Skillz Sundayz
As a teenager, I played a tiny bit of pinball, but I was never as excited about it as I am today. I wasn’t trying to improve, I was just flipping around. Jumping forward to just a couple years ago, I was reintroduced to pinball as an adult and this time I was hooked and really wanted to both understand what was happening and improve my game. I quickly discovered that finding educational pinball content was surprisingly difficult.
One of the best sources of information I found was a collection of short videos from the Abe Flips Youtube channel.
This playlist of 11 videos is only about 35 minutes long, but is incredibly information dense. I watched those videos over and over, then went to a game and tried to replicate what I had learned. I spent weeks trying to always dead bounce before flipping, or always nudge the machine even if it wasn’t necessary just to build up the muscle memory.
Pinball absolutely has some luck involved, but it’s a game of skill. If you still need convincing, try watching this 45 minute game of Jurassic Park scoring nearly 2 billion points.
In summer 2024 the creator of the Abe Flips videos created a Kickstarter for a full length pinball skills video called Mastering Pinball. That video was just released a couple weeks ago and is 90+ minutes of content that is just as information dense as his short videos from earlier. It contains tons of slow motion footage that shows what the ball is actually doing under different conditions, and demonstrations from the top players in the world.
Skillz Sundays*
*Not necessarily on a Sunday
I’m really excited about this video, but I’ve only watched a few minutes of it because I’m hoping to watch it with you all. For anyone that is interested, I’d like to propose getting together periodically to watch 20-30 minutes of the video and then spend some time practicing what we just saw.
If you’d like to join for this, please send me an email and we can look for a regular time that works for everyone. If enough people are interested, maybe we could even play some of the video before our regular Tuesday event.