The interruption-protracted Season 14 of the Lansing Pinball League finally came to an end on September 28 with an exciting – but mercifully short – final playoff tournament. In the 8-person A division tourney, Danny climbed out of the second-chance swamp where he had been knocked by Mike, to face off against him a second time in the final match. I was in the process of setting up the Tuesday Night Smackdown finals on Guardians of the Galaxy when Mike came over and said I was going to hate him but that he wanted to pick Guardians for the third game of his first match against Danny. I let the main tournament take precedence while the Smackdown finalists waited. Danny needed to win on Guardians in order to move on to a second round against Mike. Mike prevailed, ending the tournament without a second finals round (which to me is always a little disappointing, even though I also needed to go home as I had work early the next day) and ending Danny’s chances of defending his Season 13 championship title.
We resumed the Smackdown tournament, observing that this was the first time the Smackdown had finished before the league finals. This was partly due to having to wait for Mike and Danny to play Guardians and partly due to my scheduling Smackdown finals for 11 pm (I think I may have made it 10 pm in past seasons). Nevertheless, finals did get done at least an hour earlier than is typical, and it is almost certainly due in part to my unilateral decision to disallow playing extra balls. In past seasons whenever I took a vote, a narrow majority of players favored continuing to use “Lansing extra ball rules” for finals (which means playing a maximum of one extra ball).
Meanwhile, the 6-person B division tournament had already ended a while back, with a win for Pat in the final match against Donny. Pat ended up the tippy-top seed in B division after losing a single game tiebreaker on Lord of the Rings (a random choice) to Todd at the beginning of the night. They had ended the regular season with a tie for points – actually a three-way tie that also included Biff, who hasn’t returned to league since the interruption.
We also gave out some traditional end-of-season awards: Best Game, Worst Game, and Most Improved. Joseph handles the calculations for those. Best Game indicates the game that was the highest above the mean for the night, Worst Game is the furthest below the mean, and Most Improved is based on an average gain in points per night over the season. Most Improved went to Dan N., Best Game was Joseph on Elvira’s House of Horrors, and Worst Game was Jason on Stranger Things. (I was certain it was going to be my TMNT game in which I hit about two targets in three balls.) The three of them got generic red “WINNER” ribbons, and everyone else (except the top three in each division who got the nice glass trophies) got the famous green “LOSER” ribbons. Matt had a batch of them made years ago when he ran the league and he later found the leftovers and gave them to me. Sadly, there are only a couple left, so unless I manage to get enough surplus league money to get another run of them (unlikely given that I ended this season in the hole after dues and expenses were accounted for) this is the last season everyone will get one.
After Jason got knocked out of the tournament, I gave him a Loser ribbon and apologized, because I had made him a double loser for the night with his “win” on Worst Game. When he won Tuesday Night Smackdown, he hung the Loser ribbon on one side of his jacket, the Winner ribbon on the other side, and tried to put on the Smackdown medal. That’s when we discovered I had cut the ribbon too short for him to fit over his head.
We had two new players attend, Brian and Michele, though as they could not play in finals they just watched the tournament and played in Tuesday Night Smackdown. Michele put up a quite good qualifying score on Guardians but unfortunately had left before I started the finals for it. She would have qualified for A division. Brian did play in A and took 2nd place in his first Lansing tournament. Brian recently moved to Lansing from Grand Rapids, and has previously played in a season of the Grand Rapids Pinball League. Michele is a longtime pinball player but new to the competitive scene. I also have heard we may get at least one more new player this season. I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone when we start the new season in less than a day.