Rules knowledge and situational awareness

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So I recently watched a quarterfinals match on spiderman from PAPA 14 that I found pretty interesting. On ball 3 Bowen as player 1 had something like 140m, Paul Jongma as player 3 was chasing with around 115m and lit battle royale while in armed at the dock. After draining out of multiball, he took one shot to try and start battle royale, bricked, and the ball headed straight to the right outlane. He tried to make a move to save the ball but he had double dangered earlier in his ball and ended up tilting. Rough. But what makes it worse is that apparently there is a rule on spiderman that on ball 3, and ball 3 only, when battle royale is lit the outlanes become lit for a ballsaver (which is a cool rule that I didn’t know). So if Paul had just let the ball go out without nudging he would have gotten the ballsave and been able to take another shot at starting BR, giving himself a chance to overtake Bowen.

I found it interesting because it was such a clear case of how important rule knowledge and situational awareness are. Anyone have a story about losing because you didn’t know a specific rule or you didn’t realize the situation you were in?

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Yeah, my reaction to this situation was “Oh well, I just lost”, and then I didn’t.

A similar thing happened to me at IFPA6 against a player from Austria, who had more than enough bonus on Judge Dredd to drain and win, but didn’t know it – he tilted saving a ball headed to the center drain, and I won a game that was a dead-certain loss.

The one I recall from the other side was watching Jason Werdrick earn extra points on a brand-new Indy 500 by using the launch button during modes (Dueling Drivers, Go For The Pole). I would have lost badly anyway, but not knowing the easter eggs in the game didn’t make me very happy in that moment.

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Yeah, I can definitely recall a game where I lost by tilting my bonus. I was playing Greg Dunlap on STTNG, and I had gotten 10x bonus and the warp factor that holds bonus multipliers on ball 2. For whatever reason I didn’t realize my 10x multiplier was held, and tilted trying to save a center drain on ball 3 when I would have won if I just let it drain. Oops.

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