IFPA Women’s Pinball Championship – Coming in 2016!

We’re excited to announce that we are creating the official IFPA Women’s Pinball Championship, to be held in conjunction with the IFPA US National Pinball Championship out in Las Vegas on March 17th, 2016.

The IFPA plans on inviting the top 16 ranked women from around the world to battle it out in a best-of-7 single elimination format to crown the IFPA Women’s Pinball Champion. Similar to the qualifying process used for the IFPA World Pinball Championship we will use the rankings as of January 1, 2016 to determine the qualifiers. Full details of the event including schedule, entry fee, prizes, etc. will be available soon.

The current Women’s Rankings are available here: http://www.ifpapinball.com/rankings/women.php

For those women that do not find themselves on the ranking, please contact the IFPA and we will update your profile.

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I think it’s awesome that the IFPA is taking this step to support women in the pinball community in a more formalized way. I’m curious for a bit more context if you’re able to share; why now? why this format? are there specific objectives you’re hoping to achieve by putting this together?

Like everything we’ve done with the WPPR system it’s mostly come down to being able to filter out information.

SCS started because we were able to filter out tournaments based on their location.

The idea of a Women’s Championship has been on the list for a while, but our profile system didn’t actually incorporate gender into the database. We’ve been able to (and by We I mean shepherd) has added gender as an attribute in our database, so we’re able to get this going.

We plan on eventually doing the same with a Junior’s Championship at some point once there’s enough of a youth player base for it to make sense.

Both the Youth and Women rankings are now available on the sub-menu bar on our homepage 24/7.

It’s really about motivating these player groups to get out and play more, now that there is something to try and play for via your WPPR rank. We’ll see if that actually happens, but I’m pleasantly surprised by how many profile updates we’ve gotten from women that we missed in the few hours after the announcement.

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Will the IFPA endorse women only events for WPPRs?

Number 40, Erin Ray, is not eligible since he’s a dude.

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Women’s only events will not be endorsed since they are restricted events. Even the IFPA Women’s Championship won’t be eligible for WPPRs because of the gender restriction, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build it up to be the most prestigious women’s tournament in the world.

Same will go for Juniors, Seniors, College Students or any other subgroup of players that we end up focusing on with the WPPR system.

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I feel new markets opening up for WWPPRs, JWPPRs, SWPPRs, and CSWPPRs.

:smiley:

Have it your way!

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As is number 30, Andrea Galbiati…

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And number 49, Janne Toukkari. Dude is all man.

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I’m really worried that all of these men are trying to infiltrate the women’s tournament. Perhaps we should require DNA testing? :wink:

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That doesn’t really work! Assigned sex is generally seen as subordinate to gender identity. If someone identifies as a woman, I would expect them to be eligible for the women’s tournament.

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What about people who don’t identify with any traditional gender, or those that identify with multiple genders?

The can o’ worms is large with this one.

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If they don’t identify as any gender, that would make them ineligible for a women’s tournament since they don’t identify as a woman.

If they identify with multiple genders, you would have to allow them to play as long as one of them was “female”.

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Instead of having a bunch of dudes on the Internet decide what events can or cannot possibly happen how about we all just enjoy that the IFPA is creating an event that a lot of people will really enjoy qualifying for and ultimately compete in?

I am really looking forward to seeing my friends try to qualify and I’m looking forward to cheering them on the entire way.

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Sure, the IFPA can create whatever they want and invite whichever 16 people they want. I’ll be the first one to confirm for the 2020 Tournament of Dave’s :smile:

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There are 230 “Dave’s” in the system . . . might have to combine that with the 499 “David’s” to make qualifying in the top 16 a challenge :smile:

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I’m glad the whole “gender idenity” was considered and kept simple. Everyone plays pinball. :smile:

Is there a lack of men named Dave in pinball tournaments? If so, maybe you’d have a point. But in my scene I can think of several.
I get that you’re making a joke, but it egregiously misses the point of the whole thing.

Best comment.