PAPA 5 for me was my last chance at making sure I was in the Hall of Fame next to the likes of Joshua Henderson, Ethan Blonder and Escher Lefkoff as a PAPA Juniors Champ. “40’d” each round in the playoffs FTW - it was 10-5-1-0 back then with 4 games per round. (This was after finishing 4th the year before and crying in the corner for an hour)
Other personal highlight, but more of an ah-ha moment was Pinburgh 2003. Watching Bowen work through the Harem Mulitiball exploit, and knowing I had never really played pinball ‘that way’. I was still just playing games how I would normally play them for fun at home or on location. Had a nice internal “fuck it” moment . . . “I can do that” . . . and proceeded to grind out my first real chopping wood game I ever played. That moment changed the way I approached all pinball games going forward.
in defeat. I quickly went through the five stages of grief on my way up to game 2. I was out at that point, but I still wanted to play my best and finish strong. We had a great match on Embryon for Game 2, and I needed a big ball 3 to come back and get the win. The final game of IFPA-9 for me was on, what at the time was just an ordinary, tilty Old Chicago (Although, just about 18 hours later, it would become the infamous tilty Old Chicago…) I played the game well and made a couple of great outlane saves and I remember laughing at myself because I was suddenly able to play so calmly and well after the pressure of qualifying had been lifted on that game of CV… Unfortunately, though, I housed my double bonus ball 5, and T-Mac was less than 10k behind me with a ball to go… I remember walking out of the garage to take a deep breath that I was done and I was congratulating a couple of guys sitting out in the driveway and when asked, I said… “Well, I could end up with a 17 this round, but I would need Todd to drain right about…” and just then, I heard a collective groan come from the garage as Todd drained out his last ball just a couple thousand points short of my score. I was happy that I played better on Saturday, but frustrated that I would miss the cut at 94 points… So you can imagine my absolute euphoric disbelief a few minutes later when Josh announced the cutline at 94 points. Even though it was 7 players for just 1 spot, it was a new life!! Looking back at the results, it was just insane that the cutline was 94. If any of the 7 players had just one more victory in that last round, there wouldn’t have been a playoff and the final round scores of the 7 players were 17, 17, 11, 7, 5, 5. My good luck continued because the selected game for the playoff was Tron, which I had already played well in group play on Friday, and my position was last player in the first group of three, and the other four would play after us. Now some players might like to know going into a big, all-or-nothing game what the scores were from the first group, but I am not one of those people! So to me, it was perfect; I just had the beat the other two guys in my group and put up a solid score and the rest would hopefully take care of itself. My luck continued as neither of the other two players in my group seemed to know Tron very well at all (it was pretty new back then) and both started with less than a million points on ball 1. I started off my first ball really well getting to Quorra MB and cruised from there to finish with around 40 million (old code, so scores were a lot lower back then). I then just had to wait out the other 4 player group, which seemed to take an eternity. I didn’t watch the game (so maybe Raymond remembers what the scores were ?) and probably clocked in a couple of miles of pacing around Todd’s expansive driveway waiting for it to end, but I survived the 7-for-1 playoff and made the Finals at IFPA-9… That was a Sweet Pinball Moment ™.
