austin_dern

So I played. The balls were still locked, and I even found the multiball start. This put together a lot of points fast. I started getting congratulations, and I double-checked my score, then let the ball drain. The bonus kept counting, rolling up surprisingly long a while.

I'd won.

The import of this might not be obvious. For all I talk about pinball around these parts, and for all I've talked about bunny_hugger's successes --- she's won the B Division at the Marvin's league, and got a string of trophies from the Lansing league --- and for all that I do pretty well in league play, the fact is I've been lousy in tournaments. Usually I bomb out quickly. On rare occasion I win one or two matches before being defeated. On a few occasions, such as the Amazing Race side tournament at the State Championships, I get far along. But I finish out of the money every time. I'd had success as one of a pair in Zen Tournaments, but as a solo player? Never.

And suddenly I had. For the first time in my competitive pinball career, I won a solo trophy.

B Division, yes. It has struck me part of my trophy drought was that I'm good enough to qualify among the state's top players, but not good enough to reliably beat them. So my slow start maybe put me in easier waters. Still, MWS is certainly better than me. The father who'd tilted out might be; it's hard to say. Well, it came out nicely for me, anyway.

Bill had homemade trophies, carved wood things, for the top three winners in A division, and for the lone top winner in B. He'd had the time to paint the carvings of flippers in the trophy for B, so I have one that stands out even among its partners.

There'd be some time yet before the A Division finished its playoffs. It had more people, and more better players. We stuck around of course. bunny_hugger are great ones for sticking around and trying to help with cleanup and all that. And some of our better friends were in the running for the championships in A Division. Plus, there's trying to figure out how to play Pinball Magic to do.

So we'd stick around to the reasonable end of the night, and take home surprisingly large amounts of the potato salad and spaghetti salad and all we'd taken there to start, and talk about just how wonderful the whole day was and how glad we were to be there. On the way out --- well, there was that Jurassic Park machine. It had been sitting in the garage, not used in tournament play for some reason. MWS had turned it on for a game before he left. bunny_hugger took a turn on it herself. I don't remember if I played. I suspect not, since I'd had a satisfying game inside and I like leaving on a high note. I believe we amused our hosts with stopping for one last little game before heading back home. I'd certainly be.

Trivia: The British Government Post Office registered more than 35,000 telegraphic addresses by 1889. Source: The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: Popeye, Bobby London.

PS: Things To Be Thankful For, mathematics nevertheless! Inspired by a building wall asking people what they're grateful for.

Back to the tournament. After a strong start bunny_hugger was becalmed just short of the fifteen points needed to qualify. I started slower, but kept going. People kept qualifying ahead of us. The top eight, the A bracket, got filled up. We kept plugging away. MWS qualified. And then, finally, I did well enough in our pods to get the fifteen points and qualify for finals.

bunny_hugger didn't.

Now, on the one hand, both of us had qualified for finals in either the main or the side tournament. And she had had several fantastic games, including absolutely crushing people on a round of Pinball Magic. She found one shot she could repeat, and build up to an incredible points payout. I believe her score that game more than doubled the combined scores of everyone else in her group, and that group included the guy who had won the Michigan State Championship. On the other hand, she had missed the main tournament, and that hurts. And side tournaments are never worth as much as main tournaments. It would happen that, despite her doing better in her tournament than I did in mine, she'd get about half the International Flipper Pinball Association credit.

I didn't get into the A division. I was part of the quartet of people who'd get to compete for B division. It'd be me, MWS, the father of that father-son pair (the son was in A division), and another guy from the Detroit area whom I'm not sure we had ever met. Competitive pinball records indicate he was at the Amazing Race tournament the week before, but that's not much guidance about who he was.

We would go into a three-game playoff, following rules akin to what they do at the top-level pinball competitions. And the games would be scattered all over; after two matches me, the father, and MWS were surprisingly close to tied. It would all come down to the last game, which the random draw made out to be ... Mars, God of War.

I would have a chance on this. Mars, God of War, a solid state machine, levels playing skill. And I'd put some time on it, as well as staring intently at other people playing, to work out some of its secrets. Knock down every drop target. Also, I'd worked out where to shoot, at least, for two- and three-ball multiballs. Those wouldn't have jackpots, but they'd offer the chance for big scoring potential in vey short order. I'd be the last player, too, which is always a psychological advantage. The last player doesn't have to be the best he can; just, good enough, and the last player knows how much that enough is.

I had a fair first ball, including locking a ball but not releasing it for multiball. That's potentially dangerous since on an older game like this, someone else could unlock the ball, gaining multiball for themselves and stealing yours. But nobody did, and I felt relieved. The second ball went better, as I remember it, although again I locked a ball without releasing. Still, I had a pretty good lead.

MWS closed out on a lousy ball that locked him into fourth place. The father played. I've since realized that he is a single-ball player; he can often win, but it's on a single outstanding ball rather than a couple consistently good balls. I think I apprehended the risk here because I did feel like the score gap he had to overcome wasn't nearly big enough. It wasn't; his score just barely exceeded mine. And I thought about what I could do to rack up points quickly when my turn came. And then ---

Trivia: In 1870 Alphonse Penaud introduced the rubber band as a source of power for small model planes. Penaud was twenty years old at the time. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: Vic and Sade: The Best Radio Plays of Paul Rhymer, Editor Mary Frances Rhymer.

PS: A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Kullbach-Leibler Divergence, a mathematics thing I didn't know about two weeks ago, but which I've learned something about for now.

So, the main basement tournament: there'd be a qualifying period and a finals. To qualify groups of four players would be randomly drawn and assigned a table. Whoever scores highest got four points, second-highest two points, third-highest one point, and the bottom-scorer got nothing. Reaching fifteen points qualified one for the finals. Qualifying would carry on until the seeding spots were full.

So there's obviously always an advantage to winning your group. But anything besides losing the group gets you a little closer too. And the social side of pinball would produce some odd conflicts of desire. It's more fun to play with better friends, if nothing else for the fun of commiseration. Our closest pinball friends, though, are MWS and CST. They're not people we can't beat, mind you. But generically, if we're all playing at our average, that puts me and bunny_hugger in third and fourth place and that won't get us anywhere. So we both wanted to get paired up with each other, and with our friends; but we also wanted to get grouped with people we could beat.

If not a group we could beat, then, at least we might get a table we could win on. There was always Mars, God of War, for example, a 1981 solid-state table. That's much more a coin toss than, say, The Avengers, another boring modern Stern. And even moreso than would ordinarily be, too. Besides its sound being distractingly weird --- almost all silent except for low, angry growls --- its tilt was alarmingly tight. People got tilted without obvious warning or provocation. There was talk of taking it out of rotation, which never came to pass, and I'm glad for that. Or there'd be perfect mysteries of games, such as Pinball Magic. We had heard of this table, but never seen it. More on that one anon because it deserves some special attention.

We'd get assembled into groups and go off and play and come back together again. It felt like I kept getting paired up with MWS, although that surely happened less than we think. I kept not getting Mars, God of War, to my disappointment because I was pretty sure I'd be in tune with it. bunny_hugger leapt ahead in points pretty quickly. I think she was up to ten points before I was even at five. I seemed to keep getting assigned Road Show, over and over and over.

bunny_hugger would also get dropped onto Twilight Zone a lot. Twilight Zone is one of the beloved games of the 90s Golden Age of pinball. It's got a lot of modes. It's got some great blends of humor and strategy. It's got a wizard mode that's second to none. It's also brutal, particularly with a bumper field near the left outlane that is just death. You can make a skill shot perfectly, only to be sent into the bumpers and from there into the cornfield. If you are in tune with the game, it can be a masterpiece. If you're not, it's rapid death. And bunny_hugger got becalmed in a seemingly endless string of Road Show and Avengers and Twilight Zone games that would just not give her anything to do.

So in the later rounds of qualifying she'd rack up dreadfully few points. I would get a string of disappointing third-place finishes too. One that I remember burning me was a Metallica game in which I just could not hit anything for anything. After bombing out on that I took time between rounds to play it again (legitimate; many people were practicing between rounds, or getting in time on unusual games), and put up a perfectly crushing game, the sort that would've won my previous group if everyone else's scores were doubled. So it goes.

And so the afternoon went: us stuck just below the threshold fifteen points, increasingly desperate and struggling against ever-more-desperate competition, as the available slots in the finals filled up, one by one.

Trivia: The Report of the Consulting Engineers for the Panama Canal delivered to President Roosevelt on the 10th of January 1906 concluded that a sea-level canal would cost about $247 million and need twelve to thirteen years to complete. This would be about $100 million and three to four years more than a lock canal would. The report recommended the sea-level canal nevertheless. Source: The Path Between The Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870 - 1914, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: Vic and Sade: The Best Radio Plays of Paul Rhymer, Editor Mary Frances Rhymer.

PS: A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Jacobian, in which I tackle a mathematical thing that's important but deep into vector calculus.

A longstanding pinball superstition has it that your first game on an unfamiliar table will be your best game on that table for a long, long while. It's easy to understand why. The first time on a new table you just try to keep the ball alive. The second time you think you've worked out some strategy, and try for that, and maybe it's not right and maybe you're focused so hard on one shot that you miss everything else that makes points and so on. Eventually you recover, but there does sure seem to be a nasty dip after a good first game.

bunny_hugger put up a great game on Hi-Score Pool, the strange pinball machine with a nearly-concealed playfield which was the side tournament's game. There'd be open qualifying, playing as much as you had time for, until about 6 pm, with the highest eight scores going on to finals. Her first score started out as maybe the second-highest recorded. It would drift down a little bit, here and there, but never so much. It would always stay much higher than my highest score, even after I started to work out some of the ways to play this strange game. She even mastered advanced skills like bounce-passing on the large circular disc that catches and launches the ball and takes up the space between the flippers. I don't think anyone else managed that.

I would never be on the leader board. I got to like the game, and worked out what I thought a winning strategy for playing it. It's an electromechanical game, which rewards slow playing and letting the ball roll itself out. But the flippers also don't allow for trapping the ball, bringing it to a stop and aiming it. Also there's no clear direction to shoot the ball; you have to infer where the targets might be. Some people tried to overcome this by squatting low as possible to peer under the board covering the playfield. I realized the guidelines on the playfield were basically right. But I didn't get the chance to play my way back into competence.

bunny_hugger watched the spreadsheet with the top eight scores, with increasing misery, as the cutoff hour approached. One person and then another recorded a slightly higher score and pushed her down. At the deadline she was sitting there on row number nine.

The thing about spreadsheets is that if you use them like a normal person, Row 1 will have headers. Like, this spreadsheet was headlined 'Name' and 'Score'. So bunny_hugger was the 8th-highest scorer in qualifiers. She was in for the side tournament.

Finals for this took the 5th through 8th place finishers and had them each play a game of Hi-Score Pool. The lowest would be eliminated. The fourth seed would join the survivors, and they'd play again. The lowest would be eliminated, and the third seed join, and so on. This scheme's designed to generate the greatest number of meaningful games the winner may have to play --- the metric that the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association uses to judge a tournament's point value --- without taking forever to play. If bunny_hugger could just beat anyone, consistently, she could become one of the final four. And an electromechanical game is a coin toss to start. A bizarre electromechanical like this even more so.

She got eliminated the second round, and came in number 7 in the tournament. She'd be beaten by some great people, including the people who came in #1 and #2 in the State Championship the weekend before. And she beat a lot of great players, including CST, MJS, Bill, me, and both that father and son pair mentioned in the State Championship report. But still, there's always the hope of doing just that little bit better still.

Trivia: New York City banned tetraethyl lead in 1925 following the research of Alexander Gettler into the new fuel additive already dubbed ``looney gas'' and suspected in the deaths of five Standard Oil workers and hospitalization of dozens more. New Jersey and Philadelphia followed soon. Source: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum.

Currently Reading: Deep-Space Probes, Gregory Matloff. This really does read like something james_nicoll would keep on hand for when he needs the equations for, say, the heat induced on a laser-propelled solar sail.

PS: Reading the Comics, March 19, 2016: I Do Some Calculus Edition, to show off that I can too still do mathematics, not just exposit about the stuff.