Carrying on with the Michigan State Women's Pinball Championship, even though it's a Sunday: we got to the venue, RLM Amusements, about fifteen minutes or so after it opened, and nearly two hours before the scheduled start of the tournament. This gave ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger some time to check the games out and even try them herself, for the first time in nearly a day and a half, before her responsibilities as tournament director would take priority.
And she had some time to learn of tournament-running stuff. Confirming that RLM was going to be able to stream the tournament, for example. (You can watch the whole stream here, at least for now. bunnyhugger can be identified as wearing her KN-95. You might spot me in the background, wearing an N95 and cover to that, making it weird by trying not to be weird.) Learning that there was a news reporter from a Kalamazoo station making the hourlong drive up. (Grand Rapids stations were interested in the open tournament but didn't take the bite for this.) You can see that, at least for now, over here at WMMT's web site, including pictures taken at the end of the tournament.
The guy they sent hadn't known what he was being sent to Grand Rapids for, and wasn't looking forward to it, until he learned it was a pinball thing and that sounded like fun. So it was, although the first time he interviewed bunnyhugger --- in the middle of her first round of live play, so her opponent waited patiently for this --- he failed to turn the camera on and didn't realize until he bumped the camera and it went rotating. Fortunately as someone who's taught the same class as many as three times in a row bunnyhugger can repeat herself without making it sound too rehearsed.
RLM would serve as the backup tournament director. Usually and in lower-stakes tournaments I serve as bunnyhugger's backup, there to make rulings and direct players in a match that involves her. But who's going to be confident in the tournament director's husband that more than half the competitors have never seen before? RLM, who runs high-value tournaments every week at his place, and who isn't related to any of the competitors except by friendship, was the better choice all around. Also since he owns the venue he has keys to save stuck balls, which he'd end up doing a lot over Sunday too. RLM would also do color commentary for the live stream; he's one of the voices you'll hear on that Twitch recording a lot.
But what could I do, then, besides drive bunnyhugger home and tell her no, she hadn't lost the tournament yet? For one, updating partial results. I'd spend a lot of the day walking around, checking the results sheets people filled out, and entering them in the online system so people watching at home could know, roughly, the state of all eight (then four, then two, the one) matches.
For another, directing traffic. Whenever anyone finished a match both winner and loser would need to know where to go, who they would play next. Winner was easy: the online MatchPlay system would tell you which match you had to wait for to see who your new opponent was. Loser, though, was harder. Though each match had a number, there are a lot of pinball players who don't grasp that the loser of (say) match 5 should go down the brackets to the line marked L5, instead of just putting themselves on whatever the first blank line they saw was.
And we had little online support for this: Matchplay doesn't keep any track of what to do with anyone not competing for the top four slots. The only brackets we could find that describe how to place everyone so that, like, who gets 13th and who gets 16th place makes sense aren't stored anywhere official, not even at places like PrintMyBrackets.com. They're passed around in one step above samizdat publication and I hope we don't lose them before next year again.
Another thing I could do: misinform players! This was an outgrowth of the banks system that IFPA set on the coed and the women's tournaments. Before the start of each best-of-seven match, both the higher and lower seeds would pick three games, one from each bank, no duplicates. Then they'd take turns picking one game from the higher seed's selections, one game from the lower seed's. So each player was guaranteed to pick at least two games. If the match was tied after six games, the higher seed got a pick. (There are more complications to this, none of which matter.)
Ah, but what about if you've already lost a round, and so are no longer in the running for the #1 position? Well, those in the ``Consolation Bracket'' or as some called it the ``Losers Bracket'' would play best-of-three matches, the better to get some more pinball in without spending all day fighting over fifteenth place. How were games picked there, though?
As bunnyhugger explained the process to the players, that those in the Consolation Brackets would take turns high-seed/low-seed just as the winners did (although they didn't need to pick their games before the match got under way), one of the guys hanging around in support of their partners interrupted. He was quite sure that was not correct, and rather than go on about it bunnyhugger promised to check with the IFPA Tournament Directors Discord to confirm she'd understood the process correctly.
Well. It turns out that the IFPA does not care what you do with players from 5th on. They only really care about which round people go out in, and the positions can be settled however the tournament director likes. bunnyhugger decided they would use the same process that the 'Bronze Match', for 3rd and 4th players, would. Which I understood to be, higher player picked a game, lower player picked a game, and if a third game was needed whoever lost game two picked game three.
This was wrong. What bunnyhugger wanted --- and thought she had specified by saying it was done ``like in Lansing league finals'' --- was that loser picks every game after the first. So, loser of game one picks game two, and loser of game two picks game three. And it was several rounds into the Consolation Brackets before we realized I had been giving wrong instructions and, worse, contradictory instructions to what bunnyhugger had.
There wasn't much to do besides tell everyone I had misinformed that I screwed up and here's what they should be doing. bunnyhugger worried that this would reflect badly on her, and worse, that people might insist on their right to redo any and all rounds marred by my screwup. Fortunately, nobody did. That all the players were, if competitive, still amiable and friendly helped. That there wasn't any money on the line for anyone 5th through 16th must have helped too. Next year we're definitely getting this written out ahead of time and not trusting me to understand instructions.
KennyKon pictures: let's see some more of Steel Curtain, again before the park was even open for the day.
Another test train, starting the steeper-than-average lift hill on Steel Curtain.
And there it goes over the banana roll here.
Just looking over at the turnaround for Racer again, but from a higher vantage point, so the coaster itself looks like it's peeking over the fence.
Almost ready for our ride! I was so nervous at whether the con badge would hold on through the ride. Also, I didn't register that the seats were football-themed at first.
Looking over the other end of the launch station. The gift shop is a big one and made to look like a stadium which is the sort of idea that seems like a lot of fun until you realize that even in the modern era of sports facilities that look like stuff, football stadiums aren't that much fun from the outside.
And here's the loading of the next group, after we'd had our ride. It's a fun ride, but it's not going to displace the Racer, in the background, as ride we run not walk to avoid missing. The 'Danger No Step' corner at the end of the platform is normal for this sort of thing and note that there is a bit of fencing there to protect someone from accidentally plunging in a bad spot. No, that is not Cookie Monster waiting for the next train's front-seat ride.
Trivia: Nikola Tesla's first American patent, a commutator for a dynamo electric machine, was issued the 26th of January, 1886. Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes. (He would collect two more before mid-March.)
Currently Reading: Matariki: The Star of the Year, Rangi Matamua.
