The story begins on the late evening of February 27. After waiting for weeks and seeing my name still at the top of the waiting list, I received the email from one of the tournament organizers at 10:38 pm informing me that a spot had become available. I was finally able to confirm that I could still make a trip to the Dallas/Fort Worth area work on the dates of the Texas Pinball Festival, and so the following evening at 7:25 pm, I sent in my payment and made preliminary lodging arrangements.

The days leading up to my visit to the Texas Pinball Festival were filled with frenzied planning, packing, and other administrative tasks. With everything packed and lodging arrangements made, the time had finally come to actually set the GPS, hop in the car, and go.

The trip is somewhere around 250-260 miles from my departure point in north central Houston, and ideally a little less than 4 hours of driving time. I’ve had quite a bit of experience with long distance travel from my messenger/courier work as well as my current merchandising job (covering other stores where we do not have a local field representative). I have traveled with others between the DFW area and Houston, including spending a little time exploring parts of the area. So it’s not like I’m just rolling into a strange new city/metro area armed with only the GPS apps on my phone and hoping for the best.

However, this was my first trip this far out of town traveling alone. It helped that I saw at least one familiar face as I stopped over at the Madisonville Buc-ee’s (the only one on I-45 between Houston and DFW until you get to Ennis). That Buc-ee’s is not quite at the halfway point, though, and there’s still a good 2½ hours worth of driving (about 170 miles) left.

I made another brief stopover for a phone call and possibly another soda or bottled tea. The store I wound up at (on Texas Highway 179 near Teague) unfortunately did not have many options. Worse, the drink containers I touched were warm due to a malfunctioning cooler. My immediate reaction was “to heck with that.” Thus, I was back on the road for the last 110 miles or so.

It turns out upon my arrival that my original lodging arrangement was probably not going to be workable. I will go into a bit more detail about this situation in a post on Rant Roulette. (For a variety of reasons, the mentioned post is still in progress.)

Since this was going to take some time to resolve, I decide to take care of other business. First order of business: emptying my bladder. Second order of business: (partially) refilling my vehicle’s fuel tank. (I took care of both at a QuikTrip not too far from where I was.) Then, it was time for me to head over to the Texas Pinball Festival site in Frisco. I needed to pick up my wristband, name tag, and program. By doing so at this point, I would not need to wait in line Friday morning. Such a wait could have potentially cut into practice time in the tournament room.

In the meantime, with some help from people back home, I was able to get lodging squared away. Now that I could breathe a bit easier, it was time for a relatively uneventful dinner at a nearby Qdoba. Why Qdoba, you ask? I had a free entree on my rewards card expiring in early April. (Qdoba had locations in the Houston area some years ago, and I was just short of my  first free entree when all of the Houston area locations were closed permanently. I had kept up with changes to the rewards program. With those changes, I wound up with enough points to qualify for a free entree outright without needing another purchase.)

One beef quesadilla later, it was finally time to head back to the hotel. I needed to prepare for the eagerly anticipated weekend that was now on the horizon.

For a variety of reasons, sleep was hard to come by in the hotel room I wound up in. Thus, I woke up much earlier than desired. Rather than risk oversleeping, I decided to leave the hotel room as early as feasible, even though it meant I would be spending a fair amount of time waiting for the tournament room to open up for practice.

I used the time wisely, using the surface streets instead of the expressways. It is worth noting that the Dallas/Fort Worth area could well be the “toll road capital of Texas” so this was as much an economic measure as it was a relaxation and time management measure. Along the way, it’s time for another stop at a  QuikTrip for a light breakfast (roller grill taquitos and bottled tea).

I’m pretty sure I wound up in the lobby of the convention center sometime around 7:45 am if not earlier.

Finally 8:30 am rolls around and the players file into the tournament room for the morning practice session. Practice was supposed to be limited to about 60 seconds per machine per player. I did my best to stick to this, trying to err on the side of shorter time as opposed to going a few seconds over. At least one player who was in a practice line ahead of me was using the stopwatch feature on his phone and calling out players who obviously went over; I had thought about doing this, but for reasons I’m not going to go into here, I decided against it.

I feel like I made really good use of the practice time despite one miscue (not realizing that Mandalorian was the kids’ tournament game, intentionally set up with either loose or non-existent tilt). While I didn’t get in practice on all the games, I felt I got enough to really help make informed decisions about which games to definitely play (Spanish Eyes, Flash Gordon, Stranger Things, Rush) and which games to possibly skip entirely (Twilight Zone).

Shortly before 9:30 I went ahead and left the tournament room and began the half-hour wait until 10:00 when qualifying would officially begin.

In order, these were the scores I was able to attain during qualifying, with commentary interspersed. Times are from the DTM (tournament software/website) page, adjusted to local time. An asterisk (*) denotes a score that was later superseded by a higher score. An octothorpe (#) denotes a score that was lower than the previous high score to that point that does not qualify for an asterisk (i.e. an entry that many players would just ask to be voided). A percent sign (%) denotes the three scores without a corresponding photo.

Mar 25, 10:05am Spanish Eyes 46,300 *
Mar 25, 10:11am Dialed In 50,790 *
Mar 25, 10:27am Rush Premium 21,093,320
Mar 25, 10:33am Flash Gordon 518,520 *
Mar 25, 10:41am Total Nuclear Annihilation 114,820 *
Mar 25, 10:49am Buccaneer 60,980
Mar 25, 11:05pm Spanish Eyes 56,250 *
Mar 25, 11:13pm Space Mission 29,680 *

Here, I took a quick break to take a look at the standings, and tooted this to my Mastodon feed:

Took a quick look at the standings, so far 5th out of 72 that have played. Of course that is subject to change but it is very encouraging to see that this early.

Indeed, it wouldn’t last all that long.

Mar 25, 11:45pm Beatles 647,540 *
Mar 25, 12:18pm Stranger Things Premium 49,113,650

At this point I took my lunch break. I walked to the mall and decided on Which Wich. One ‘Za Wich (pizza sandwich) and one large Dr Pepper later, it was time to walk back into the hotel and tournament room and get back to business.

Mar 25, 1:49pm Space Mission 16,430 # %
Mar 25, 1:53pm Bounty Hunter 359,120

After this game was a two-hour gap for my registration desk volunteer shift.

Mar 25, 4:25pm Creature 6,592,780 *
Mar 25, 4:56pm Whirlwind 2,364,620
Mar 25, 5:08pm Space Mission 67,110
Mar 25, 5:25pm Spanish Eyes 71,260
Mar 25, 5:35pm Bounty Hunter 104,910 # %
Mar 25, 5:39pm Fast Draw 30,360

At this point, the internet access had deteriorated to nearly unusable. Thus, I was not able to live toot the last seven scores. It was difficult enough to reload the DTM pages to update my standings.

Mar 25, 5:51pm Buccaneer 68,020 *
Mar 25, 5:58pm Flash Gordon 751,790

This was my dinner break followed by a quick tour of the show floor. (The tournament room opened to entries at 10 am; the show itself did not open until 5 pm.)

Mar 25, 7:27pm Dialed In 58,640
Mar 25, 7:55pm Creature 55,750,430

This is this point after which accessing anything, including DTM (the tournament software/website), became effectively impossible. I unfortunately had to bother the registration desk to queue me for two of these last three games (a scorekeeper queued me for Flash Gordon in the middle of the final three).

Mar 25, 8:29pm Beatles 1,251,590
Mar 25, 8:39pm Flash Gordon 273,360 # %
Mar 25, 9:06pm Total Nuclear Annihilation 204,430

And that’s it. Dee-duh-duh-deet-deet, deet-deet.

I remember looking at the standings somewhere in here. I was at least 4 slots out of qualifying for novice division (the next 8 after B division). However, even that didn’t last. I didn’t screenshot exactly where I was at 1 am (technically Saturday morning) when qualifying ended. By that point I was long since back at the hotel, trying to sleep. However, I did look sometime between 10-11pm; by that point my rank had already fallen to somewhere around 100th-110th or so.

The trip back to the hotel was relatively uneventful; I stopped off at QuikTrip again for a couple of buffalo chicken and cheese links and bottled tea.

Gallery 1, tournament qualifying scoreboards (Note: A couple of these are poor quality due to having only enough time to take one quick snapshot before re-queuing for another game and/or letting the next player in the queue take his/her turn.)

Gallery 2, show floor and other non-tournament-related photos:

There’s not a whole lot of story to report for Saturday and Sunday. Of note, before leaving the tournament room Friday night, I signed up for a second volunteer shift, this time as a scorekeeper.

Now, during the original signup period online, I originally decided not to sign up as a scorekeeper. This was based on the description provided by the organizers. From reading that, scorekeeping seemed like a potentially high-stress position and I am quite loath to accept high-stress positions as a volunteer. However, once I had a chance to play the tournament and see what exactly scorekeepers did, I decided to go ahead and give it a try. It wasn’t nearly as odious as I might have originally expected, especially given the lower activity level for 9 am to 11 am. In fact, scorekeeping was probably more in my wheelhouse than registration desk duty. (Though during this shift, I also staffed the registration desk briefly while one of the organizers went downstairs to get coffee.)

With that, I went to pick up my T-shirt and drop it off in the car. Then, it was time to head back into the main game room/exhibit hall. I had the opportunity to meet up with an old friend, as well as meet her new partner and a couple of other people she knew. This is the reason for the multiplayer games.

Sunday was more of the same. Of note, I got in quite a few quality games on some specific favorite titles of mine, the main ones being Trident and Sorcerer. I also got to play the Willy Wonka pinball for the first time. This is a game I definitely would not mind spending more time with in a less chaotic setting.

I did wind up staying for the closing awards ceremonies and raffle drawing. This put my departure time a bit past 3 pm, guaranteeing my arrival in Houston after civil twilight.

(This is all one big gallery for now; I may go back and split it up later. My score is usually the higher/highest one in multiplayer games, with the exception being Weird Al at the end.)

And with that, here are my closing thoughts on everything that happened over the weekend at the Texas Pinball Festival.

This was an exciting and surreal weekend two years in the making. At any point I could have interpreted certain events as signs from the universe trying to tell me I shouldn’t go, even after paying for the show pass and tournament entry fee to the tune of around $170.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of my tournament performance, I would like to extend my thanks to the tournament organizers/directors: Phil Grimaldi, Colin McAlpine, and Dick Curtis. While all of the organizers did a terrific job, Dick deserves special appreciation as he was the organizer supervising and training me through my volunteer shifts. Dick has the perfect calm and easy-going personality for training/onboarding volunteers (and I’ve done a lot of volunteering over the years, enough to know that that isn’t always the case).

And with that, here are my thoughts on the tournament. While my performance at this tournament was quite lacking, I did wind up with relatively good scores on at least two games, those being Spanish Eyes and Flash Gordon. In fact, similar performances on ten of the other thirteen machines (i.e. good enough for a 71 or better) would have gotten me into A division.

I had played many of these games before, and it’s not like many of the ones I hadn’t were inaccessible. (For example, I’m pretty sure at least Cidercade had Rush prior to TPF, I just didn’t have the time to go play it prior to the tournament. Einstein’s in Richmond had TNA, which I had played before but not recently.) Also, the scores I would have needed to qualify were not hopelessly out of reach; they seem to mostly match what I consider my attainable range, at least on the games where I know what that range is. It’s more a question of getting them done within the limited number of qualifying games afforded. Put another way, can I “catch lightning in a bottle” during qualifying?

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the tilt settings. Most of the games had reasonable tilt settings, a far cry from the “gesundtilt” (i.e. “sneeze tilt” or ridiculously conservative tilt setting) I was expecting to run into at least a couple of times. I was still conservative in my use of nudging.

It was nice to see familiar faces on the show floor and in the tournament room, as well as get to see a few of the “big name” players in person. I unfortunately didn’t get to talk to very many of them at length

As this was my first year, I don’t have a reference to previous year experiences at this same event. The closest experience I have to playing in a tournament with this format would be the tournament at the 2015 Houston Arcade Expo. Due to the budget that year I effectively had to play that tournament as a limited entries tournament, even though the option was open for players with deeper pockets to buy more entries.

Now, both types of tournaments (unlimited entries and limited entries) have their advantages and disadvantages. Having unlimited entries (which basically means entries limited only by one’s budget) means more “mulligans” should one have lousy games early on, or that one can cut one’s losses after a poor performance on a few games. However, it also means the tighter one’s budget, the slimmer one’s chances, and that otherwise good players may miss out on qualifying due to lack of funds. A limited entries tournament puts everyone on a more equal footing. However, if one can’t “catch lightning in a bottle” (i.e. get good scores within that limited number of entries), one’s pretty much screwed.

It may sound like no big deal to reasonably skilled players to put up, say, 7.4 million on Whirlwind or 134 million on Creature from the Black Lagoon on tournament settings. Actually doing it in the crowded tournament room, with the potentially nerve-wracking and headache-inducing noise level is another story. (I picked these scores as this is about where 38th place or 60 qualifying points was. The A division cutoff was at 702 or an average of 58.5 qualifying points per game, so 60 across the board was enough to make A division with a little room to spare.)

I mention the environment because it seemed even louder than a lot of arcades/bars I have played in. During the peak of qualifying Friday evening, there were potentially 24 machines (15 in Wizards, 8 in classics, and the kids’ tournament game) being played at the same time, many of them older electromechanical games with loud chimes and/or bells. Even if you turn the sound down to nothing on all of the solid-state and newer games (which will annoy some players as there are important aural cues on some games), there is still plenty of noise from the flippers, bumpers, kickers, drop target resets, and the myriad other mechanical gadgets in pinball machines.

With the noise level being what it was, I found myself having to take breaks and walk outside the tournament room for a few minutes just to be able to clear my head. It’s something I need to get better at dealing with. I don’t think this was the reason I did so poorly, but it did catch me by surprise a little bit.

Finally, for those planning to make the trip to next year’s (2023) Texas Pinball Festival, assuming it stays mostly the same as 2022, here is my advice, primarily from a road-tripper perspective (i.e. someone driving into the DFW area from no more than about 500 miles away):

• Pick your hotel carefully. In order, my choices would be: The Embassy Suites adjoining the conference center, a hotel within walking distance (such as: the Hyatt House, Hilton Garden Inn, or Hotel Indigo just across Gaylord Parkway; the Hyatt Regency in the Stonebriar Centre mall; the Home2 Suites just outside the mall; the Drury Inn near Gaylord Parkway and Dallas Parkway/DNT), other nearby hotels within the shortest driving distance possible. Cheap hotels/motels, hostels, or Airbnb rentals more than about a 2-3 mile drive away should be your last resorts (pun intended) unless the budget just won’t allow anything closer/nicer. It may cost more to stay at the Embassy Suites or a hotel close to it, but not having to deal with DFW area traffic is worth it.
• Remember that driving in the DFW area usually either means taking toll roads, or a much longer (in time) trip across the adjacent feeder roads or other surface streets. If you are flying in and staying at the Embassy or a hotel within walking distance, you might be able to get away with not renting a car and just taking a cab or rideshare (or possibly even DART, if you’re up for the walking distance) to/from the airport.
• Food tends to run a bit on the expensive side in the immediate area of the hotel. The food trucks may have relatively reasonably prices, though the selection is going to be a bit limited. (For example: on Saturday it was an egg sandwich truck and a barbecue truck. One of my friends recommended against the barbecue truck, and I usually avoid eggs. I decided to roll the dice anyway with the barbecue truck and the food was at least decent.) $15 to $17 per meal plus a bit extra for snacks should be enough with a little cushion. My order at Which Wich inside the mall still ran close to $15 and I had expected it to be a bit less.
• Embassy Suites was kind enough not to charge (at least most) TPF attendees for parking in 2022. I came out to find open parking garage exit gates despite having to take a ticket on both Friday and Sunday. (I am guessing the parking rates, when applied, may be to discourage Comerica Center and Dr Pepper Field visitors from using the hotel’s garage, as Embassy’s rate can potentially go up to $18 versus $15 or $10 at the other two facilities.) Tournament players who enter and leave the garage before 5 pm might still have to pay for parking. I would appreciate further clarification from those who have more information.
• Buc-ee’s highlights clean restrooms in their advertising. I can personally attest to the honesty of this advertising. The Madisonville location is a great place to stop and take a bathroom break (whether #1 or #2) as well as refuel, grab a bite to eat, and even air up your tires if needed.
• Allow extra time for traffic-related delays, even on the rural sections of highways. I had to deal with a complete freeway closure on my trip in. (ironically, I detoured specifically to try to avoid this, only to wind up right in the middle of the traffic jam after re-entering the highway.)

And with that begins the long wait for Texas Pinball Festival 2023. I’m already looking forward to it.