It’s been a real pinball period now, with the IFPA World Pinball Championships last weekend, and the European Pinball Championships (EPC) the weekend before that. The EPC was in Northampton, a bunch of miles north of London. Me and some other Swedish players were scheduled to land on Heathrow at 13.50 local time, but since the famous English weather decided to close Gatwick down, we had to wait in the air for an hour before we could land. Oh well, we had plenty of time to get to Northampton…
Heathrow – Northampton, a 103 km drive on highways.
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…and it took plenty of time to get to Northampton. Since the weather couldn’t stop us, the UK Department for Transport did its best. Road works and accidents combined made the 1h+ drive take more than three hours. We were supposed to start playing the country tournament at 17.45, and at 17.40 we arrived to Northampton. By then our handheld GPS had run out of batteries, and we hadn’t brought the car charger. Another car with Swedish players were behind us though, and they had a working GPS, so when they arrived to Northampton, we used them as GPS by proxy, and finally arrived at the site at 18.00 sharp. The warming up that we had planned turned into an instant start of team tournament matches.
The Jochniyle Trans-Atlantic Express
But despite the abrupt start all the Swedish teams did well, and when the qualifications round was over, all three Swedish teams were among the six teams that made it into the final, ending up on place 1, 2 (my team) and 5. A 50% chance of a Swedish victory! However, one of the American teams was the better players, and they won the team tournament. My own team had apparently burned all our energy in the qualifications, and we ended up on sixth place. The other two Swedish teams took the 2nd and 3rd places.
The organizers had apparently taken the warning about the tight schedule seriously, since they had done everything in their power to minimize the ball times on the games. This makes the outcome more random, and a lot of good players didn’t make it into the finals. Players like Neil Shatz, Roy Wils, Albert Nomden, Jorian Engelbrektsson and myself ended up on embarresing positions. I ended up as 89:th, which is my all time low in ANY tournament, and the first time I ever miss the finals in a big tournament (except PAPA).
Anyway, it made it possible for me to put all efforts into the Classics tournament. They had eight classic games put up, and the best score on each game would continue into the finals. I took aim for Big Fair, and had a battle against Roy Wils for the win. I finally got 3453 against his 2893, and made it into the finals. And so did four (almost five) other Swedes! That’s domination…
Classics finalists
The semifinal was played on Time Fantasy, where Jörgen Holm and I scored around 2 million points each, leaving the other two way behind. In the finals, Jörgen and I met Neil Shatz and Jim Belsito on Firepower. Belsito got over a million, giving him the victory, and I got second place with about half a million. The silver medal somewhat compensated for the catastrophy in the main division, and at least I didn’t had to go home empty-handed.
Jörgen and I had a flight booked the same evening, so we left immediately after the Classics final. We arrived at Heathrow in time to check in and return the rental car, and went for a smoke. After the smoke we headed towards security, but they wouldn’t let us in! The didn’t say why, and just directed us to a desk. At that desk they explained that there’s a new rule, saying you have to arrive at security at least 35 minutes before take-off. We looked at the time. 33 minutes to take-off. We’d been ONE minute late! She said there was a 30 minute wait at security. Heck, we were at terminal 5, there’s never more than ten minutes to wait at terminal 5 security. And BA flights to Sweden is at gate A10 or A11, which is a two minute walk from security.
If I wanted to catch a train, I’d get down to the train station, and if I’m there at least ten seconds before take-off, I’m on my train. But when flying, you have to be there hours before take-off, and go through a lot of meaningless procedures and elephantiasis security measures. And of those hours, 99% is waiting time! What the heck is wrong with the aviation business?? They really need an extreme makeover.
We rescheduled our flight and found ourselves a hotel, and all together that smoke was the most expensive one (with ordinary tobacco) of my life. Heathrow hotels really know how to get paid more for less.
Todd playing with cows
A week later I was back in England again. This time for the IFPA World Pinball Championships in, or rather outside of, Hemel Hempstead. Nick Bennet provided his personal farm to host the tournament! Rather unusual, but all you need to host a pinball tournament is space and power, and the farm had enough of both.
The qualifications system was a lengthy (but good!) one, taking one and a half day of continious match play to complete. I started fine, parking on positions around 12-15 somewhere. Since positions 1-8 and 9-16 were seeded in later into the finals cup ladder, it was important to do good in the qualifications. After the first day I was at the 18th position, so I had to play good on day two, to get into the seeded bunch of players. But morning pinball is not my bag, so I fell down to the 24th position when the qualifications was over.
That meant I had to play all rounds of the ladder. I started up against fellow Swede Marcus Hugosson. He beat me at F-14, but then I won four games in a row. Next opponent was Krisztián Szalai, the Hungarian guy who got second at EPC the week before. It was a tough match, and it took nine games to determine the outcome, before I finally won on Road Show(!). The next match was against Neil Shatz, second at IFPA last year, second at PAPA 2005 and third after me at EPC Classics this year. I beat him playing good on Star Trek, Simpsons and Road Show (again!), and had the least lousy game on Star Gazer. 4-0!
The quarter finals was the first match on the third day, and my opponent now was noone else than Bowen Kerins, the reigning IFPA champion and multiple PAPA champion. And again, morning pinball is not my bag. I got about 50 million on Simpsons against Szalai and Shatz, and I got 2 million against Bowen. Bowen had an easy win, 4-0 without having to put any effort into it. I had really been looking forward to that Simpsons game, since we have both made fantastic scores on tournament mode Simpsons, but apparently that fantastic match wasn’t this match. 
The last game was a tie breaker for the quarter finals losers. Once again I met Jim Belsito, and once again he beat me to it. But I beat Cayle George and Trent Augenstein, earning myself a sixth place in the tournament. I’m pleased with the outcome, even though I really wanted to give Bowen some more competition. I won $400 and a bottle of IFPA Jalapeño Sauce!
This time the return flight went fine, except for “poor” Jorian, who had to stay to play the final against Bowen. Bowen won once again, keeping the title for another year.
Now I’m home for a few weeks, before it’s time to go to PAPA to battle once again…
/P