Monday, February 27, 2012

Pinball competition

Got a message saturday afternoon to ask if I was available to play pinball competition that evening.
Sure, why not ? I'm not a competition player but enjoy playing some games.

The competition was organised by www.belgischeflippercompetitie.be

They organise competitions for a few years now. In the past I never entered as there is a lot of demand and when registration opens, it's usually filled in a few minutes (and I never bother to look when registration opens and try to enter).
Thsis years the rules have changed, and teams of 4 players are entered. It was one of these teams that was one player short, so therefor they asked me.

The competition saturday was held at the nice gameroom of http://www.pinbasement.com/
Two large rooms in the basement with a great collection of games, both old to new..
Some of the games I remember are WCS, Diner, Fire, BSD, MM, MB, Sopranos, Whitewater, World Poker Tour, CFTBL, ..

The competition took a while, about 5 hours.. it was always in blocks of 3 games. First played with 2 against 2 of another team. Then there was a zen-game with all players of both teams. Zen-pinball is playing with 2 players of one team, each player controls one flipper button.

Each game scores 5 - 3 - 1 - 0 points for 1st, 2nd, .. position.
We played average, we were happy each time that we didn't end last, on most games our team had 2nd and 3rd position.. unfortunately this wasn't well for the final ranking and we ended up last. Getting the highest score on a game got you 5 points and this is really needed to score points - so when you look at it strategic it's better to have one great player and one bad/average so you get 1st and last place (and thus get 5 points) then having 2 average/good players and end up with 2nd and 3rd place as this only gets you 4 points :-(

Anyway, who cares..
I had a great time, was in a good team, played some nice pinball machines, saw a lot of friends back and met some new people (and finally met people in real life I only knew online).