The Stern Pro Circuit (SPC), presented by the Replay Foundation and IFPA is a series of 20 high-level pinball tournaments held throughout each season, starting with the 2018 season. We will be tracking the WPPR performance by players in these events, with the top 40 qualifiers being invited to the Stern Pro Circuit Final held in Chicago, IL.
IS the circuit year Jan/1 to Dec/31? Any rough idea what time of years Circuit finals would be held in Chicago then? It was nice having it together with PAPA for us crossing the country to reduce number of long haul flight.
I assume you ran the number already, any clue what at the 2016 top 20 WPPR tourney then? I am hoping we have a decent geographical representation… one could dream
The Circuit season will be a calendar based season.
The timeframe will be in that February-March zone, depending on Stern trade show commitments (one of which is when Nationals is held). I know Stern would like it done BEFORE the Amusement Expo so they can use the PR generated from the SPC at the show. This would place it between SCS and Nationals time wise.
This has the ranking of the 20 current circuit events, of which the top 15 will stay on for the inaugural SPC season.
I haven’t begun to dig up the ‘next biggest 5’, but I would anticipate Flip Out at Expo will be one of them, and probably some international events a majority of US players have never heard of.
This was in the works a couple of months before that. Stern approached us about this idea after SCS was done, and rather than venture down the path of creating a competing circuit, we figured it was worth finding out just how quickly we can destroy competitive pinball if PAPA and IFPA actually work together on something
Josh talked before about how leveraging the Stern brand would be helpful for growing pinball, plus you have the word “pro” in here, so are there plans that this can grow into something with higher stakes over the next few years? The NIB Stern is cool I’m not complaining about that but 2nd-40th are still getting the same prize level.