The inevitable, and very lightly anticipated (thanks
@Jackpot ) UK Open write up. TLDR: it went pretty well.
Won’t go into all the minutiae, you know the deal - three tournaments that I could participate in, five-game cards, many hours of qualifying time! I’m going to be writing this with a first timer to the UK Open in mind, and how I approached it as a first timer.
Firstly, machine selection - this year the main and classics banks had
24 machines each and the PBR bank had 12. I followed
@Jmac ’s advice and didn’t choose five in advance for any of the tournaments. However what I did do, given the size of the banks, was rule out machines which I would play on “counting” entries. There were some machines in the bank I have never got a good score on and the chances of doing so under pressure on a hard machine would be slim. So for example in the main I eliminated Rush, Iron Maiden, Funhouse, AIQ and Alien Star immediately, which still left me to choose five from 19… which I think is okay. I would have kicked myself if I’d ruined a card on one of those. Otherwise, I did play pretty much all of the machines at some point to figure out which felt “safe” and which I had a chance of going really well on. The other trap to avoid falling into is don’t just choose a machine because it has no queue, especially if you are on a good card. I did this a couple of times and it was such a bad idea! Be patient and play what you actually want to play.
Secondly, this was my first time playing a multi-day event, and these are potentially LONG days. Energy management and mental state were so much more important than I thought they would be. On Friday I was super fresh and felt good until quite late on. Saturday, I was wiped out when I woke up and so stayed in bed for another hour rather than be there at the hooter as I was on the Friday. I think this helped, but after playing almost all day I did crash around 9pm and just started playing horribly. You really need to recognise this if/when it happens because if you continue to play then you are pretty much just burning money and likely winding yourself up mentally. So step back when you need to, you can qualify as much or as little as you want. Sunday, I was forced to play less because of the queues on the PBR bank and I also didn’t start until about 11 given my tiredness. This worked out well for me.
Thirdly, card qualifying is HARD. Properly hard. Getting five good scores back to back on hard machines can feel nigh on impossible and having a stinker four games into a really good card is absolutely demoralising and frustrating, you can feel like the worst pinball player alive. I ruined a good Main card with a 6m on Jurassic Park which I had scored 63m and 275m on with my previous two games. What I would recommend to help with these feelings is to do some scorekeeping. You can obviously see all of the submitted scores on Never Drains, but you don’t see the voided tickets. You don’t see the top, top US players putting up 2m on John Wick, or 50m on Indy 500, or 5m on AIQ. But when you’re scorekeeping you do see all of that and it did help me feel a bit better about my own stinkers, so do some scorekeeping for perspective!
On the topic of scorekeeping, I signed up for 2 x 2 hour sessions. These were probably the most exhausting 4 hours of the weekend, it is really non-stop physically and you need to concentrate hard or you can easily make stupid mistakes. I signed up for more than the minimum required because I thought this would be a useful way to force myself to take a break from playing - which obviously it did - but it was no cake walk and so didn’t quite have the desired effect in terms of R&R. But, after a short break afterwards it did give me some kind of spark, maybe it let my reflexes recover a bit. And obviously, it massively helps the event run, so please do it!
Scorekeeping does earn you entries, and I got through plenty of those. I ended up buying 30 entries over the weekend, which is not a cheap endeavour. I was playing out all games on most of these cards to get more machine time, apart from on Sunday when the PBR queues were long and I was literally running out of time to be wasting it on dead cards. You can of course use fewer entries, or indeed way way more, but as with all things you should set your budget accordingly and do stick to it!
The machine setup was quite difficult but rarely “unfair”. All of the Sterns with the exception of Bond 60th had no ball save. But, there weren’t that many “hardware” changes like removing outlane posts etc. which are the preserve of the higher ranking US tournaments. It was possibly marginally harder than Pinfest but not much more. So, it will probably be an initial shock if you’ve only ever played machines on factory settings, but you will adjust to it.
Finally on tips, you really need to do your rules homework, especially if you’re someone like me who is new so can’t pull from decades of experience playing these machines. I prepared a document where I wrote 100-500 words on all 60 machines including core strategy on how I’d approach them, skill shots to go for, danger shots to avoid etc etc. This took absolutely ages. I consulted this often when I was queuing, especially for machines I didn’t have much experience on. This is quite extreme prep but now I’ve done this, I have it ready for any other comps with the same / similar banks, so hopefully it will pay dividends in the future.
So, how did it all go? My objectives coming into the weekend were:
- Finish in the top 80% (so, above 120th ish) in all comps, and,
- Stretch goal - finish top half in one comp.
And it went better than expected. I finished 68th in PBR, 70th in Classics and 110th in Main. So, top half in two, and indeed top 80% in all - great results for me. Main was a bit frustrating with multiple ruined cards. My best card in PBR actually had a zero on it - a disastrous 15m on Fish Tales meant my card was being carried by only four games. My best cards:
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So a mixture of good, bad, and ugly and PLENTY room for improvement in future events.
I noted some of my better scores in another thread, but I did have a pet favourite machine in each bank. In the Main, almost all of my cards included Baywatch. I never blew this machine up (top score c. 650m) but equally, I rarely scored less than 300m on it. It was solid and felt safe for me, so I hassled the Hoff all weekend. In Classics, I scored consistently well on Freefall with two scores around or above 1 million. Freefall is an excellent machine if you want to force yourself to slow down and chill. If you don’t know - the drop target grid is key to scoring well and you can change the row of the grid you are working towards by pressing both flippers at once. So trap up, look at which targets are left up and which you still need to complete your rows on the grid (which increase bonus X) and then choose your row and shoot. Great for getting the heart rate down. Finally in PBR, Demo Man was my absolute banker game - I scored over 800m three times. I was using the handles which is apparently a bit of a noob move, but I actually played better with them and they also give you more bonus and secret multiball jackpots
With these results I gained over 30 WPPRs which has leaped me up from 137th to 84th in the UK rankings (and 4,221st in the world). I’m pretty proud to have come from literally zero to top 100 in 8 months. Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m actually the 84th best player, but you really do need to turn up to the big tournaments and play solidly if you want to do well in this system (however flawed you consider it). Some IFPA stats from my profile:
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Apologies for the length, always happy to take any questions or PMs (and especially from newer players starting out on their journeys!)
Next outing: SWL in two weeks for back-to-back matchplay tournaments. See you there!
Simon
.
but you’re absolutely right. I know and accept I will have bad tournaments but I always want to try to figure out the reason(s) for those bad days, if there is one, so I can work on it for next time. Maybe I should just shrug my shoulders from time to time!
% nicking your advice to:
;
I beat myself up all the time for being c**p at pinball and never feel I'm improving, despite having target scores pinned up on our home machines, watching all the Abe Flips videos... I’d almost given up competitive league entirely before the UK Open - just playing casually at PBR.
I really enjoy reading these. 
