Even survived the Buffalo signal vortex!
Looking forward to my annual trek west. 
A couple of us are coming down from Eugene to donate our money to the City Champ cause!
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Just win it
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Just got flights and hotel package deal for City Champ. $49 each way on Southwest from LA and hotel was like $125/night. Promo code SAVENOWUS
We are working hard to get all games in shape before the weekend, and I hope that the players will enjoy this year’s edition of City Champ. All participants should have received an email with additional information. If you haven’t, please let me know.
The forecast for San Francisco looks sunny with highs around 65 degrees, perfect pinball weather!
To follow along on MatchPlay: https://matchplay.live/gbg6e
To watch the stream: http://twitch.tv/sfpins
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Bummed not to be making the trip this year. Great event! Hoping to catch some of the live stream.
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If any of you are in town early. There is a casual tournament tonight at 7:30pm at The Myriad. $5 entry. No WPPRs but it’s super fun.
There is also the Guardians of the Galaxy launch party / pre-City Champ tournament at Gestalt at 7pm on Friday. $5 to play.
City Champ finals banks have been updated and are visible here. Trying to be as transparent as possible with our games.
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Bank 6: Harlem-BW-GOT
That one looks familiar!
My finals run was like
Harlem 
Baywatch 
GOT 
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fun bank except that Harlem hosed me good :S
It’s been hosing the rest of us for the past 12 months
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Great day of qualifying yesterday! Tune in at 11AM Pacific today for the first round of playoffs.
Every round will be in groups of 4 on a bank with 3 machines from 3 different eras. 7/5/3/1 scoring, and the the top two from each group advance.
Thanks to the AV Crew for streaming and to officials, techs, and score keepers for keeping things running smoothly.
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Stream will be at www.twitch.tv/sfpins and we’ll be following the top seeded group, to the extent our wireless camera range allows.
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Congratulations to Colin Urban for taking it down! He was playing great all day, and pulled out those clutch Meteor games when he needed to!
Thanks to the San Franscisco crew for putting on a great tournament! The games were tough but fair (six million dollar man’s tilt not withstanding) and it was fun to play all those different machines against so many people.
My only criticism is the playoff for 5th-8th that occurred for all four players. It essentially took all your games in that round, and threw them out the window if you didn’t move on to the finals. I don’t think any tournament should ever TAKE AWAY something once someone has earned it, and in this case, unless you were 8th, you could potentially lose spots because of this strange rule.
Might I suggest next year simply only playing off people who have the same amount of points? So if 5th-8th have 13,13,11,9 points respectively, only the 13s would play off for 5th and 6th.
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Agreed that it’s a weird rule. It’s on the website and we did do this last year.
Semifinals will be 2 groups of 4 players. Same scoring as before on 3 games. The top 2 from each group move on to the finals. The bottom two from each group will play 1 machine for 5-8th place.
We can discuss for next year how this is handled as I think we can do better. Thanks for coming out this year and defending your title. I’m glad we get such good players coming out to this and hope to see you all next year.
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I had a blast at the tourney, strong field, really good vibe, excellent choice of games and the majority in great playing shape. I would suggest maybe having a dinner break, the tournament is suppose to end around 6:00. So you could do a lunch break at round 4 and a break at round 8. It also allows a player to have a mental break and prepare themselves for the stretch run. I would also suggest starting 30 minutes earlier that way you can do intros, rules and other announcements in that time to keep the tourney on time. Love to have a more seating areas but the space is tight and know it is tough.
Overall this is one of the better run tournaments I have been to and will absolutely be back. Thanks to all the volunteers and technicians that make a large scale tournament like a this happen.
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First of all, thank you to all participants who came out to SF this year. I really appreciate your support for our tournament.
Secondly, I love the constructive criticism. There may be changes next year thanks to the people who make their voices heard. I wanted to address what has come up so far, to explain if I can, why a certain rule was in effect.
I don’t see it as taking away points as much as once the round is over, those points are gone. Nobody could, for example, take any of the points they had earned on Saturday with them to Sunday.
It’s common practice to play out matches for certain positions. In the Olympics, for example, there is usually a bronze match. If you did really well in the semifinal, but still lost, it doesn’t matter more than if you had done poorly in the semis. Now, where one draws the line of which matches to play out or not, that is a philosophical matter. I chose to draw the line at a 5-8th place match mostly for practical reasons.
I really didn’t expect it to run as long as it did this year, so I apologize for messing up people’s dinner plans. Last year ran faster, and I think the games were set up harder as the main reason for this. We had a couple of restarts of games (What’s up GOT??) that also didn’t work in our favor. I don’t want it to run later than 7 PM, so one option would be to have maybe 10 rounds instead of 12. Another option is, as you say, to have a dinner break, but then it’ll run pretty late.
It’s definitely a suggestion that will be discussed further.
Yup. The only way of increasing the seating to player ratio would be to have fewer players I’m afraid.
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You can play out the bronze match for people that are ACTUALLY tied, like I said, people who both have 13 points. It doesn’t make sense to play out any of the other positions since they already had been decided.
Sure it makes sense. The tournament explicitly described this to occur.
If you have two different pools of players you don’t have a direct comparison between the two pools. Combining the losers of the semi pools to determine 5-8 is a great way to determine what the 5-8 ranking should be since the competitors were separate before then.
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