My plan for competing in the Main and Classics tournaments was to play one game each on all the tables and then see what happened. I started out with Classics, a tournament I haven't played in in years. (Classics finals have become a Friday night thing, to save time on the otherwise very packed Saturday, and if you don't know that you can get to the tournament Friday in time it doesn't make sense to enter unless you figure you're never going to qualify anyway.) This started out fantastic, with me playing Abra ca Dabra, a really old one-player game, just forever. I put up 90,150 and for a short while, admittedly only two hours into the tournament, had the highest score of all on the table.
Next I went over to Jungle Queen, famed of my Pinburgh D Division First-Place Tiebreaker; while I lost that time, back in 2017, I've always felt good about the table since. I went to put up something like four house balls and the lowest score on record. On Skateball, a circa 1980 table themed to skateboarding or whatever I put up a great half-million, and then on Golden Arrow a score below what I could probably have gotten flipping at random. I was feeling, all right, if I'm going to play great every other game that's fine, I only have to be good on four games out of six to qualify. Then I went up to Firepower, a table that not only have I played in real life but play all the time in simulation, and stank. Then on to 300, a bowling-themed game that treated me kindly at Pinburgh, and treats me well at RLM Amusements, on which I did not as well as at RLM amusements.
Well, no worries. The important thing was getting any kind of placement in Classics; I could go for a good placement later, if it looked like I could accomplish that.
So from there on to the main tournament, with fifteen games to play. And if it strikes you that six Classics plus fifteen Main games is more than the 20 entries I might well have mentioned buying, yeah, so it was.
Also, now, the weird thing: the tournament was packed. There was a queue three or four players deep on every table. Thursday was traditionally the slow day at Pinball At The Zoo, the one where you could get a bunch of entries in and hope they held up okay over Friday and Saturday morning qualifying. If it was packed Thursday, how busy was it going to be Saturday morning? Would it be possible to play at all then?
I did get to play all the Main tournament games on Thursday, yes. I don't say that I played them all well. In fact, some of them I played rotten. My games of Bobby Orr's Power Play, Tommy, and The Shadow would be 99th or worse out of about 110 entrants. I would never manage to improve a Shadow game that was for a while one of the three worst entrants; the game kept going down, at one point being pulled from the competition area entirely so PH and AJH could work more on it.
But you don't have to play everything well. You just have to play something well. And here I did. I had a Space Shuttle game that was top-ten for when I put it in. A game on John Wick that was similarly well-placed. A game of Mystic where, despite trying to shoot the spinners instead of the treacherous drop targets, hit enough drop targets on the first ball that I would get a 72,000 point base to my bonus; for a while that was, I think, a top five score. And then the game Legends of Valhalla, which I'd never seen or played before, where I had a first ball that did not want me to finish. I would get a multiball, shuffle that around a while, and then a new mode would start for some reason, and while I did my best to figure what that was about another multiball started. I ended up with a score above 100 million, which was the highest anyone put up, at the time, and I think was even still the top score at the end of Thursday. By the end of qualifying it had dropped but only to fourth place.
For a while, on Thursday, I wasn't just qualified for playoffs, but I was qualified for the A Division.
The day of that Marvin's visit was also, it happens, Roger's birthday and we had a present for a beautiful big white bunny.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger sitting down, readying her camera to photograph Roger's response to a gift he was too busy sleeping to expect.
And there's the bunny, hanging out beside the freezer bottle that he understood could keep him less terribly hot through summer.
Mmmm? He's interested to know what's all this, then. It's a 'pie' of dried fruits and vegetables in a shell that sure looked and felt like ice cream cone material.
Though he came out he didn't race right for it, possibly because he didn't quite see it, possibly because being out was more fun than being out for a purpose.
A little pointing out from the blurry bunnyhugger and he got the point, though.
Oh, isn't that a bunny who looks surprised and happy!
Trivia: The Centaur upper-stage rocket was given that name officially in November 1958, after years being the ``high-energy upper stage''. The name was proposed to the Advanced Research Projects Agency by Krafft Ehricke of General Dynamics, who had directed development of the booster; he had gotten the suggested name from Eugene C Keefer of Convair. The name was after the horse-human blend, with the Atlas booster it rode being the brawn, the horse, and the Centaur, containing payload and guidance, the brain, the human. Source: Origins of NASA Names, Helen T Wells, Susan H Whiteley, Carrie E Karegeannes. NASA SP-4402
Currently Reading: Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop, Henry Petroski.
