticket to play the games that wouldn’t be my first choice to see how they played. I also played the pins I would have blindly focused on normally as I know them well. The result was although I know them inside out, i was going to avoid creech and wcs as they were way tougher set up than what I’m used to and my muscle memory for the shots was way out. On the flip side other games were now in consideration. 1) Bond 60th was playing really nice with a not too tight tilt. I needed to read up the rules having only played it once before but definitely something I felt I could put a decent score on
2) Rush although set up tough also didn’t have a super tight tilt. The ball save was off but possible to activate with the skill shot. I’m not really familiar with the rules but know which modes are rewarding and I could see a path to multiball. Post passing to get the ball on the left flipper was quite consistent.
3) Jetspin. No one would really be familiar with it. Yes there would be house balls a plenty but also a soft plunge put the ball in the top lanes to rotate the wheel and then keeping it alive achieved a decent ish score. Rotate the wheel a couple more times to the star and happy days if possible

The 2x practice cards also told me that bksor and twd were definitely my banker games and I felt confident I could put 100m or close to it on both. The end result was I put a really good card together with 4 good scores and 1 really average score that was bleeding all through the qualifiers. The card held up and I got through to the business end of the tournament.

My strategy will be the same for the Uk open next month. Play everything once if possible to see how they play. Make sure I’ve done the homework on the rules of games I’m not as familiar with. Finally, talk to other people as much as possible to find out how games are playing!
Thank Jmac, really appreciate you taking the time to reply. With the UK Open having a larger bank (and three of them!) I think I will definitely be having more “exploration” tickets than I did at PinFest, all subject to queuing times of course. Will definitely need to manage my time (and wallet!) effectively.
 
Morning Simon. I’m enjoying reading your journey into competitive pinball as it was the same for so many of us. Similar to you this year, I went to pinfest last year with a predetermined list of 4 pins that was going to make up my attempt to put 3 games together on a ticket. I tried many times and failed miserably. I did similar at the UK Open. Obviously I’ve played a lot of pinball in the meantime and am a better player but my strategy going into pinfest this year was very different. Being a 5 game card it was already going to be tougher but I didn’t go in thinking ‘I must play these 5 pins’. I used my first ticket to play the games that wouldn’t be my first choice to see how they played. I also played the pins I would have blindly focused on normally as I know them well. The result was although I know them inside out, i was going to avoid creech and wcs as they were way tougher set up than what I’m used to and my muscle memory for the shots was way out. On the flip side other games were now in consideration. 1) Bond 60th was playing really nice with a not too tight tilt. I needed to read up the rules having only played it once before but definitely something I felt I could put a decent score on
2) Rush although set up tough also didn’t have a super tight tilt. The ball save was off but possible to activate with the skill shot. I’m not really familiar with the rules but know which modes are rewarding and I could see a path to multiball. Post passing to get the ball on the left flipper was quite consistent.
3) Jetspin. No one would really be familiar with it. Yes there would be house balls a plenty but also a soft plunge put the ball in the top lanes to rotate the wheel and then keeping it alive achieved a decent ish score. Rotate the wheel a couple more times to the star and happy days if possible

The 2x practice cards also told me that bksor and twd were definitely my banker games and I felt confident I could put 100m or close to it on both. The end result was I put a really good card together with 4 good scores and 1 really average score that was bleeding all through the qualifiers. The card held up and I got through to the business end of the tournament.

My strategy will be the same for the Uk open next month. Play everything once if possible to see how they play. Make sure I’ve done the homework on the rules of games I’m not as familiar with. Finally, talk to other people as much as possible to find out how games are playing!
Twatting hell Jmac! I bloody love this post!! You've got the bug bad 🤩

This is exactly how I did it 🤝
 
Twatting hell Jmac! I bloody love this post!! You've got the bug bad 🤩

This is exactly how I did it 🤝
The competitive side of pinball has heightened my enjoyment of the hobby more than I could quantify. From the awesome people I have met that will be lifelong friends to just playing so many pins that I would never come across.

I can’t say it loud enough - people should just give it a go. It’s overwhelming friendly to new people and not at all judgy on your ability. I’d even go as far as to say - I promise you’ll make friends and it will improve your pinball skills

@Taxiturn I’m going to host a matchplay tournament for 40 people hopefully on sat 16th nov. You’d be very welcome - I’m based around 10 miles outside Bedford just off the A1. Details of how to sign up will be posted on here soon
 
The competitive side of pinball has heightened my enjoyment of the hobby more than I could quantify. From the awesome people I have met that will be lifelong friends to just playing so many pins that I would never come across.

I can’t say it loud enough - people should just give it a go. It’s overwhelming friendly to new people and not at all judgy on your ability. I’d even go as far as to say - I promise you’ll make friends and it will improve your pinball skills

@Taxiturn I’m going to host a matchplay tournament for 40 people hopefully on sat 16th nov. You’d be very welcome - I’m based around 10 miles outside Bedford just off the A1. Details of how to sign up will be posted on here soon
Thank you, looks like I should be free that day so I will be signing up once it goes live! I saw Gonzo’s video, amazing place you’ve got there.
 
My strategy will be the same for the Uk open next month. Play everything once if possible to see how they play. Make sure I’ve done the homework on the rules of games I’m not as familiar with. Finally, talk to other people as much as possible to find out how games are playing!
I trust you won't use last years strategy Jon, i.e. 9 pints in the middle of a very good card 🍻 :D.

Simon, don't be annoyed by your performance at PBR, I'm sure you don't need to be told it's not going to be a linear progression!, skills will improve but you'll have awful days too, just remember our matches on No Fear and Far out and that should cheer you up :). My progression curve looks more like the FTSE 100 during covid.
 
I trust you won't use last years strategy Jon, i.e. 9 pints in the middle of a very good card 🍻 :D.

Simon, don't be annoyed by your performance at PBR, I'm sure you don't need to be told it's not going to be a linear progression!, skills will improve but you'll have awful days too, just remember our matches on No Fear and Far out and that should cheer you up :). My progression curve looks more like the FTSE 100 during covid.
Thanks Kev, it was a bit of a shame for you that you caught me in the one round of the day where I was actually playing well 😂 but you’re absolutely right. I know and accept I will have bad tournaments but I always want to try to figure out the reason(s) for those bad days, if there is one, so I can work on it for next time. Maybe I should just shrug my shoulders from time to time!
 
Not a diary entry per se, but a really good short video which Travis Murie has uploaded about some of the different elements of improving as a player.

I’ve definitely been putting a lot of focus on what he calls the “hard skills”, which have and will continue to be absolutely necessary for me to improve, but which can broadly be developed by logging the practice hours and doing your rules homework.

I think the “soft skills” are probably more difficult to develop as there is so much more to them. Quickly adapting to different machines is a really challenging area for me, and this definitely falls into that soft skills category.

Anyway, give it a watch and see what you think:

 
The inevitable, and very lightly anticipated (thanks @Jackpot ) UK Open write up. TLDR: it went pretty well.

Won’t go into all the minutiae, you know the deal - three tournaments that I could participate in, five-game cards, many hours of qualifying time! I’m going to be writing this with a first timer to the UK Open in mind, and how I approached it as a first timer.

Firstly, machine selection - this year the main and classics banks had 24 machines each and the PBR bank had 12. I followed @Jmac ’s advice and didn’t choose five in advance for any of the tournaments. However what I did do, given the size of the banks, was rule out machines which I would play on “counting” entries. There were some machines in the bank I have never got a good score on and the chances of doing so under pressure on a hard machine would be slim. So for example in the main I eliminated Rush, Iron Maiden, Funhouse, AIQ and Alien Star immediately, which still left me to choose five from 19… which I think is okay. I would have kicked myself if I’d ruined a card on one of those. Otherwise, I did play pretty much all of the machines at some point to figure out which felt “safe” and which I had a chance of going really well on. The other trap to avoid falling into is don’t just choose a machine because it has no queue, especially if you are on a good card. I did this a couple of times and it was such a bad idea! Be patient and play what you actually want to play.

Secondly, this was my first time playing a multi-day event, and these are potentially LONG days. Energy management and mental state were so much more important than I thought they would be. On Friday I was super fresh and felt good until quite late on. Saturday, I was wiped out when I woke up and so stayed in bed for another hour rather than be there at the hooter as I was on the Friday. I think this helped, but after playing almost all day I did crash around 9pm and just started playing horribly. You really need to recognise this if/when it happens because if you continue to play then you are pretty much just burning money and likely winding yourself up mentally. So step back when you need to, you can qualify as much or as little as you want. Sunday, I was forced to play less because of the queues on the PBR bank and I also didn’t start until about 11 given my tiredness. This worked out well for me.

Thirdly, card qualifying is HARD. Properly hard. Getting five good scores back to back on hard machines can feel nigh on impossible and having a stinker four games into a really good card is absolutely demoralising and frustrating, you can feel like the worst pinball player alive. I ruined a good Main card with a 6m on Jurassic Park which I had scored 63m and 275m on with my previous two games. What I would recommend to help with these feelings is to do some scorekeeping. You can obviously see all of the submitted scores on Never Drains, but you don’t see the voided tickets. You don’t see the top, top US players putting up 2m on John Wick, or 50m on Indy 500, or 5m on AIQ. But when you’re scorekeeping you do see all of that and it did help me feel a bit better about my own stinkers, so do some scorekeeping for perspective!

On the topic of scorekeeping, I signed up for 2 x 2 hour sessions. These were probably the most exhausting 4 hours of the weekend, it is really non-stop physically and you need to concentrate hard or you can easily make stupid mistakes. I signed up for more than the minimum required because I thought this would be a useful way to force myself to take a break from playing - which obviously it did - but it was no cake walk and so didn’t quite have the desired effect in terms of R&R. But, after a short break afterwards it did give me some kind of spark, maybe it let my reflexes recover a bit. And obviously, it massively helps the event run, so please do it!

Scorekeeping does earn you entries, and I got through plenty of those. I ended up buying 30 entries over the weekend, which is not a cheap endeavour. I was playing out all games on most of these cards to get more machine time, apart from on Sunday when the PBR queues were long and I was literally running out of time to be wasting it on dead cards. You can of course use fewer entries, or indeed way way more, but as with all things you should set your budget accordingly and do stick to it!

The machine setup was quite difficult but rarely “unfair”. All of the Sterns with the exception of Bond 60th had no ball save. But, there weren’t that many “hardware” changes like removing outlane posts etc. which are the preserve of the higher ranking US tournaments. It was possibly marginally harder than Pinfest but not much more. So, it will probably be an initial shock if you’ve only ever played machines on factory settings, but you will adjust to it.

Finally on tips, you really need to do your rules homework, especially if you’re someone like me who is new so can’t pull from decades of experience playing these machines. I prepared a document where I wrote 100-500 words on all 60 machines including core strategy on how I’d approach them, skill shots to go for, danger shots to avoid etc etc. This took absolutely ages. I consulted this often when I was queuing, especially for machines I didn’t have much experience on. This is quite extreme prep but now I’ve done this, I have it ready for any other comps with the same / similar banks, so hopefully it will pay dividends in the future.

So, how did it all go? My objectives coming into the weekend were:

- Finish in the top 80% (so, above 120th ish) in all comps, and,
- Stretch goal - finish top half in one comp.

And it went better than expected. I finished 68th in PBR, 70th in Classics and 110th in Main. So, top half in two, and indeed top 80% in all - great results for me. Main was a bit frustrating with multiple ruined cards. My best card in PBR actually had a zero on it - a disastrous 15m on Fish Tales meant my card was being carried by only four games. My best cards:

IMG_9846.webp

So a mixture of good, bad, and ugly and PLENTY room for improvement in future events.

I noted some of my better scores in another thread, but I did have a pet favourite machine in each bank. In the Main, almost all of my cards included Baywatch. I never blew this machine up (top score c. 650m) but equally, I rarely scored less than 300m on it. It was solid and felt safe for me, so I hassled the Hoff all weekend. In Classics, I scored consistently well on Freefall with two scores around or above 1 million. Freefall is an excellent machine if you want to force yourself to slow down and chill. If you don’t know - the drop target grid is key to scoring well and you can change the row of the grid you are working towards by pressing both flippers at once. So trap up, look at which targets are left up and which you still need to complete your rows on the grid (which increase bonus X) and then choose your row and shoot. Great for getting the heart rate down. Finally in PBR, Demo Man was my absolute banker game - I scored over 800m three times. I was using the handles which is apparently a bit of a noob move, but I actually played better with them and they also give you more bonus and secret multiball jackpots :)

With these results I gained over 30 WPPRs which has leaped me up from 137th to 84th in the UK rankings (and 4,221st in the world). I’m pretty proud to have come from literally zero to top 100 in 8 months. Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m actually the 84th best player, but you really do need to turn up to the big tournaments and play solidly if you want to do well in this system (however flawed you consider it). Some IFPA stats from my profile:

IMG_9843.webp
IMG_9845.webp

Apologies for the length, always happy to take any questions or PMs (and especially from newer players starting out on their journeys!)

Next outing: SWL in two weeks for back-to-back matchplay tournaments. See you there!

Simon
 
Great write up Simon, these tournaments are very draining, but I think you can be very proud of your achievements. Just look at the list of players that came to compete, current and past world champions, major winners, players that have played since they were 2yrs old, consistent, almost robotic accuracy. Just take a look at Zach McCarthy 3 1st and 2 2nd places on his 5 game card!!! Staggering. I was honoured just to play alongside some of these guys.
See you at the next one mate 👍
 
The inevitable, and very lightly anticipated (thanks @Jackpot ) UK Open write up. TLDR: it went pretty well.

Won’t go into all the minutiae, you know the deal - three tournaments that I could participate in, five-game cards, many hours of qualifying time! I’m going to be writing this with a first timer to the UK Open in mind, and how I approached it as a first timer.

Firstly, machine selection - this year the main and classics banks had 24 machines each and the PBR bank had 12. I followed @Jmac ’s advice and didn’t choose five in advance for any of the tournaments. However what I did do, given the size of the banks, was rule out machines which I would play on “counting” entries. There were some machines in the bank I have never got a good score on and the chances of doing so under pressure on a hard machine would be slim. So for example in the main I eliminated Rush, Iron Maiden, Funhouse, AIQ and Alien Star immediately, which still left me to choose five from 19… which I think is okay. I would have kicked myself if I’d ruined a card on one of those. Otherwise, I did play pretty much all of the machines at some point to figure out which felt “safe” and which I had a chance of going really well on. The other trap to avoid falling into is don’t just choose a machine because it has no queue, especially if you are on a good card. I did this a couple of times and it was such a bad idea! Be patient and play what you actually want to play.

Secondly, this was my first time playing a multi-day event, and these are potentially LONG days. Energy management and mental state were so much more important than I thought they would be. On Friday I was super fresh and felt good until quite late on. Saturday, I was wiped out when I woke up and so stayed in bed for another hour rather than be there at the hooter as I was on the Friday. I think this helped, but after playing almost all day I did crash around 9pm and just started playing horribly. You really need to recognise this if/when it happens because if you continue to play then you are pretty much just burning money and likely winding yourself up mentally. So step back when you need to, you can qualify as much or as little as you want. Sunday, I was forced to play less because of the queues on the PBR bank and I also didn’t start until about 11 given my tiredness. This worked out well for me.

Thirdly, card qualifying is HARD. Properly hard. Getting five good scores back to back on hard machines can feel nigh on impossible and having a stinker four games into a really good card is absolutely demoralising and frustrating, you can feel like the worst pinball player alive. I ruined a good Main card with a 6m on Jurassic Park which I had scored 63m and 275m on with my previous two games. What I would recommend to help with these feelings is to do some scorekeeping. You can obviously see all of the submitted scores on Never Drains, but you don’t see the voided tickets. You don’t see the top, top US players putting up 2m on John Wick, or 50m on Indy 500, or 5m on AIQ. But when you’re scorekeeping you do see all of that and it did help me feel a bit better about my own stinkers, so do some scorekeeping for perspective!

On the topic of scorekeeping, I signed up for 2 x 2 hour sessions. These were probably the most exhausting 4 hours of the weekend, it is really non-stop physically and you need to concentrate hard or you can easily make stupid mistakes. I signed up for more than the minimum required because I thought this would be a useful way to force myself to take a break from playing - which obviously it did - but it was no cake walk and so didn’t quite have the desired effect in terms of R&R. But, after a short break afterwards it did give me some kind of spark, maybe it let my reflexes recover a bit. And obviously, it massively helps the event run, so please do it!

Scorekeeping does earn you entries, and I got through plenty of those. I ended up buying 30 entries over the weekend, which is not a cheap endeavour. I was playing out all games on most of these cards to get more machine time, apart from on Sunday when the PBR queues were long and I was literally running out of time to be wasting it on dead cards. You can of course use fewer entries, or indeed way way more, but as with all things you should set your budget accordingly and do stick to it!

The machine setup was quite difficult but rarely “unfair”. All of the Sterns with the exception of Bond 60th had no ball save. But, there weren’t that many “hardware” changes like removing outlane posts etc. which are the preserve of the higher ranking US tournaments. It was possibly marginally harder than Pinfest but not much more. So, it will probably be an initial shock if you’ve only ever played machines on factory settings, but you will adjust to it.

Finally on tips, you really need to do your rules homework, especially if you’re someone like me who is new so can’t pull from decades of experience playing these machines. I prepared a document where I wrote 100-500 words on all 60 machines including core strategy on how I’d approach them, skill shots to go for, danger shots to avoid etc etc. This took absolutely ages. I consulted this often when I was queuing, especially for machines I didn’t have much experience on. This is quite extreme prep but now I’ve done this, I have it ready for any other comps with the same / similar banks, so hopefully it will pay dividends in the future.

So, how did it all go? My objectives coming into the weekend were:

- Finish in the top 80% (so, above 120th ish) in all comps, and,
- Stretch goal - finish top half in one comp.

And it went better than expected. I finished 68th in PBR, 70th in Classics and 110th in Main. So, top half in two, and indeed top 80% in all - great results for me. Main was a bit frustrating with multiple ruined cards. My best card in PBR actually had a zero on it - a disastrous 15m on Fish Tales meant my card was being carried by only four games. My best cards:

View attachment 262594

So a mixture of good, bad, and ugly and PLENTY room for improvement in future events.

I noted some of my better scores in another thread, but I did have a pet favourite machine in each bank. In the Main, almost all of my cards included Baywatch. I never blew this machine up (top score c. 650m) but equally, I rarely scored less than 300m on it. It was solid and felt safe for me, so I hassled the Hoff all weekend. In Classics, I scored consistently well on Freefall with two scores around or above 1 million. Freefall is an excellent machine if you want to force yourself to slow down and chill. If you don’t know - the drop target grid is key to scoring well and you can change the row of the grid you are working towards by pressing both flippers at once. So trap up, look at which targets are left up and which you still need to complete your rows on the grid (which increase bonus X) and then choose your row and shoot. Great for getting the heart rate down. Finally in PBR, Demo Man was my absolute banker game - I scored over 800m three times. I was using the handles which is apparently a bit of a noob move, but I actually played better with them and they also give you more bonus and secret multiball jackpots :)

With these results I gained over 30 WPPRs which has leaped me up from 137th to 84th in the UK rankings (and 4,221st in the world). I’m pretty proud to have come from literally zero to top 100 in 8 months. Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m actually the 84th best player, but you really do need to turn up to the big tournaments and play solidly if you want to do well in this system (however flawed you consider it). Some IFPA stats from my profile:

View attachment 262595
View attachment 262596

Apologies for the length, always happy to take any questions or PMs (and especially from newer players starting out on their journeys!)

Next outing: SWL in two weeks for back-to-back matchplay tournaments. See you there!

Simon
Absolutely superb write-up and thread, generally 😍

The whole thread is absolutely brilliant throughout. Very thoughtful and thought-provoking 😍

You should be incredibly proud of your finish, @Taxiturn, after only eight months of play. We did much worse in the UK Open after playing for a couple of years now.

I'm 💯% nicking your advice to:
  • Write 100-500 word strategy summaries for each pin before a tournament - rather than watching half a PAPA tutorial video and promptly forgetting the entire contents (!) or literally hoping my seven year old had figured out the rules while playing casually in PBR (erm, Whirlwind - see audio clip) :oops:;
  • Sloooow right down;
  • All the sports psychology and 'you lose a lot' stuff. I currently panic under any competitive pressure whatsoever, whether that's playing in league and even being watched at home. I can tell from my husband, @MadMonzer, that there are skills you learn as a kid playing competitive sports, whether that be football, chess, or whatever, that I never did and it's not the easiest trying to learn them from a standing start, age 44;
  • Play exploratory cards (thanks @Jmac), if you can, and only pick your best machines after you've tried the rest of the bank. I say 'if you can' because, like quite a few of the Ladies I suspect, I focused on the Ladies event in the UK Open, and ended up only putting in 1 or 2 cards into the main comps.
I think the big thing I've learned from reading your thread, @Taxiturn, is to be much kinder to myself 🤗 I beat myself up all the time for being c**p at pinball and never feel I'm improving, despite having target scores pinned up on our home machines, watching all the Abe Flips videos... I’d almost given up competitive league entirely before the UK Open - just playing casually at PBR.

But, then, I noticed further up how you'd written:

I had five hours of practice yesterday

And I'm like 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Not because of anything you've done (:)), but because if I can manage five uninterrupted minutes, I'm doing well. If IFPA ever launch a format where you have to adjudicate a fight, keep your equanimity while someone shouts "you're not achieving much on that ball, are you?" as they trampoline on a nearby sofa, or you have to fetch a chocolate digestive between Ball 1 and Ball 2, then I will be GOLDEN. Honestly, Zach McCarthy can retire now, because I am QUEEN of that format!

Joking apart, watching my son improve over the summer holidays, there aren't any shortcuts to lots of preparation, practice and a focus on basic skills :) There's a genuine difference between playing pinball (owning pinball machines and playing them daily) and actually 'gitting gud'.
 
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Absolutely superb write-up and thread, generally 😍

The whole thread is absolutely brilliant throughout. Very thoughtful and thought-provoking 😍

You should be incredibly proud of your finish, @Taxiturn, after only eight months of play. We did much worse in the UK Open after playing for a couple of years now.

I'm 💯% nicking your advice to:
  • Write 100-500 word strategy summaries for each pin before a tournament - rather than watching half a PAPA tutorial video and promptly forgetting the entire contents (!) or literally hoping my seven year old had figured out the rules while playing casually in PBR (erm, Whirlwind - see audio clip) :oops:;
  • Sloooow right down;
  • All the sports psychology and 'you lose a lot' stuff. I currently panic under any competitive pressure whatsoever, whether that's playing in league and even being watched at home, and then I literally drop the ball. I can tell from my husband, @MadMonzer, that there are skills you learn as a kid playing competitive sports, whether that be football, chess, or whatever, that I never did and it's not the easiest trying to learn them from a standing start, age 44;
  • Play exploratory cards (thanks @Jmac), if you can, and only pick your best machines after you've tried the rest of the bank. I say 'if you can' because, like quite a few of the Ladies, I focused on the Ladies event, and ended up only putting in 1 or 2 cards into the main comps. My aim, going into the competition, was to try to get into the Ladies final, as I came 17th out of 25 last year, only losing my finals' place in the last half hour of qualifying, and I know I've improved since then.
I think the big thing I've learned from reading your thread, @Taxiturn, is to be much kinder to myself 🤗 I beat myself up all the time for being c**p at pinball and I never feel I'm improving, despite having target scores pinned up on our home machines, having watched all the Abe Flips videos, and so on... I often feel I'm not doing the right things to improve, will never improve, and had almost given up competitive league play entirely before the UK Open - just playing casually while at PBR with @MadMonzer.

But, then, I did notice further up how you'd written:



And I'm like 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Not because of anything you've done (:)), but because if I can manage five uninterrupted minutes on any given day to practice, I'm doing well. If IFPA ever launch a format where you have to adjudicate a fight, keep your equanimity while someone shouts "you're not achieving much on that ball, are you?" as they casually trampoline on the sofa beside you, or where you have to stop to fetch a chocolate digestive biscuit between Ball 1 and Ball 2, then I will be GOLDEN. Honestly, Zach McCarthy can retire now, because I am QUEEN of that format!

Joking apart, watching my son improve over the summer holidays from "oh, how cute, he got onto our high score table" to "flipping heck, he's GC on everything!", there aren't any shortcuts to lots of preparation, practice and a focus on basic skills :) My son could, and did, play AFM for five hours straight one day over the summer, trying to take Grand Champion off his parents, and I could see the difference it made to his play. There's a genuine difference between playing pinball (owning pinball machines and playing them daily) and actually 'gitting gud'.

I am improving year-to-year. I can see it clearly on my Stern Insider annual summary from 2022 compared to 2023, and @MadMonzer and I have now just also set up a Pindigo account to track our scores too. It's just painfully slow compared to people with more time, energy and stamina :)
Thanks Vee, I think the biggest thing of all is setting realistic goals for yourself given limited time, tiredness, whatever it may be that might impact your performance. If I turned up to the UK Open with the goal of making a final then I would have left disappointed, but this wasn’t realistic for me so I set my sights lower. I think we can all find our own goals at any level and work towards achieving whatever “good” looks like for us. I’m never going to be a world class player and I know and accept that, I started way too late in life (in my mid 30s, ha) and lack the raw skills for it. It’s okay not to be amazing and even to stagnate or regress for periods if life gets in the way. It is disappointing when we don’t succeed in our own goals (like in my recent outing at PBR), but we can still pick out SOMETHING good from everything and try to learn from what went wrong.

I have picked up loads and loads of information from interacting with other players - asking questions or “debriefing” after games if there’s time, picking up tips on psychology, playing socially with a group of really strong players at SWL and watching what they do, discussing online like we are now, just generally being curious. It’s a lot more useful and fun than just watching hours of Bowen blowing up machines with 99% shot accuracy (albeit, I do still watch those when preparing my strategy summaries!)

I also totally get the psychology aspect of the “crumbling under pressure”, I think I’m getting better at this now but it is still sometimes a problem. I was quite proud of gutting out a few clutch game 5 results in this tournament - I had a house ball first ball on my Freefall game on my best Classics card but kept it together, and then on my PBR game 5 on Lethal Weapon (coming straight off an awful Fish Tales) I only had 8m after ball 2 and was in full panic mode. But I managed to get into “tri-ball” and bag a couple of quick jackpots to finish with a solid if not spectacular 67m to save the card. On the other hand, you can see my best Main card ended with a terrible Twilight Zone where it did go quite wrong under pressure and I couldn’t hit the left ramp or the piano for love nor money.

Pindigo is great (especially for people like me who like to keep records and document stuff) and I’d recommend it to anyone!
 
Great write up Simon 😁 I really enjoy reading these.

Taking notes on so many games is a massive endeavour, props for that. That will keep being useful though as you'll see half these games at PBR comps at least. I'm up to 86 games that I have notes on now. I like to refine from a YouTube tutorial mess of notes, to getting some hands on practice, to condensing it down to the major points or a key path through the game that I prefer.

If you don't already look at them, the Tilt forum rulesheets for new games often have lively discussions in the replies on what strategies people are shooting for, for inspiration. Ultimately I prefer to try out a few strategies and pick the one that works best on the machines I have access to. Like there's zero chance chance of me nailing 100 loops on the Dr Who at The Pinball Office, so I had to figure out "second tier" strategies.

You're right the best card format is HARD, and we don't get much chance in the UK to practice it through the year. So it's tricky to figure out the right way to approach it, tactically (when to void, game selection etc.) and mentally (which game to pick when, securing a solid finish on a good ticket etc.)

I'm still kicking myself for finishing off my best classics card with my "safe pick" Alien Poker and absolutely crumbling under the pressure.
 

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I have a different take on machine choice. I'm very well aware that whilst I can pull off a good game (managed 6th highest on Medusa in the classics), I can be pretty inconsistent & cods-up a game I usually do well on. I also find making a decision quite difficult. In the Open, there were games I wasn't going to choose (Rush, PF & JW due to lack of knowledge), plus the 5 on my best ticket so I didn't knock their scores down, I basically did go for the shortest queue outside these to avoid making a choice.

Of course, 3 games in when I knew my current ticket was garbage, I would play PF or JW just to get some experience.
 
Great write up Simon. It's interesting getting the perspective from a relative newcomer, it was a while since I was in that situation.

One thing that you've possibly overlooked is choice of game compared to other players. With such a large bank it's possible to pick games that the top players don't favour, or at least don't feature on their cards as they've voided their scores on that card. Especially early doors if I've had a bad game on a card, I'll play games which I don't necessarily intend on being in my 'best card' but I will play them with no expectations of a great score, sometimes you'll find a game that clicks with you unexpectedly. It's also important that you're not competing against scores which you'd find unachievable with even a fantastic game.

I've done some analysis on the scores entered (as I always do for major comps which have readily available access to the scores). Taking into account that not all scores will be recorded due to voided tickets here are my findings:

The games featuring most on the top 40's qualifying tickets were I500, TWD, IMDN, Shadow & TNA (which obviously is a very different game in single player than multiplayer). No player played all 5 of these games on their submitted cards.
The games most picked by the qualifiers with game choice were Shadow, Rush, AIQ & TWD.

These games featured so heavily and had such an impact that the other 17 games in the bank would have had little to no bearing on qualifying results had they been omitted altogether.

The games least featured by the top 40 qualifiers on their cards were Cheetah, Rush, Flash Gordon, Baywatch & JP2.
During the finals, nobody chose Genesis, Cheetah or I500 (due to machine breakdown??). While Labyrinth & JB60 were just picked once.

What stands out from that is that few qualifiers had Rush in their qualifying card, but they were happy to play it in the finals.

Looking at your submitted scores compared to other submitted scores. Had the format been a best game format picking your best 5 scores you would have finished 71st, rather than 110th, showing the importance of consistency.

Also worth considering is the number of times a game has been played - finishing 34 from the bottom on MB would get you 0 points, finishing dead last on Baywatch would get you 37 points - which could make the difference of a number of positions, or even the difference between qualifying or not. (I made this exact mistake last year choosing AFM over SW for the last game on a fantastic ticket I had running. Had I finished last on SW I would have qualified).

Obviously all of the conclusions needed the proviso that many scores will have been voided and thus not recorded, but they do fall in line with other major comps I've analysed which don't have the option of voiding.
 
Great write up Simon. It's interesting getting the perspective from a relative newcomer, it was a while since I was in that situation.

One thing that you've possibly overlooked is choice of game compared to other players. With such a large bank it's possible to pick games that the top players don't favour, or at least don't feature on their cards as they've voided their scores on that card. Especially early doors if I've had a bad game on a card, I'll play games which I don't necessarily intend on being in my 'best card' but I will play them with no expectations of a great score, sometimes you'll find a game that clicks with you unexpectedly. It's also important that you're not competing against scores which you'd find unachievable with even a fantastic game.

I've done some analysis on the scores entered (as I always do for major comps which have readily available access to the scores). Taking into account that not all scores will be recorded due to voided tickets here are my findings:

The games featuring most on the top 40's qualifying tickets were I500, TWD, IMDN, Shadow & TNA (which obviously is a very different game in single player than multiplayer). No player played all 5 of these games on their submitted cards.
The games most picked by the qualifiers with game choice were Shadow, Rush, AIQ & TWD.

These games featured so heavily and had such an impact that the other 17 games in the bank would have had little to no bearing on qualifying results had they been omitted altogether.

The games least featured by the top 40 qualifiers on their cards were Cheetah, Rush, Flash Gordon, Baywatch & JP2.
During the finals, nobody chose Genesis, Cheetah or I500 (due to machine breakdown??). While Labyrinth & JB60 were just picked once.

What stands out from that is that few qualifiers had Rush in their qualifying card, but they were happy to play it in the finals.

Looking at your submitted scores compared to other submitted scores. Had the format been a best game format picking your best 5 scores you would have finished 71st, rather than 110th, showing the importance of consistency.

Also worth considering is the number of times a game has been played - finishing 34 from the bottom on MB would get you 0 points, finishing dead last on Baywatch would get you 37 points - which could make the difference of a number of positions, or even the difference between qualifying or not. (I made this exact mistake last year choosing AFM over SW for the last game on a fantastic ticket I had running. Had I finished last on SW I would have qualified).

Obviously all of the conclusions needed the proviso that many scores will have been voided and thus not recorded, but they do fall in line with other major comps I've analysed which don't have the option of voiding.
Thanks Wayne, I did think a bit about machine popularity, though not in quite the granular detail you did looking at the top players’ choices. This is how I ended up with John Wick on a few cards as a lot of players wrote it off because they either don’t know it at all or had a really bad initial game on it, as it was playing extremely quick and brutal. I only had a handful of games on it myself before the Open but got a few relatively solid scores (surprisingly so considering we’re talking 25m here).

I think machine popularity and “competing with scores I can’t achieve” was my critical error with choosing Fish Tales in the PBR bank, which a lot of top guys like Escher and Daniele were playing and blowing up and which was extremely popular throughout the event - it was very playable and even had a (very short) ball save. The cut off to score a single point was around 20m i think. And frankly, I’ve never scored over 100m on FT in competition before, so it was probably a silly choice. But, I opted for the safety blanket of familiarity over tournament common sense and got punished for it.

It is really interesting that your top 40 favourites of Indy, TWD, IMDN, Shadow and TNA are all amongst the machines I naturally avoided and only really played on dead cards (if at all). Perhaps I naturally gravitated towards friendlier choices, I didn’t see many of the big guns playing Baywatch! Shadow was very popular, with Paul Englert in particular spending a lot of time on it and regularly scoring 800m+. On JP2, similarly to Wick I think some players spooked off it because it had the potential to be a card killer despite Escher putting 800m on it with what I believe was his first or second game of the whole tournament. I had more than one drain from half ramping the skill shot SDTM with no ball save and saw others do the same. Cheetah was tucked in a corner and, along with Flash Gordon, had that inherent classics randomness that made them a bit of a scary prospect on a good card.

To answer your question on Indy 500, it wasn’t there on Sunday, it was replaced with Magic Castle (from the Classics bank) - not sure why.
 
To answer your question on Indy 500, it wasn’t there on Sunday, it was replaced with Magic Castle (from the Classics bank) - not sure why.

That was Zmac's privilege for being the top qualifier. He got to choose to remove any game from the main bank and replace it with any game from the women's or classics banks
 
Thanks Vee, I think the biggest thing of all is setting realistic goals for yourself given limited time, tiredness, whatever it may be that might impact your performance. If I turned up to the UK Open with the goal of making a final then I would have left disappointed, but this wasn’t realistic for me so I set my sights lower. I think we can all find our own goals at any level and work towards achieving whatever “good” looks like for us.
Both @MadMonzer and I have attainable (hopefully) goals :)

@madmonzer’s current goal is to attend enough tournaments to get into the Top 100 IFPA-ranked UK players. He’s ranked 106 after the UK Open, so that’s definitely a realistic target to go for.

I went into the UK Open with one (personal) aim - to get into the Ladies final. Not to win, or anything, but just to say I’d got there. Last year, I was in the Top 16 (with more than 16 players!) until about thirty minutes before the close of qualifying. I knew I’d improved over the last year (from my Stern Insider Connected ‘2022/2023 Year in Review’) and thought that scraping narrowly into 16th place might be entirely ‘doable’. It turned out this wasn’t a realistic goal, but this wasn’t apparent until late Friday evening. Put simply, Ladies was 5-card format on a 7-machine bank. I’d used my limited prep time to prep for all seven machines, including playing Shrek in PBR until I wanted to nuke it violently from orbit (just to be sure), or maybe condemn the whole awful thing to the eternal fires of damnation.

There weren’t many Ladies competing, so it was very easy to spam cards to grind a slightly better score (as everyone seemed to end up doing). I was literally playing my socks off, getting sets of scores that felt like they’d be a personal best for me in PBR league, over and over, but, by the time I went home on Friday evening, I was obviously making no headway at all. My best machine, Jackbot, I was relatively consistently opening the visor with the skillshot on Ball 1 and getting into very long (for me) repeat multiballs, but I still ended up feeling “how many jackbots do I need to get in quick succession on this game, exactly?!” The ‘problem’ seemed to be, complete credit to Deleted Member 404 for running such a great comp, that the field had improved so rapidly that there were fewer Ladies competing than last year, but they just seemed to be a whole lot better, with many international players who’d flown in specifically for the event!!

I put in one ticket for the UK Open, putting in little to no effort, having prepared nothing, and came 134th out of 160 people. That felt weirdly effortless, but Ladies constantly felt like I was the worst player in the universe throughout the entire multi-hour grind! Complete credit to Lucy Vince, @Lecari, Sarah, Rhian and @AlanJ’s wife, Clare, who stormed through for the British team.

Eventually, early on Saturday, I decided I’d topped out on my ability in Ladies, and gave up to go for my second goal, which was to get my older son successfully through his first tournament. Partly, to get him WPPR points very quickly. Partly to improve his confidence in his abilities and maybe encourage him to take up pinball as a competitive (solo) sport. As well as not having to hire a babysitter for him (and later his brother), I’m also hoping it will help him develop all those lovely soft skills, such as good sportsmanship, and dealing with stress and frustration. Possibly eventually help him make some friends too, as he currently struggles with that 🥰

I’m never going to be a world class player and I know and accept that, I started way too late in life (in my mid 30s, ha) and lack the raw skills for it. It’s okay not to be amazing and even to stagnate or regress for periods if life gets in the way. It is disappointing when we don’t succeed in our own goals (like in my recent outing at PBR), but we can still pick out SOMETHING good from everything and try to learn from what went wrong.

I got into a negativity trap around PBR evening league. Not because anyone did anything wrong (everyone was lovely), but there were evenings where I’d walk in the door, look at the 15 or so (utterly lovely) blokes I could already see assembled, and think ‘no point plunging a ball, really, is there?’ because I knew that I’d come in 16th without making a shot. It’s not easy to come back, week after week, feeling there’s going to be no actual competition. Eventually, I just endlessly house-balled as a self-fulfilling prophecy :(

I have picked up loads and loads of information from interacting with other players - asking questions or “debriefing” after games if there’s time, picking up tips on psychology, playing socially with a group of really strong players at SWL and watching what they do, discussing online like we are now, just generally being curious. It’s a lot more useful and fun than just watching hours of Bowen blowing up machines with 99% shot accuracy (albeit, I do still watch those when preparing my strategy summaries!)

Yes, I’ve got a long-term ambition to get to more matchplay. @David_Vi said it was a great way to learn through playing socially. The current problem is getting babysitting to cover the full length of an event :)

I also totally get the psychology aspect of the “crumbling under pressure”, I think I’m getting better at this now but it is still sometimes a problem. I was quite proud of gutting out a few clutch game 5 results in this tournament - I had a house ball first ball on my Freefall game on my best Classics card but kept it together, and then on my PBR game 5 on Lethal Weapon (coming straight off an awful Fish Tales) I only had 8m after ball 2 and was in full panic mode. But I managed to get into “tri-ball” and bag a couple of quick jackpots to finish with a solid if not spectacular 67m to save the card. On the other hand, you can see my best Main card ended with a terrible Twilight Zone where it did go quite wrong under pressure and I couldn’t hit the left ramp or the piano for love nor money.
According to Stern Insider statistics, I’m a ‘Ball 3’ player - so, I worry about house first balls a bit less now :) At home, if I’m shooting for score, I’m like “I’m a Ball 3 player. It’s tough, but I got this”. If you don’t have Stern Insider Connected, get it for location play because they do some lovely ‘end of year’ stats :)
 
Also worth considering is the number of times a game has been played - finishing 34 from the bottom on MB would get you 0 points, finishing dead last on Baywatch would get you 37 points - which could make the difference of a number of positions, or even the difference between qualifying or not. (I made this exact mistake last year choosing AFM over SW for the last game on a fantastic ticket I had running. Had I finished last on SW I would have qualified).
Nice tip Wayne - I'll try to remember this for the future, thanks.
 
The games featuring most on the top 40's qualifying tickets were I500, TWD, IMDN, Shadow & TNA (which obviously is a very different game in single player than multiplayer). No player played all 5 of these games on their submitted cards.
The games most picked by the qualifiers with game choice were Shadow, Rush, AIQ & TWD.

These games featured so heavily and had such an impact that the other 17 games in the bank would have had little to no bearing on qualifying results had they been omitted altogether.
This is interesting but I'm struggling to work out how I would incorporate that into my selection strategy mid-tournament.

If we're saying these five games were the most prevalent in qualifier's tickets, that seems to mean picking those makes you more likely to qualify.

But it also means that the better players are playing those five games a ton, and I'd be better off staying away from them and playing games like Flash that wasn't being blown up by the top competitors.

I think im close to understanding something, I could have a look at the top tickets mid-event and see which games are over-represented for the qualifiers, but can't quite work out what that implies for the best strategy...
 
Also worth considering is the number of times a game has been played - finishing 34 from the bottom on MB would get you 0 points, finishing dead last on Baywatch would get you 37 points - which could make the difference of a number of positions, or even the difference between qualifying or not. (I made this exact mistake last year choosing AFM over SW for the last game on a fantastic ticket I had running. Had I finished last on SW I would have qualified).
@MadMonzer was doing this analysis on the fly during the UK Open 2023 and 2024. He’ll identify ‘underplayed’ games where you can get a decent score just by playing. It hasn’t worked (for us), largely because it feels like everyone in the know does it! So, he’ll identify an ‘underplayed’ machine and we’ll put a card in but, within an hour or so, the card will start dropping like a stone as other players rush in.

It feels like it might work an hour before qualifying closes, when other players don’t have time to react, but our experience is that it doesn’t work in the middle of the comp.

He also suggested some statistical tomfoolery for my Ladies’ tickets where he calculated the exact scores I’d need to qualify, and then I’d start with my worst machine and insta-void the whole card unless my score was nearly, or above, the threshold. I spent a long time playing the same game (Diamond Lady) over and over, but eventually got completely demoralised and feel - in retrospect - I’d have been better off just putting in proper cards.
 
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According to Stern Insider statistics, I’m a ‘Ball 3’ player - so, I worry about house first balls a bit less now :) At home, if I’m shooting for score, I’m like “I’m a Ball 3 player. It’s tough, but I got this”. If you don’t have Stern Insider Connected, get it for location play because they do some lovely ‘end of year’ stats :)
I have Stern insider, how do I see these stats please
 
I have Stern insider, how do I see these stats please
If you go to ‘My Profile’, it’s in a box at the top called ‘2023 Year in Review’. If you click on it, there are lots of stats, and - if you scroll to the bottom - you can also see the same information for 2022 (or whenever you first joined Insider).

IMG_0188.webpIMG_0189.webp
 
If you go to ‘My Profile’, it’s in a box at the top called ‘2023 Year in Review’. If you click on it, there are lots of stats, and - if you scroll to the bottom - you can also see the same information for 2022 (or whenever you first joined Insider).

View attachment 262629View attachment 262630
Now I know why I can't see that, I only started playing in June this year ha ha
 
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