The Northwest Pinball Championships mark the end of any “travel” for the year for me. I put travel in quotes because it’s under 20 miles as the crow flies, but commuting every day isn’t feasible. Good luck to everyone on the rest of their tournaments this year, I’ll be watching on Twitch!

Friday

I was able to put in a few cards in classics and open on Friday, but most of the day was spent volunteering for the event. In previous years I would have had a panic attack over the lost time, but it worked out. Mercifully since the work was running the front desk it was almost entirely sitting. I’m going to add a note here that Escher owes me a beer for letting him play John Wick at the end of the night.

Saturday

Saturday was a full day of qualifying, I managed to offload the volunteer shift I was scheduled for since I’d put in extra time at the desk. The queues were sort of long, but not out of control like other years. A few of us sat around and tried to tag team “Word Flower” which passed the time nicely.

By some miracle I qualified for classics in the last 10 minutes because I had one card with two glorious games and two 0’s. I had already given up hope on classics and moved on with my life so that came as a bit of a shock, being just below the cut line for hours before that.

I managed to get through round 1 by completely giving up on Paragon and using the sure-fire “Just Send It” strategy. Round 2 was another lesson in getting completely shut out (whoops!) on games I actually like. I think in 9 balls I managed to actually get 5 or 6 flips total, that’s classics baby!

As for the main event, I managed to put together a card that jumped me up into the 6th qualifying spot. I sank to 7th by the end of the night.

Sunday

On Sunday I woke up early and went for a walk since the hotel I was in didn’t have a gym room. Having a bye, I was able to watch my buddy from Bremerton play in round one. When it was my turn to choose games, I picked games I’d been feeling pretty good on all weekend, Mandalorian, X Men, and John Wick. The bed was promptly sh*t in, but at least it wasn’t another shut out. Sometimes waking up for these things is rough, not sure what to work on there.

After that I was able to put in a couple good cards for the charity event and qualified 7th seed there. I’m not really sure how that works since I was fairly tired all day and was unable to wake up. In the finals I managed to bomb Hoops, which finally treated me well on a card (maybe for the first time ever so I’m not surprised at the result in the finals game). Pulled through with a 2nd on Star Wars, which played extremely nice… and fast. Black Knight: Sword of Rage came down to a mediocre game that made so Escher and were hoping for a tie breaker. Germain is really good at pinball, though, so we were both knocked out.

On The Event

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my performance during the weekend. Managing to qualify for all 3 events while spending most of day 1 volunteering felt pretty good. It feels like I’m making progress on being more social at these events, but the feeling of “being an alien” never really goes away. At least I’m trying to talk to people, amiright? I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but I’m still really happy to have gotten into the hobby, everyone is pretty cool for the most part and we all get to nerd out over pinball!