I know some of these are duplicates but I want to make sure all these links are gathered in one place for those “late to the party”.

For those looking to follow along this weekend:

• Main scoreboard (note that I am only in the Wizards tournament, so you will not see me with results for Classics or others)
• Jump straight to my scores
• Live stream for finals (4pm Saturday): Wormhole Pinball
• Mastodon (Twitter workalike) feed — will have scores and possible brief commentary, relatively close to real-time.

Looking forward to a great time. Let’s rock.

Update (originally written 2022-03-25T20:14 but failed to post) — due to technical difficulties I may not be able to update the live feed anymore tonight. I have the scores stored locally on my phone and hopefully backed up at some point over the network, and will pencil them in into the final chronology of the entries as they were played.

Update 2022-03-27T08:16 — final standing 139th out of 160 players. There appear to have been four or five no shows out of the group. Full recap to follow in the coming days.

Update 2022-03-28T04:39 — Turns out I misread the results. I assumed a zero final score meant a no-show and that is not necessarily the case. My apologies to the players in question.

This past February 11 came and went with little fanfare, but something happened on that day. Something quite noteworthy, and perhaps something rather unfortunate in a way, but it is what it is.

As of 2022 February 11, I no longer have any active IFPA-endorsed events in my player history. I had taken a voluntary hiatus from competitive pinball play as of June 2019, and had planned to resume right around the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit. (Once the pandemic hit and the IFPA temporarily suspended endorsing events, the earliest I could have had some type of IFPA-endorsed events in my ranking history would have been last August.)

This is, of course, only a temporary situation. I’m not giving up on competitive pinball, and I’m certainly not giving up on playing major tournaments and the chances at fame, honor, and prizes that go with winning them.

On that note, this coming Friday through Sunday, March 25-27, is the Texas Pinball Festival. I will be competing in the Wizards tournament. It’s my first tournament in almost a year (despite my attempts to organize tournaments in the interim). Time permitting, I may be issuing live updates, probably on my Mastodon account. More about that later (I will be posting again prior to my departure from Houston).

But first, I need to clear the air about something. When it comes to competitive pinball events, I still intend to play to win. Of note, however, is the often-overlooked yet quite important difference between the object of the game and the object of playing the game. The object of the game is to win, get the highest score, etc; the object of playing the game is to have fun and enjoy the experience.

These two objectives should not be, and are not supposed to be, mutually exclusive. That is, one should be able to both play to win and play to have fun, and neither have to give up playing to win in order to have a good time nor have to give up having a good time in order to play to win.

I hope to continue to enjoy whatever competitive pinball experiences I am able to participate in for the remaining time I am able to do so on a regular basis. The day may come where it’s just not fun any more; I obviously hope that day is far into the future, if it ever arrives.

Yes, I’m still playing pinball. Perhaps not as often as I would like, but I am still playing.

This is from last Sunday and Monday, March 8 and 9 (in order, separate galleries for each day), both days at Little Dipper. I’m happy with the way Creature from the Black Lagoon is playing; it is a much more effective use of the space than the barely functional The Machine: Bride of Pinbot that used to be there.

Not a whole lot to add here, except it didn’t take long to get on the high score list for Creature. That’s a good thing and segues nicely into the announcement I will make tomorrow.