So on the morning of March 18 I get a text about my free admission rewards at Cidercade expiring in three days. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have dragged myself out to Cidercade this late on the night before I’m set to drive up to Frisco for the Texas Pinball Festival, and after a day on which I have to get a ton of work done to boot. But, it was a good excuse to get in some last minute pinball practice, though most of the games I played were not part of the tournament lineup.

Given the hour and my state of relative exhaustion, a lot of these scores weren’t all that great. I actually wound up playing quite a few video games before going back to pinball at the end of the night. I feel like despite this being a somewhat abbreviated visit, I got what would have been $12 worth of play out of it.

Highlights: 68.4M+ on Iron Maiden, 43.9M+ on Led Zeppelin, 101M+ on Star Wars. 47.7M+ on Metallica Remastered, 146M+ on Game of Thrones (Premium/LE, I forget which).

And then it was time once again for the monthly Einstein’s visit.

There were a few of relative gems on this outing: 150k+ on Stars, 54.3M+ on Black Knight: Sword of Rage (Premium), 3.9M+ on Rick and Morty.

I would fit in one more arcade visit before it was time to head north to the Texas Pinball Festival.

Highlights in brief: 80.5M+ on Star Trek, 796k+ on Jacks to Open. The rest weren’t really anything special.

(This was originally supposed to be a league night for Bayou City Pinball League, but cancelled due to low attendance.)

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.)

I headed down to Eureka Heights with the primary goal of socializing with a few people I knew would be there for a tournament (even though I would not be able to play in it, or really, didn’t have much desire to try to play in it even if able).

Amazingly, I managed to squeak in a couple of games of pinball while I was there. This includes a game on The Jetsons, which is a rare game from Spooky Pinball with only 100 units manufactured.

There’s not a whole lot to report on when it comes to my February visit to Einstein’s. The main highlight is the Guardians of the Galaxy score of 148.6M+. My score on Black Knight: Sword of Rage of 55.5M+ wasn’t too shabby (I feel like a really good run starts around 100M), the others are pretty ho-hum. (The 7.9M+ was on Game of Thrones; the translite was not lit.)