Italian Pinball Championship

We're back from our holidays in Italy.
Last week (June 1 and 2) the TIF italian pinball championship was held near Milano.
We went over there and then stayed a week extra at lake Garda on holiday.

It was the first time the Italian pinball championship was organised.
The full article and pictures will be posted later this week on www.flippers.be

I'm not a tournament player, I hadn't played any pinball competition for 2 years and before that I usually end up somewhere in the middle.. and except for Medieval Madness I didn't know well any of the machines we had to play on..
(at home I almost hadn't played the last 3 months, only the 2 weeks before the competition I played every evening on my MM to get used to playing pinball again and work up my ball controll skills)

Before the competition started the machines were available to play already..
I did very bad on most, except on Cactus Canyon which I really like and got scores between 10 and 56 million.

Then the competition started. Everyone was divided in groups and played 4-player games.
It's very different from the way I usually play.. at home I play relaxed, on my own.
On some machines I did much better than in trials, I think it's because we played
multiplayer games and I saw what the others where shooting for.. there's also pressure to keep up with scores from other players.

I did extremely bad on MM and CC. I blame the heat (somewhere around 35 degrees C)
and standing up too long and not drinking enough.. Only got like 1,2 million on CC,
I really don't know what happened I couldn't concentrate at all anymore.
Drank a lot of water and then it went much better, in the end I got a very good score on ToTan (a game I also don't know the rules of..). Even got 2 great scores at totan: I was already doing quite well but on my last ball the pinball got stuck and couldn't be nudged out of position, the game tilted and the referee decided all 4 of us had to play again. In this replay game on my first ball I even scored more than I had with 3 balls on the discarded game, finished somewhere around 22 million if I remember correct.

After playing the electronic machines we had to play on 4 electro-mechanical pinball machines too.
Game duration was much shorter there, I did good on some, a bit less on others..
In the end I ended up 10th, around the middle position. What I expected (although I had hoped for a bit higher.. still mad on how bad I did on CC and MM).

The competition was a lot of fun.. especially meeting new people from around Europe
(mostly Italians, but some were from Germany and even from Poland).