Anyone test what happened on trident at INDISC?

Since classics was not streamed, the incident was probably not well known, but I am really curious which scenario is most likely. Note, am not questioning the ruling, I think given the situation pulling the game was correct. Here is my understanding of what happened.

  • Ball 1 P3 tilts.
  • P4 plunges the ball for 0 points and drains
  • P4 plunges again, and P1 score counts up.
    The player up lights were not working, nor where the lights that indicate number of players in the game. There were 3 hypothesis.
  1. It was actually only a 3 player game and the display shows zeros for unused players.
  2. It was a tilt through, and the 0 point plunge was clearing the tilt.
  3. The game doesn’t qualify playfield and you can earn a zero.

The game was turned off without trying to figure out what happened, which i think it good for an active tournament. But I would love to know which explanation is feasible.

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[No doubt most people here will know this, but classic Stern machines have anti-tilt-through technology that is meant to avoid exactly this situation. The tilted-through player can plunge the ball and then be able to play once the ball reaches the trough, with the tilt through a fading memory. The officials were certainly aware, and therefore everyone was confused when it didn’t happen.]

I speculate that it was a double tilt through. In other words, not only did P3 tilt through P4’s ball, but the machine also registered another tilt with the ball in the shooter lane.

Caveat: My guess is as good as anyone else’s, and might be significantly worse. For example, if a classic Stern isn’t able to tilt with the ball in the shooter lane and there was no shooter lane switch malfunction here.

I think Tilt through protection on classic sterns is done via playfield validation (at least on games like F2K). Which is why you can tilt if the ball is going into the wrong lane on your plunge and get another try (which is not allowed in tournamnent play BTW).

Sure. The small missing piece to what you just wrote is that only the drain switch registers when the game is in a tilt state. I’m speculating that the tilt switch can also register. Then again, that’s pretty much what a regular tilt through is.

Problem is there are so many scenarios that the TD just ruled major malfunction just to move on. You could take glass off and verify:

Trident has anti tilt-through.
Trident has 0 score ball save.

The only innocent person in all this was Todd. Bob could have only started a 3 player game but is that really his fault when there was nothing to indicate such?

Andrei at fault for tilt-thru on a game most think wont allow it?

Am I at fault for assuming I would get the ball back with zero score with again no way to verify it is indeed still my turn.

This is right up there in the TD hall of fame scenarios!

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Huh? Full stop on this point. Pull the game right there and then, or play the game as single player only.

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I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess that the game didn’t start the weekend that way. And that it was playing ok otherwise until the incident came up. Jim wouldn’t let something like that slide.

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I completely understand and agree. But WHEN/IF it comes up, I stand by my original recommendation: pull it (or if possible, fix it), or have matches played as single player.

Point taken. Your recommendation is what they did. What’s not clear is if the lights went out mid-game (and the group agreed to play through it?), or if they were out from the start.

Guessing again, I bet the lights went out mid-game or were intermittent before going out completely. I probably wouldn’t agree to start (without a ruling first) if those lights were out. It’s a small problem if you’re playing on location. Much bigger problem when playing for cash.

Well, I did kinda bark at Karl about the ruling given the unfortunate outcome for me given the ball one scores, so I don’t feel completely innocent, either :frowning: .

At the time, it did seem like there were a couple possible explanations to what happened that could have been discovered if we played on(and likely had to experiment after the game was over), mostly coming from my biased desire to keep the balls played so far. Outside of it being a 3 player game all along(resulting in throwing out the game played so far), there probably was no scenario where we’d be definitely sure of what happened, though, so it’s hard to argue with the ruling now in hindsight.