It’s that time again. The Texas Pinball Festival is this weekend, March 21-23. As you may have heard, the tournament format has completely changed this year. Instead of the previous “limited entries” format, the field of 160 players will be divided into two groups of 80, an “early” group (Friday 09:00-16:00, Saturday 09:00-14:00) and a “late” group (Friday 17:00-24:00, Saturday 14:00-19:00) for a matchplay qualifier. This year, I am in the “early” group.

One good change deserves another. The live updates will be moved to a new Telegram announcements channel. This should hopefully be easier to follow and will allow me to keep announcements separate from my usual posts to Mastodon.

I may or may not be able to update this blog post with the tournament scoreboard link when it becomes available. It will likely be posted to the Telegram group linked previously before I update this post.

The livestreams of the finals will once again be on Wormhole Pinball’s Twitch feed. With the new format and required schedule, this unfortunately wreaks significant havoc on my plans to play in other tournaments being offered over the weekend. If those happen they’ll be on the Telegram channel.

I’m looking forward to being “back in the saddle again” for what is now the fourth year in a row. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

It’s now time for me to start packing and rest up for a long drive tomorrow. See you in Frisco.

(Edit: I will likely have one or two arcade visit posts to make before the TPF recaps. There’s just not enough time left to catch up.)