League Night Recap for 1/9/18 and 1/23/18

In preparation for League Night #3 tonight, I present to you… the belated recap of 1/9 (and apologies for 1/23)!

Opening night of the 10th season of Lansing Pinball League.

Season 10 started on 1/9 with my first night as the new league director, and what a start it was.  I expected a few new players; I didn’t expect half the participants to be new players.  In the chaos of getting all the new players checked in and explaining the rules, I got a bit overwhelmed and league started a little late.  Plus, when it was time for me to put people into groups, I didn’t have a good method ready and I just started pulling names off my list, putting four per game and trying to make sure at least one league regular was in each group to help out.  I then got to the end of the list and discovered I had only one person left, Dan.  Since other groups had already dispersed, score sheets in hand, I just removed myself from another group and joined Dan as a two player group.  This was not optimal since it meant that Dan and I had to wait all night for other, slower groups to finish, and worse, neither of us really got to meet any of the new players properly.  Oops.  I’m still learning.

It was great to see so many new players in the league.  We got some extra publicity from the Avenue and Pinball Pete’s this season, and I also made a poster for both venues to hang up, and I think that accounts for some of this.  In any case we’re all happy to have the league growing again.

Dan battles those ugly Martians on our league game, Attack from Mars.

This season we are going to be working through all the games alphabetically, but that’s “alphabetically according to how Match Play has them in its game list” since originally I was going to use Match Play to run the league.  (That didn’t end up working out since the way it deals with absent scores isn’t as we had planned.  Instead we’ll be using a spreadsheet on Google docs.  Not as pretty, but it works.)  Match Play doesn’t skip “The” in the titles of games, hence “The Addams Family” was not part of League Night #1.  We’ll continue with that alphabetical method the rest of the season but I might switch back to a sane method in future.

Mike S. ended up winning the first league night.  My own night was… not so great.  I think I’m going to find that my tendency to play badly in league after rushing home from work and getting no warmup time is only going to be exacerbated by also being in charge of running things.  That’s OK.  I love this league best of all the ones I play in because of the fun factor, not because of my scores!  I wasn’t alone in my agony, anyway; Fish Tales and AC/DC especially beat up a lot of players.

I rarely miss a league night, so of course I went and missed the second night of the first season I’m captaining.  I had a very good reason; I was giving a presentation at an international animal studies conference in Mexico City.  Joseph came with me (missing his shot at the state championship!) and so that left league stalwart Mike S. in charge of things for Night #2.  The threat of an ice storm almost caused a problem since Mike has to drive from Grand Blanc, but fortunately it didn’t materialize and Mike made sure everything was fine while I acted like a professional philosopher way down south.  I heard that we got even more new players, and that things ran smoothly without me.  In the words of Chris, “Mikey done good.”

Typical LPL frivolity with Danny, Derik, and Matt.

Tonight is League Night #3, and the first of our Tuesday Night Smackdown series!  Anyone (not just league members) can put in qualifying games on our randomly-chosen Smackdown game (which for tonight will be Iron Man), with the top four going on to play off for the Smackdown Champion title.  Smackdown attempts can start as soon as Joseph arrives, which will be around 5:15.  I will probably be a little late tonight due to an exam in my class, but should be there by 7:40 at the latest to get everyone going.  See you soon.