Pinball Tournament at The Pinball Hall of Fame

 Las Vegas, NV

Not a selfie!

The Pinball Hall of Fame

Today I visited The Pinball Hall of Fame to play pinball and to play pinball in a tournament.  The Pinball Hall of Fame is a non profit museum and they have a TON of machines.  Sadly it takes a lot of work to keep these machines working and they are backlogged.  They are running volunteer days to repair machines, which would be fun if I know how to repair machines.  There are still a lot of machines that are working and I was able to play quite a few machines I have never played before.  

Is there any question as to what is goin on in this 25,000 Square Foot warehouse on Las Vegas Blvd?

They have two Stern Jaws (Pro) machines.  This game came out a couple of weeks ago.

It's a beautiful machine with tons of actual movie clips.

I arrived about an hour early to practice on machines that were going to be in the tournament.  The machines are all over the warehouse so I wasn't able to find them all, and there were too many to practice on.  At 12:30 I started looking for the tournament sign up.  I failed to find it so I asked a guy I recognized from other tournaments here and he pointed me to a very hidden place on the warehouse floor where signups were taking place.

Here is where you sign up.  No wonder they are having problems getting "walk ups" to enter the tournament.

After I signed up one of the guys that is prominent in the pinball community came over and talked to me.  I saw an opportunity and said, "I don't mean to be negative but the sign up area is VERY hidden.  I came to play in the tournament and couldn't find it myself."  He said he would tell them to make an announcement and they did but the place was packed and they still only got 15 players.

During the tournament I took photos of the place.

They had a big Stern area.  Stern Pinball Inc. is the leading pinball manufacturer at the moment.  Stern Pinball Inc. is different but related to Stern Electronics Inc.  Stern Electronics survived from 1977 to 1985 and Stern Pinball started as Data East in 1986 when the son of Stern Pinball Inc, bought Data East as well as Sega's Pinball division.  The name changed to Stern Pinball Inc. in 1999.

Computerized Sex Tester wasn't on the list of games in the tournament.  Probably good because I suffer from a very sexy learning disability called Sexlexia.

All of the dark machines are out of order.

This was my tournament score on Buccaneer.  It was good for 2nd place.  On these single player machines your group of four play one at a time for obvious reasons.  You take a photo of your score so you can compare scores at the end of the round to see who won.

This was the pinball meeting area where players waited for the next round to be announced.  Some players just played other machines while we waited. I did a bit of both.

An errant fuse on the ground.  That's the first thing you check when something isn't working on your machine.  It's the easiest fix.

This is Gottleib's  Play Mates.

And this is Gottleib's Grand Domino.  Only 500 Play Mates were made for the US Market but 4000 Gran Dominos were made for Italy and the rest of the world.

This is an out of order Mario Andretti.  They should call it Michael Andretti when it isn't working.

I got to play Jaws a couple of times today.  I don't know the ruleset but I had a good time and even started a Multiball

I also got to play This is Spinal Tap.  I didn't even know it existed.  It's made by HomePin and appears to be pretty rare.  It was fun but some of the mechanics seemed flakey.  It didn't feel solid like a Stern machine.

The Pinball Hall of Fame is right on Las Vegas Blvd. and you have to head North when exiting the parking lot so that meant I got to sit in Saturday Super Bowl traffic.  It was slow going for the first half mile or so until I could get off The Strip.  In other news the Luxor is now a giant Doritos ad.  Seems like something out of Idiocracy.

As for the tournament, it won't go down as a top 15.  I didn't play poorly but also didn't place well.  I ended up 12th out of 15.  I did have a terrible game on Godzilla so there is that.

My practice and non tournament games

My tournament games.

It was a fun tournament and I got to play on machines I had never seen before.  It's kind of fun trying to figure them out on the fly.  I would have liked to get a couple 1st places and fewer 4ths but oh well.

That's it for today.  If you missed, Pinball and a Punk Rock Tiki Bar, check it out.