When the league last met, we started our final bank rotation between 7 (Canis Minor, “The Little Dog”) and 8 (Coma Berenices, “Berenice’s Hair”). Bank 7 is our designated back-up bank that games move into and out of based on need. Bank 8 is our “everything else” bank, made up of anything we haven’t played yet plus games chosen by popular vote. There had been an unusual number of mid-rotation game switches this season as well as several new games, so this time the two banks were overcrowded. We had several games that had been played by only half the league. I decided to put together the two banks with all the games that no one had played yet plus as many of the “half-played” games as possible. I put it to a vote to decide which of the candidate games would not be played. As usual, the voter turnout was not very high, but the most popular (by which I mean least popular) choice was Monster Bash (philistines) followed by a tie between Ghostbusters and Stranger Things. I did a random drawing between them and the unlucky loser was Ghostbusters.
At some point, Danny walked up to me with a deadpan look on his face and something in his hand. I looked at what he was holding out and realized it was a flipper button. He had evidently decided to turn up The Addams Family and rip off the knob. Earlier this season the same thing happened to him on Indy. Derik asked me if there was time to fix it and I said sure and he got it sorted out for us. Thanks, Derik!
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown was on Metallica, and the random drawing for the undercard division selected AC/DC. Danny triumphed over Devon, Joseph, and Peter in the A division, and in the B division Derik beat Tim, me, and Bryan. I guess I should have shot the ramps.
With one league night left to go in qualifying, we currently have 22 players qualified for finals, with five more who will qualify if they attend the last session. Since this season we are going to limit A division to 8 people in order to keep the tournament shorter, the competition to get above the cut is extremely fierce, and the margin very narrow. Peter is currently one point ahead of Devon in 8th and 9th and sadly for me, I am another 4 points behind Devon in 10th. Peter keeps wanting to point out how close the three of us are and Joseph keeps trying to discourage him from reminding me. The gap between any of us and Jason in 7th is large, so it is unlikely (though not impossible) that anyone will overtake him. It’s really looking like this will be my first B division season in quite a while. I have usually hung around the 9th or 10th place mark which used to be the bottom of A. At least I’ll have a chance at hardware in B.
Meanwhile in A, Danny has a fairly good lead (22 points) over Tim but Tim only has one point on Josh. That said, the A division seeding isn’t quite as important now that there will be no byes. The A/B cutline is really where the suspense is this season.
That’s the wrap-up for last time and you know what that means: it’s almost time for the next meeting, in just a few hours. (I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you all an Ethan Tournament recap, but work and Pinball at the Zoo have been eating my spare hours recently.)
