I’ve also never heard of stopping a game in progress. If you start your game by the cutoff time, you should be allowed to complete it.
NW Pinball Championships definitely used to be that way . . . play until Midnight. Once Midnight hits it’s like an episode of Chopped, hands up, step away from the machine.
I think over the years even they switched to “last game played starts at X o’clock” instead, although it was kind of entertaining to step up to a game knowing you only have 200 seconds to score as much as you could.
The reason we do that is because if someone starts a game at 4:58 and has a game that lasts over 20 minutes we need to start the next round and waiting on people to finish then tally the scores would make the event go on a lot longer . We want to start the second round of qualifying at 5:30 since most have been playing since 11:00 am and you can get your qualifying games if you turn all your scores in by 3:00 pm then have a few hours to up score on games you need to get better at. That is the risk you take for starting a game close to cut off time, in my opinion.
A few in past have taken issue with it but we need to start the next round and need time to make the march ups to start at 5:30.
Come experience flippers it is a great tournament and who can beat the Outer Banks for your hotel accommodations
Please sell flippers t-shirts online somewhere. Really cool shirts!
Wouldn’t a better solution then be to say that qualifying games must be started by (say) 4:45, but that games in progress at that time can be completed normally? This is likely to result in the desired time schedule without the risk of players “timing out” a game in progress.
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