For a variety of reasons, sleep was hard to come by in the hotel room I wound up in. Thus, I woke up much earlier than desired. Rather than risk oversleeping, I decided to leave the hotel room as early as feasible, even though it meant I would be spending a fair amount of time waiting for the tournament room to open up for practice.

I used the time wisely, using the surface streets instead of the expressways. It is worth noting that the Dallas/Fort Worth area could well be the “toll road capital of Texas” so this was as much an economic measure as it was a relaxation and time management measure. Along the way, it’s time for another stop at a  QuikTrip for a light breakfast (roller grill taquitos and bottled tea).

I’m pretty sure I wound up in the lobby of the convention center sometime around 7:45 am if not earlier.

Finally 8:30 am rolls around and the players file into the tournament room for the morning practice session. Practice was supposed to be limited to about 60 seconds per machine per player. I did my best to stick to this, trying to err on the side of shorter time as opposed to going a few seconds over. At least one player who was in a practice line ahead of me was using the stopwatch feature on his phone and calling out players who obviously went over; I had thought about doing this, but for reasons I’m not going to go into here, I decided against it.

I feel like I made really good use of the practice time despite one miscue (not realizing that Mandalorian was the kids’ tournament game, intentionally set up with either loose or non-existent tilt). While I didn’t get in practice on all the games, I felt I got enough to really help make informed decisions about which games to definitely play (Spanish Eyes, Flash Gordon, Stranger Things, Rush) and which games to possibly skip entirely (Twilight Zone).

Shortly before 9:30 I went ahead and left the tournament room and began the half-hour wait until 10:00 when qualifying would officially begin.

In order, these were the scores I was able to attain during qualifying, with commentary interspersed. Times are from the DTM (tournament software/website) page, adjusted to local time. An asterisk (*) denotes a score that was later superseded by a higher score. An octothorpe (#) denotes a score that was lower than the previous high score to that point that does not qualify for an asterisk (i.e. an entry that many players would just ask to be voided). A percent sign (%) denotes the three scores without a corresponding photo.

Mar 25, 10:05am Spanish Eyes 46,300 *
Mar 25, 10:11am Dialed In 50,790 *
Mar 25, 10:27am Rush Premium 21,093,320
Mar 25, 10:33am Flash Gordon 518,520 *
Mar 25, 10:41am Total Nuclear Annihilation 114,820 *
Mar 25, 10:49am Buccaneer 60,980
Mar 25, 11:05pm Spanish Eyes 56,250 *
Mar 25, 11:13pm Space Mission 29,680 *

Here, I took a quick break to take a look at the standings, and tooted this to my Mastodon feed:

Took a quick look at the standings, so far 5th out of 72 that have played. Of course that is subject to change but it is very encouraging to see that this early.

Indeed, it wouldn’t last all that long.

Mar 25, 11:45pm Beatles 647,540 *
Mar 25, 12:18pm Stranger Things Premium 49,113,650

At this point I took my lunch break. I walked to the mall and decided on Which Wich. One ‘Za Wich (pizza sandwich) and one large Dr Pepper later, it was time to walk back into the hotel and tournament room and get back to business.

Mar 25, 1:49pm Space Mission 16,430 # %
Mar 25, 1:53pm Bounty Hunter 359,120

After this game was a two-hour gap for my registration desk volunteer shift.

Mar 25, 4:25pm Creature 6,592,780 *
Mar 25, 4:56pm Whirlwind 2,364,620
Mar 25, 5:08pm Space Mission 67,110
Mar 25, 5:25pm Spanish Eyes 71,260
Mar 25, 5:35pm Bounty Hunter 104,910 # %
Mar 25, 5:39pm Fast Draw 30,360

At this point, the internet access had deteriorated to nearly unusable. Thus, I was not able to live toot the last seven scores. It was difficult enough to reload the DTM pages to update my standings.

Mar 25, 5:51pm Buccaneer 68,020 *
Mar 25, 5:58pm Flash Gordon 751,790

This was my dinner break followed by a quick tour of the show floor. (The tournament room opened to entries at 10 am; the show itself did not open until 5 pm.)

Mar 25, 7:27pm Dialed In 58,640
Mar 25, 7:55pm Creature 55,750,430

This is this point after which accessing anything, including DTM (the tournament software/website), became effectively impossible. I unfortunately had to bother the registration desk to queue me for two of these last three games (a scorekeeper queued me for Flash Gordon in the middle of the final three).

Mar 25, 8:29pm Beatles 1,251,590
Mar 25, 8:39pm Flash Gordon 273,360 # %
Mar 25, 9:06pm Total Nuclear Annihilation 204,430

And that’s it. Dee-duh-duh-deet-deet, deet-deet.

I remember looking at the standings somewhere in here. I was at least 4 slots out of qualifying for novice division (the next 8 after B division). However, even that didn’t last. I didn’t screenshot exactly where I was at 1 am (technically Saturday morning) when qualifying ended. By that point I was long since back at the hotel, trying to sleep. However, I did look sometime between 10-11pm; by that point my rank had already fallen to somewhere around 100th-110th or so.

The trip back to the hotel was relatively uneventful; I stopped off at QuikTrip again for a couple of buffalo chicken and cheese links and bottled tea.

Gallery 1, tournament qualifying scoreboards (Note: A couple of these are poor quality due to having only enough time to take one quick snapshot before re-queuing for another game and/or letting the next player in the queue take his/her turn.)

Gallery 2, show floor and other non-tournament-related photos:

The story begins on the late evening of February 27. After waiting for weeks and seeing my name still at the top of the waiting list, I received the email from one of the tournament organizers at 10:38 pm informing me that a spot had become available. I was finally able to confirm that I could still make a trip to the Dallas/Fort Worth area work on the dates of the Texas Pinball Festival, and so the following evening at 7:25 pm, I sent in my payment and made preliminary lodging arrangements.

The days leading up to my visit to the Texas Pinball Festival were filled with frenzied planning, packing, and other administrative tasks. With everything packed and lodging arrangements made, the time had finally come to actually set the GPS, hop in the car, and go.

The trip is somewhere around 250-260 miles from my departure point in north central Houston, and ideally a little less than 4 hours of driving time. I’ve had quite a bit of experience with long distance travel from my messenger/courier work as well as my current merchandising job (covering other stores where we do not have a local field representative). I have traveled with others between the DFW area and Houston, including spending a little time exploring parts of the area. So it’s not like I’m just rolling into a strange new city/metro area armed with only the GPS apps on my phone and hoping for the best.

However, this was my first trip this far out of town traveling alone. It helped that I saw at least one familiar face as I stopped over at the Madisonville Buc-ee’s (the only one on I-45 between Houston and DFW until you get to Ennis). That Buc-ee’s is not quite at the halfway point, though, and there’s still a good 2½ hours worth of driving (about 170 miles) left.

I made another brief stopover for a phone call and possibly another soda or bottled tea. The store I wound up at (on Texas Highway 179 near Teague) unfortunately did not have many options. Worse, the drink containers I touched were warm due to a malfunctioning cooler. My immediate reaction was “to heck with that.” Thus, I was back on the road for the last 110 miles or so.

It turns out upon my arrival that my original lodging arrangement was probably not going to be workable. I will go into a bit more detail about this situation in a post on Rant Roulette. (For a variety of reasons, the mentioned post is still in progress.)

Since this was going to take some time to resolve, I decide to take care of other business. First order of business: emptying my bladder. Second order of business: (partially) refilling my vehicle’s fuel tank. (I took care of both at a QuikTrip not too far from where I was.) Then, it was time for me to head over to the Texas Pinball Festival site in Frisco. I needed to pick up my wristband, name tag, and program. By doing so at this point, I would not need to wait in line Friday morning. Such a wait could have potentially cut into practice time in the tournament room.

In the meantime, with some help from people back home, I was able to get lodging squared away. Now that I could breathe a bit easier, it was time for a relatively uneventful dinner at a nearby Qdoba. Why Qdoba, you ask? I had a free entree on my rewards card expiring in early April. (Qdoba had locations in the Houston area some years ago, and I was just short of my  first free entree when all of the Houston area locations were closed permanently. I had kept up with changes to the rewards program. With those changes, I wound up with enough points to qualify for a free entree outright without needing another purchase.)

One beef quesadilla later, it was finally time to head back to the hotel. I needed to prepare for the eagerly anticipated weekend that was now on the horizon.