12 Hours of Pinball

 Tempe, AZ

The Electric Bat 5 Year Anniversary Pinball Weekend.

This weekend I played pinball for 2 days.  One of those days was 12 hours.  On Friday night I played in the warmup for the Electric Bat 5 Year Anniversary IFPA Certified Event.  It lasted about 3 hours and I came in 65th out of 87 people.  Not the best performance but there were many machines I hadn't played on, ever so I was treating this as practice.  It was a lot of fun and my sister and brother in law hung out to watch the action and take photos.

There is even a Tiki Bar in the arcade

People that weren't in the tournament had their choice of 5 machines to play on.  We got to play on the other 50 machines.

Here are some photos Sophie took of me while playing.

The main tournament was on Saturday.  It started at 10am and we finished up just after 10pm.  We played 20 rounds so between the machines I played in the tournament and the machines I played between rounds I was able to play almost every machine there.  It was really tiring but very fun.  My goal for this tournament was middle of the field and I just about did that by getting 62nd out of 100.  Just a couple of improved rounds would have gotten me that 50th I was after.  It was a great learning experience for me.

#notfonzie

Mid day I got a tiki drink to mark the bar off on my tiki list.

During practice rounds I got my ball stuck.  I thought it was funny that the drop targets say BS.

I also had a headlamp sighting.  A small number of people use some sort of lighting to help see the playfields better.  Headlamps being by far the most nerdy.

It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about how to play new machines to me as well as what goes on in giant tournaments.  I am looking forward to playing in more tournaments while I am here in Phoenix.  I should be able to get to 20 total tournaments so I can have my official placement in the "world" rankings.  Right now I am just above 5000th with only 14 tournaments played.  The ranking uses your top 20 tournaments.

That's it for today.  If you missed We have Arrived in Phoenix, you can check it out.