An Intro to Tournaments

I’ve only played in two pinball tournaments, but I’ll be honest and say that watching pinball tournament streams is some of my favorite TV. I have a couple of favorite arcades that stream about once a month, and there are large national tournaments with the best in the world.

Tournaments have been a way to learn the rules, the “tournament strategy”, and watch for interesting play techniques. I first learned about Meteor (and the 1980s Sterns in general) by watching streams and then seeking out the machines I’d watched others play.

But, I’m not trying to convince you to watch pinball on TV with this blog post. Instead, I just want to tell you about some common tournament formats and gauge interest in running our own low-key tournaments on Orcas.

Match Play

Match play is probably the most common format. Groups of players play rounds, with the winner from each round progressing, creating your typical tournament bracket. Groups can either be two players (head to head) or four, with the top two advancing.

Each round may have two or three games, with points given to players in the order they finish (e.g. 3-2-1-0 points). In large tournaments, a qualifying period can be performed before the tournament bracket to rank players and determine the finalists.

In this format you are playing against the other players in your group to earn points so you can advance to the next round.

Howdy

The howdy format (named after the Howdy Pardner weekly event at Wedgehead in Portland) takes the match play format and changes it so that the other players in your game become your teammates rather than competitors. An attempt is made to create balanced teams, and you stick with them through the whole tournament.

This format is especially interesting because it changes the competitive feel of each game into a much more relaxed and cooperative experience. You now want the other players in your game to do really well because it’s your combined score which determines your place in the tournament.

Strikes

In a strikes tournament each player has a number of “lives”, and every game they lose takes away a life. There are a few variations on this:

• A 5 strike tournament where the bottom two players in each match take one strike.
• A 15 strike tournament where you take strikes based on how you finish the match (first place - 0 strikes, second place - 1 strike, third place - 2 strikes, and fourth place - 3 strikes).

When you hit the max number of strikes, you’re out. This format guarantees everyone gets a large number of games, even if they’re having a tough night. It also can produce interesting outcomes where players in the finals may have very different numbers of strikes.

A variation of this tournament that regularly runs at the Electric Bat Arcade (one of my favorites) is a “Bounty Knockout Tournament”. In this strikes variation, every player starts the night with a poker chip, and when they are knocked out the winner of that game takes the chip. At the end of the night, chips are redeemed for money from the pot. I love this format because it means the prize pot is spread across a large number of players. No one can take a chip you have won, even once you’re knocked out. Not everyone can win a chip, but it definitely helps spread it around!

Are you interested in playing in a tournament? Let me know which format sounds the most interesting!