The 7 pm Friday tournament that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger made with, no exaggeration, literal seconds to spare was a ``target matchplay'', a format I never heard of before. It seems to be an attempt to square two constraints of tournaments: everyone wants lots of rounds so they can get come back from a rotten first couple rounds, but they also want the tournament to at some point end. So in this format you play in three- or four-player groups, the winner getting seven points, second place five, third place three, fourth place one. (Other scoring schemes are possible.) And the tournament goes on until someone --- any player, anywhere --- reaches or exceeds a target number of points. 30 is apparently a popular target. My naive analysis suggests this means there's between five and eight rounds possible, depending whether anyone is running away with the tournament or everyone is going hot and cold.
The Women's North America Championship Series was still going on and so this side tournament had to use the other two rows of games, ones not needed by the eight, then four, then two players left in that. These were also open to the general public, so competitors might have to ask people like me to shoo. The games were also picked to be older and generally faster tables; I think the most modern game was Jokerz!, from like 1987 or something.
And who was competing? Any woman who wanted, naturally. This would be largely women who had been knocked out of the North American Championship Series and wanted something to do. But also would include some women competing in the Women's World Championship, scheduled to play all day Saturday and Sunday, not all of whom were in the North American Championship Series. (The criteria for invitation were not identical.) So, a tough group with 57 players, many of them the best competitive pinball players to be found.
bunnyhugger started in a three-player group, on Catacomb, a 1981 table which includes a backglass gimmick of a little pachinko target that can score points. Enough points to tip a game, which can be particularly mischievous if nobody's all that familiar with the table, as no one has been since 1982, and all the scores are low enough. bunnyhugger took second place (good for four points) here, my recollection being that it was through fortuitous use of the pachinko.
She did worse in her first four-player group, on Captain Fantastic, one of multiple Elton John-themed pinball games, this one from 1976, and had a third-place finish. Then on to Viking, a 1980 Bally table from the era when nobody knows what the rules of Bally tables were. But she had Hagar the Horrible on her side, getting first place and lifting her up in the tournament standings nicely.
Next game? Vector, which we kind of know a little about because MJS had it in his pole barn for a year or so and we got a couple tournaments in on it. This 1982 table has some neat-looking Future Sports art to it but everything she, or I, learned about the game had since evaporated. She got third place in her four-person group, remembering it's something about the drop targets too late to use the knowledge.
And then, Cheetah. Not the one that I'd played on Thursday night and that was still in use for the Championship Series tournament; a second edition of this 1980 Stern game they happened to have. Everyone has an okay first ball; then, bunnyhugger, remembering mostly that the game is about hitting the numbered drop targets, has a runaway second ball. Like, one that puts up somewhere around a million points, while everyone else is hanging around in the 100,000 or 200,000 range. People clap when she finally loses her ball, as will happen when a person is just that good. There's another ball and she adds to her lead, but she's just crushed it.
And then comes the sad news: someone has beaten the target 31 points. AVA, a player from Boise, Idaho, has finished the tournament, and snagged first place for herself. bunnyhugger, with 24 points, has secured 12th place all to herself. She is, correctly, delighted: 12th place in a group of 57 is a great finish to start with, and in a group including some of the toughest women, and toughest general players, in North America and a handful of the world?
We go back to our hotel room, gleeful about what a great day this has been. There's finally no room for questioning whether she's a solid, serious pinball player.
With the Jackson County Fair finally seen, what's there to do but see the Calhoun County Fair, the other show where bunnyhugger submitted pictures? Let's watch, maybe, if LiveJournal's image server will work today.
Ah, our first vendors of the fair! Pop and t-shirts, everything you need.
Oddly, this year there was not an epidemic of bird flu so they could bring in ducks and geese and other birds for the showing.
That's not to say there were no geese put in Goose Jail after what I imagine was a fair Goose Trial in the Goose Courts.
``Yeah, well, just wait until my Goose Lawyer gets here!''
Pretty sure this bird is marking me for punishment.
Alas, some of the birds were hastily assembled and already falling apart under the strain of a bright summer day.
Trivia: In 1851 Augustus De Morgan noted in his The Book Of Almanacs that the formula for calculating Easter provided by the British calendar reform of 1752 was wrong in two ways --- describing the ``day of full moon'' where the ``fourteenth day'' from the new moon was wanted, and from using the ``moon of the heavens'' instead of the ``calendrical moon''. The published dates of Easter by the Anglican schedule however were ``correct'', matching the Catholic Easter, as they would not if the dates were calculated by the calendar reform act. The error has even yet not been corrected. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. That is, Parliament went to such great lengths to avoid saying they were using the Gregorian scheme that they introduced errors that they never noticed. (The ``calendrical moon'' is a notional moon used for Easter calculations that behaves a bit more reliably than the actual Moon does.)
Currently Reading: Cosmonaut: A Cultural History, Cathleen S Lewis.
