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More info?)
> Thanks very much for the game specific setting information that you
> experienced during your "A" division play. I hope others can fill in
> some of the information regarding the games in use in all of the
> divisions. Would be great to have in order to better prepare for next
> years tourney.
I played almost every game in the B bank and most seemed pretty close
to factory aside from tournament mode settings and the posts set up.
Even some of the posts weren't set up. The one thing I noticed was
harder than normal was that on LOTR you could not stack locks for Two
Towers multiball. You had to lock a ball before you could spell KEEP
again. However it also had the Cave Troll sequence for FOTR multiball,
which the practice bank game did not. The only game I didn't play once
was Eight Ball Deluxe, but I don't know what all you could do there.
Other than that so far as I could tell all the games were set on
standard. For instance, Pool Ball Mania in Cue Ball Wizard was 5M/shot,
not 3M. Big Guns' rescue timer was 12 seconds. Mirror/Piano/Flag Mode
relit on each ball like normal. Multiball was lit automatically on the
third ball on Tommy. etc, etc, etc. I am sure these would have been set
to hard for A bank qualifying.
The biggest thing that made games TZ/FH problematic for me was that the
kickouts were wildly unpredictable which made the games hard to handle,
especially TZ which I had practiced extensively before the tournament.
However that practice was on my own game which is in mint condition and
totally dialed in.
Since people want to know how to prepare for tournaments, I offer these
suggestions.
1) Go to all your games right now and set the posts all the way up.
This alone will drastically improve your play in general, although it
will be a total bitch at first, esp if they were all the way down.
2) Go out and play games on location. Home games tend to be tweaked to
the nth degree to play as perfectly as possible, and you need to learn
to deal with miscelaneous problems like flippers that are not aligned
the way you expect, or kickouts that cannot be handled predictably.
3) Set your games for no extras, or when playing on location do not
make shooting for them a priority. As Bowen said above, this really
changes game strategy. On AFM for instance, completing two saucers is
something you always want to do on a normal game because of the EB. In
tourney mode you pretty much never shoot the saucer anymore because its
way too risky compared to the points you can get elsewhere.
4) Become point oriented, not goal oriented. Stop focusing on how to
get LITZ and start thinking about where the less risky points are
(hint: how many uncollected gumball machines worth 25M a piece do you
generally leave at the end of a game?)
5) Learn to play games you don't like. This has always been the hardest
thing for me. In B bank this year, we had Funhouse which is one of my
favorite games, but all weekend it was just beating the hell out of me.
I couldn't get it going. In the meantime, we had Cue Ball Wizard which
I had never really played before, and when I did I HATED it, but
everyone was talking about how it was in great shape and playing really
well. So I got the rulesheet off the net, Keith Johnson gave me a
couple pointers, and I played it a few times in the practice bank and
realized this was a game I could do well at. So I stopped playing
Funhouse and started playing CBW and my results started improving
dramatically. The game was friendly, the flippers were strong, the
kickouts were predictable, and on my last entry I had a 600M score
worth 4th place. I still hate the game, but in the future I am going to
seriously rethink my game selection criteria to be more focused on
games I can beat rather than games I like.
There is more, so much more, that could be said on this topic. I
remember back in the day when discussion of game play and strategies
was the majority of the focus on rgp, and its sad to see that taking
such a backseat now. Perhaps more high profile tournaments and leagues
can bring some of that focus back, although I'm not going to hold my
breath.