Just discovered this thread. Great stories by some awesome players I admire. As for me, I’m a B to C player at best, so I’m quite used to scraping the bottom and my goal is often to not finish last. I always have fun no matter the outcome. One night in our weekly league tournament, due to a first round win in a swiss format, I ended up on a 3 player game against the 1st ranked player in the state (you might recognize the orange hat) and the 2nd ranked player in the state. A great game was being put up by player 1. Trapping up… ball control… not missing any shots and breezing through metamorphosis like it was nothing. Going in to the game, I had no illusion about the “fact” that getting last place for me was all but determined. Well, this night my sweet pinball moment was that I was player 1 and my score held up with ease. Lucky game with bad breaks for the other guys? Maybe? But either way it was a sweet moment I’ll always remember. (And it has also given me a bit more confidence to play better each week as well)
Mine would be coming back from behind two games in a row in the First State Flippers Tour Championship between me and Eric Destasio. First game was Elektra, which I despise of. Was down 600k to 80k and I was player 2. Just kinda said “oh well” and wailed on the blue targets, locked a ball, then drained. Went to the lower playfield with 14 Elektra Units and came back on the final lower playfield bonus which i had doubled. Not a crazy game. So Eric picked Lost World, a game he sold to me. He had 2 bad balls but bounced back on the last ball to put up a score of 195k. Which was pretty respectable on this LW. I step up with about 60k in hand and proceeded to bounce into 5x multipliers. This is where I took my headphones off, which I never do, and shot the spinner, went straight down the middle, and sat there for about a minute and a half waiting for the bonus to countdown to see if I edged him out or if we were going to game 3. I ended up winning 205k to 195k and got a cool 6ft trophy and $800 dollars cash.
Another favorite of mine was battling it out with Aleksander K at flippers and actually beating him on Pinbot. Crazy game of Dialed in with both of us having like 3 sim cards and over 1.1 million each
Also making state finals my first year of playing pinball competitively
I’ve got a handful of sweet moments that fall into a couple main categories.
The first is being recognized at various venues. Quotes from “so you are the infamous WIL” after GCing a handful of tables en route, to “your reputation precedes you” at Cycle to the Sea charity tournament. I certainly wouldn’t have expected to be good enough to have a reputation outside my regular venues. I’ve also had the operator of some games pick out my initials, and congratulate me on 5 bil on his STTNG and 124 mil on his Cirqus Voltaire. He is still trying to beat those scores.
The best sweet moment was playing in my first pro circuit tournament at OBX 2018. I was a nobody playing pretty well in the classics, and suddenly I was in the top 10, and also playing against Drew Cedolia, Steven Bowden, and Jason Werdrick. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I was star struck in that moment, and proceeded to houseball three of my five balls. Still finished 10th though!
Can an 80M (Super) Ring Frenzy be far behind??
Or maybe 136M of ROTK supers??
Is that a 9x2x2 ROTK jackpot?
It still doesn’t feel like this should even be possible, but last night I scored 21,000 for a pre-lit E-L-F skill shot plunge on Hobbit that somehow managed to sweep the bank — wow!
I’ve never seen anyone do that but it makes sense given less lucrative score bonuses awarded for more frequent E-L / L-F drop target pair hits from an accurate a standard skill plunge (or flip from a short plunge trap on the right flipper which is how I have normally approached the scenario in the past).
A perfect pre-lit L-O-C-K plunge for 18,000 is no doubt better strategically and likely more kinetically pleasing but I was pleasantly surprised to learn of something that tops it point-wise unlike shatzing a pre-lit, cycling spider lane from a short plunge trap for 15,000 — not too shabby — as yet another alternative, more common, feel-good starting move.
A heart pumping amount of points there JJP! 
It’s (7 + 8 + 9 + 10) x 2 x 2 ROTK supers (1M base).
Best I ever collected was a 9x super (no Gollum/2x).
Playing like crap in my first Chi Expo qualifying before putting up around 1.1B on my final qualifying game on IM to get myself into A.
Had a cool moment with a bay area pinball OG recently. Tom S has been around pinball in the bay forever. Played early in league, knew TJ when he was a kid, has games at home, still goes to all the shows. I believe he was one of the original CAX organizers. I was helping him with his prototype AFM he bought from Steve Ritchie. I’m not sure his age, but he’s easily in his 70’s, if not 80’s. As I was working, we talked. At one point he told me he wasn’t playing as much as he used to. I looked right at him and told him (paraphrasing): That’s okay Tom. You’ve played more pinball than any of us. I give you permission to play less.
He laughed and said that was probably true. He remembered playing some 50’s title I can’t remember when it was brand new. Made the old dude feel slightly better about not playing as much. A couple days earlier, I fixed his JJP G&R and he was all over that as I was leaving. Proto AFM will be fixed soon.
I had a nice one that was not in competition at all. This was several years ago at the former Orange County league. Pat Choy was hosting that month, and he’d just bought a Monster Bash. We got to talking about the game, and I mentioned one of the things about it most people never see - - the 6-monster stack, where you get Creature, Mummy, Dracula, Bride and Wolfman all started and still running when you then start Frankenstein multiball. That gives you an extra 15M award, the special “6’s flying at you” animation on the display, and a good chance of collecting all 6 of your instruments to set up Monsters of Rock (even if you don’t get all 6, you’ll have Monster Bash lit coming out of it with some instruments certainly collected). Several other people there weren’t familiar with the 6-stack either, so they enjoyed my description. Anyway, we then played a casual game on it (this was during “social time” before league play started), and I promptly did the 6-way stack. Given how rarely you see the stack done, it was really cool to show it to them right after talking about it.
A few months after I started at Williams, I was playing the MB whitewood with Lyman after work and we were talking about how valuable stacking modes was, and I said “You should do something where you get a bonus for bringing all the modes into Frank, some kind of bonus or something” and he was like “Hmmmm yeah maybe, you got six monsters with timers stopped” and then we went on with our night.
So a couple days later we were playing again and he said “Oh yeah check this out” and he set it up and started it and I was just like … over the moon. Like I had an idea and it showed up in a real pinball machine. That was a sweet pinball moment for sure.
Thanks! Great and Sweet idea, love doing it. Had no idea you were behind it.
In 1994 I was playing in my very first World Championships ever in Rosemont, IL. One night I was watching TV in my hotel, and I flipped to a channel and there was this really weird movie playing, and I had no idea what it was (it was an odd Christmas scene, and some kid was being sung at). For some reason I kept on watching … and the movie ended up being Tommy!