Deathsave Pinball Tournament

 Calgary, AB

Spark Science Centre 

Yesterday we went to The Spark Science Centre (the re at the end makes it fancy as well as Canadian).  Science museums, in our experience, are always mobbed with children so we decided to go closer to closing in hopes that the busses of children would be finished and gone.  They were not.  As we pulled up we saw at least 6 busses in the parking lot.  Parking at the museum is $10 (CAD), which I thought was weird.  We were going to use our NARM/ASTC pass to get in for free and paying $10 kind of ruins the whole free thing but we had driven 6 minutes to get there so we decided to pay and go in.  When we got to the pay machine for parking it said we could get the first 45 minutes for free so we went with that option with the plan to come out and add our $10 if we ended up staying longer than 45 minutes.  It was a sound decision because we lasted about 30 minutes.  It is a great museum and the children there were having an amazing time exploring interactive displays and queueing up for a VR experience.  There is a toilet that has been turned into a drinking fountain and, if you ever need to get kids to drink more water, do this!  The kids LOVED it.  I also kinda loved it.  

This mural is really cool and features The Calgary Tower.

I found a moment to take a photo of the toilet drinking fountain with no children in it, mostly.  You can see a child sprinting to the toilet... for a drink.

  

That's some good toilet water!

On the way out we found an area where I actually felt comfortable taking photos.  They had a very large room with space projected on the walls.  It was really cool and chill.   

The museum wasn't cold but it was cold and very windy outside and we didn't really stay long enough to get hot in our winter coats.

We also stopped by the gift shop which had zero children.

*Not to be confused with BigDog (TM)

If I was into buying coffee mugs this would already be in my cabinet.

They also had planetary flavors, oh sorry, flavours of astronaut ice cream.  Yep, they have a Uranus Flavour.  

The First Tournament in Alberta

This evening I returned to The Hidden Spot for the Calgary Death Save Pinball 4 Strikes Tournament.  Tonight. I believe, was their league finals so they also hosted a side tournament for players that didn't make it to the finals.  It was really well run and everyone was friendly.  The Hidden Spot is a sports bar, arcade, and pinball location.  The machines are all in great shape.  I arrived a little early to practice and then Tony, the tournament director I had talked to online, came up and introduced himself and asked if I was Jon and I said yes.  Everywhere I go, tournament directors go out of their way to make me feel welcome.  Before the tournament, Tony went over the rules and then said, "We have a new player tonight, his name is Jon and he's from The States".  At this point everyone clapped and cheered.  It was very friendly and made me feel welcome.  The rest of the evening people I played with talked to me and asked about my story.  It was really fun.

I played pretty well.  It was a 4 strike tournament with 3rd and 4th place (or 2nd and 3rd in a 3 player match) getting a strike.  I made it through the first 2 rounds with no strikes and was feeling good but my 3rd match featured one of my worst games ever on James Bond, and it was all downhill from there.  in my 4th match I lost by one shot.  I had the opportunity to start a multiball on Stern's Star Trek and couldn't make the shot.  IN my 5th match on Volley I tilted and that ends the game, and in my 6th and final match I lost on Dialed In by about 1000 points.  Another game where I would have not gotten a strike if I had made one or two more shots.  I fell like I am getting closer and closer to finishing higher in the field but the results just aren't there yet.  I get to play a tournament here every week so hopefully I can have a good showing before we move on.

A Death Save is a banned maneuver in pinball tournaments where you slam the machine really hard just before the ball enters the trough after it has already gone behind the flippers.   

The tournament has 28 people.

One of the screens that usually shows sports was showing the tournament standings and rounds.

You have to take photos of your 1 player machine scores so that you can compare scores after the round.  I had a good game on Atlantis

A fist full of loonies!

My Volley score was terrible because I tilted on ball 2 or 3 and ended my game.

It was a really fun tournament and I am looking forward to attending the rest of the tournaments here and maybe making it a bit farther than 17th out of 28.

That's it for today.  If you missed, Caesar's Palace But in Calgary, check it out!  We went to an amazing steakhouse inspired by Caesar's Palace Las Vegas.