Hello everybody from Frisco, Texas. When I return to the computer later today, I will have one post to make about events that happened before Texas Pinball Festival.

Once that is done, I will have a virtual mountain of photos and notes to go through. There will be a lot to recap, so this year’s series of posts could stretch out to as many as eight. I will try not to make them too long but at the same time I want to get in as many details as I can as this was quite a memorable trip and I am eager to share the full account of it with all of you.

Once again, this weekend (upcoming, March 15-17) is the Texas Pinball Festival including the Wizards tournament. And, once again, I am confirmed for the Wizards tournament and a hotel room in the area.

New to TPF this year will be three tournaments held by NTX Pinball, of which I will be playing in two on Friday. The first will be a group matchplay tournament Friday morning, while the second will be a strikeout tournament Friday evening.

This year is quite different from the past two years. I’m not going to go into detail right now, but the challenges I have faced both as a pinball player and in life away from the game have changed. I’ve also made some new friends outside the pinball/classic arcade community, which has helped.

This will be the third time I’ve made the trip to Frisco both for the festival and the pinball tournament. My current plan is to attend TPF, including the Wizards tournament, every year through at least 2027. This is of course subject to many variables: health, finances, and of course lack of extraordinary circumstances (such as another pandemic along the lines of COVID-19).

In the immortal words of Queen:

I’ll take it with a grin
I’m never giving in
On with the show!

And finally, the (updated) links for those looking to follow along:

• Scoreboards/event pages for NTX Pinball tournaments:
  • Friday morning Beat the Clock and Hunger
  • Friday afternoon Strike Out Hunger
• Live stream for Friday NTX Pinball tournaments: Carpool Pinball
• Main scoreboard (note that I am only in the Wizards tournament, so you will not see me with results for Classics, and I am obviously way too old to be in the kids tournament)
• Jump straight to my scores
• Live stream for Wizards playoffs/finals (4pm Saturday): Wormhole Pinball
• Mastodon (Twitter workalike) feed (toot.community) — will have scores and possible brief commentary, relatively close to real-time, subject to internet and other technical functionality. This is where most of the “action” will happen, though the official scoreboards will have information I won’t have time to post here.
• Peertube account (video.hardlimit.com) — may have live-streamed and/or recorded content made available during the event, directly from me and my devices, subject to internet and other technical functionality. This depends a lot on how well I do and my whims. I will try to announce when I’m going live on the Mastodon feed as well.

Of particular note, I will probably not be live blogging here over the weekend, but will start re-capping the events on Monday after I return.