Yeah, the waitlist seems VERY inactive at this moment in time. 3 places moved since late February is not a good sign IMHO.
PAPA, please don’t make me start doubting about this again. I really want to compete and I don’t want last year to happen all over again.
What happened last year?
I joined the waitlist last year and started at around 250. Came to about 200 before the waitlist really started picking up.
I finished at around 27 or so on the list by the time the tournament started, and it ended up being too close to call that I just bailed on Pinburgh. (Would have made it in, too; heard it went as far as 80 people the day of.) This year I want to get in with confidence, not like how it ended up last year.
We’re considering the idea of using these types of opportunities to help other leagues, locations, etc leverage Pinburgh’s popularity to benefit themselves and pinball as a whole. Full details will be announced when / if it becomes an annual opportunity. Nothing is set in stone right now, but best practices on how to move forward are being discussed and weighed against the inevitable blowback.
Either way, as Doug says, it will at most be a very small percentage of overall tickets and will be announced publicly well in advance of 2019 dates. One of the problems we’ve begun to face is the annual slew of people who run promotions without our consent, followed by the panicked requests from organizers who realize they’ve awarded a prize they cannot produce. This situation isn’t good for anyone, so we’re looking into a more established and transparent system for this aspect of the tournament / show.
There were a few people sent invitations this afternoon, so the waitlist is currently up to date. It’s not moving very much this year, which is both good and bad, I suppose, depending on your perspective.
Hopefully he gets to design his own banner!
Can you make banners out of a fur coat?
Will there be a chance for players to pick up their wristbands at the Omni the day before competition starts? I would sure appreciate it if it were possible.
So you’re saying…there’s a chance? 
To clarify, this can more accurately be stated as “there were four spots available and four people between the numbers 1 and 80 from the waitlist were there and got in.” It does not mean there were 80 open spots the morning of.
I definitely agree with the principle, Bowen, I like it very much, however a fly in the ointment is the 1.5X WPPR weighting this tournament gets.
To ask a large, successful tournament to behave in a different way because of an external organization’s decision does not make any sense to me.
As long as we get the $5040 for IFPA endorsement fees and Stern Pro Circuit fees I’m a happy man
If you’re saying giving a 1.5x WPPR weighting to Pinburgh is unfair, I’d point out that the base value for all events is capped at 64 rated players, and Pinburgh had about 12x that many rated players last year.
Without that cap, and without the 150% bonus, Pinburgh’s value would be around 430 points. So, if anything, it’s about 3x undervalued.
Yes. On the other hand, without the cap, the world rankings would pretty much degenerate into two groups: players who can attend a major and players who cannot.
Isnt the system already weighted against people who live in pinball deserts (I think the IFPA lists India as an example)? Isn’t that the nature of most, if not all amateur sports anyway? Some people from some geographic locations will inherently have an advantage over others. There isn’t really a good way to change the rules to accommodate for that.
I agree, that’s just how it is. But it doesn’t mean that we should go and make the imbalance even stronger.
You still have to reward those in massive tournaments appropriately, though. If majors aren’t particularly valuable, they lose the significance of being a major. And without being a major, there isn’t a draw to the event, which starts the process for pinball to go back to what it was: a local thing done in bars.
Isn’t 140 points for Pinburgh enough?