Thirteen must be Danny’s lucky number as he emerged from November 12’s final tournament as the victor of Lansing Pinball League’s Season 13. In fact, since things wrapped up after midnight, that added another 13 – November 13 – to the count. And another three, since Danny is the league’s third-ever champion, taking the crown from two-season winner Mike (who in turn wrested it from 10-season winner Chris). Mike joked that, like Chris (who took a season off after his first loss), this means he can now quit the league. I don’t think anyone really expects that to happen, at least not as long as The Avenue still has Ghostbusters.
Seventeen people qualified to play in finals, but Jon didn’t attend (we miss you, Jon!) so we had an even eight people in the A and B division brackets. I had squeaked into A division with a one-point lead over Biff, and my reward was having to play top seed Mike in the first round. Surprisingly I got him on one of his choices, which tipped the balance of power and should have made it possible for me to win. Unfortunately, I lost on his next choice and then again on my own ace in the hole, Medieval Madness (despite a strong start). In the loser second chance bracket I faced Josh, again won on one of his choices, lost a heartbreaking game of Batman in which I put up a personal best of something like 680M (he responded by nearly tripling that on a third ball rally from around 300) and then, demoralized, completely choked on Medieval Madness. I went out like I went in: 8th place.
Meanwhile, we had a very heated B division battle. No one was looking forward to facing Jason, who is frankly too good to be slumming it down in B but was knocked there by missing too many league nights. Although Jason did end up winning the bracket, it was only after a very tough, two-round fight against Biff. The B bracket took so long that third place Lexi had to leave before the winners’ photos were taken.
The A division took even longer, of course. In the early hours of the morning, Mike had to slog it out and see if he could win two rounds against Danny. Fortunately for everyone’s bedtime though not fortunately for Mike, it ended after one round, on a game of Deadpool. Danny walked away with over a billion and Mike, as player 2, had to try to beat that on what would have had to be an epic third ball rally. Mike didn’t give up and did start to creep his way up with a lot of work on Ball 3, but ended up draining somewhere in the 200 millions.
I had predicted a win for Tim this season, but maybe next season will be Tim’s, since this one only got him a 5th place (“only” – I’d sure trade for it). Mike predicted “the season of Derik” but Derik went home with the third place plaque. My own nemesis Josh got fourth. If you’re going to knock me out of a tournament you could at least have the courtesy to go all the way!
Everyone who did not get a plaque took home a Lansing Pinball League “LOSER” ribbon. Matt had originally had those made for a past season and found his stash of the remaining ribbons when he was moving to Kalamazoo. He passed them on to me and then I proceeded to forget where I had stored them, causing Joseph to go home during the tournament, fail to find them, come back, then go home again because in the meantime I had remembered where they were and couldn’t raise him on the phone (I mean the landline, Joseph does not generally carry his cell) because he was already on his way back to the bar.
The night wasn’t all disappointments for me either. At the start of the night, Tim announced that he wanted to present something to thank me and Joseph for the work we do for the league. He then pulled out a plastic cut-out of Rudy from FunHouse that he picked up at Chicago Pinball Expo. They used to cut these “keychains” out of the unused parts of the game’s plastics to give away as promotional items. I was really touched. Everyone knows I am a huge fan of FunHouse. A lesser known fact is that it is also Joseph’s favorite game. He’s the one who got me into it.
The other thing that happened is that I won Tuesday Night Smackdown for the first time. I was sulking from being knocked out of the tournament and had not done any qualifying on Scared Stiff. Joseph encouraged me to go put a game on so I grumpily stomped over and started a game with a few minutes to spare in qualifying. I ended up getting to Scared Stiff and nearly but not quite finishing the Stiff-O-Meter. I hadn’t looked at the qualifying scores and it turned out I had the #2 seed. It didn’t matter much because it turned out that (even though Joseph made medals for two divisions) we only had three people qualified who weren’t either gone or still playing in the main finals. Thus I won a three-person game of Scared Stiff against Joseph and Bryan to take the title of Tuesday Night Smackdown Champion. In addition to this being my first ever Smackdown win, it is technically my first ever open IFPA tournament win. I have won an open tournament before (the non-IFPA-sanctioned first Fear and Trembling, which only three people showed up to) and I have won several women’s tournaments. But this means my IFPA record no longer has “0” in my “wins” column. No, I now can proudly display a “1” there for having one a single three-player game of Scared Stiff. It’s both sad and funny in equal measures that my longtime earnest desire to win an open tournament has been fulfilled by that. This is why the philosophers say that life is absurd.
Tonight is the traditional split flipper tournament, Super-Ball XIII (AKA the Zen tournament). Teams have the chance to win a pair of spectacular trophies from our friends at Prime Time Awards. We will also have a Tuesday Night Smackdown and will give out the (so far secret) Most Improved award and the (not so secret) Worst Score ribbon. I hope to see you all tonight at 7 pm sharp to start the tournament!