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IFPA10 starts tomorrow!

Posted on May 30, 2013 by marble

The 10th annual IFPA World Pinball Championship will start tomorrow in Echzell, Germany. 64 players coming from 19 different countries will compete in qualifications during Friday and Saturday. On Saturday and Sunday top32 play-offs will be played and in the end the winner will be IFPA10 World Pinball Champion.

Go to ifpapinball.com for standings during the tournament. I might have time to tweet some of my own comments and standings during the event too.

Two pre-IFPA-tournaments were played before the main event and top4 of these tournaments were:

Rodenbach Pre-IFPA Pinball Tournament
1. Nico Wicke (Germany) (IFPA10 Satellite qualifier)
2. Andreas Harre (Germany)
3. Cayle George (USA)
4. Trent Augenstein (USA)

Hattersheim Pre-IFPA Pinball Tournament
1. Joey Springer (USA)
2. Mads Kristensen (Denmark)
3. Jörgen Holm (Sweden)
4. Roman Kunovic (Germany)

It’s been a nice and fun week here in Germany so far and it is about to get even better. Can’t wait to be part of IFPA World Championships once again!

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PAPA TV Kickstarter

Posted on May 21, 2013 by marble

I’ve tried to write a lengthy post about my Pinburgh trip that happened already more than month ago. I seem to have way too many things going on and haven’t had time to finish the post, so maybe I’ll try to do that later this summer and include the picture gallery at the same time. So for now I just mention this quickly:

Pinburgh was amazing! 4 days of fun, 400 players and the best location in the world to play pinball. Big thanks to Kevin, Mark, Bowen and all other people making the event possible!

What was especially great to see was that if Pinburgh was amazing already in 2012, the event got even better this year. The most important improvement was livestreaming Thursday’s Circuit Final and Sunday’s Pinburgh play-offs to Internet with the help of Chase Nunes from geekgamer.tv. If you missed the live, first rounds of Circuit final can be seen on GeekGamer.tv Youtube channel.

During past month a PAPA TV Kickstarter project has been collecting funds to get the live streaming equipment to PAPA HQ to make it possible to livestream all the future PAPA events too. The project has been a great success and the initial goal of $20000 was reached within first day of the project. With some stretch goals more money has been collected and many great things regarding live streaming competitive pinball should be happening during next years. There is still some 36 hours left to back up the project so if you still haven’t backed up, go to papa.tv and get yourself on the backer list and receive great PAPA t-shirts, tokens etc from the long list of stuff available!

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Ari Sovijärvi wins SPO 2013!

Posted on May 12, 2013 by marble

Sörkka Pinball Open (SPO) reached it’s 10th anniversary this Saturday when the competition was held for tenth time since the first SPO-tournament in 2004. Although the venue of the competition has changed some times during the 10-year period, the competition has mostly kept its original form and has always been played with older and newer games.

This year the venue changed again and it was first year the competition was held at a public Extraball gameroom close to the centre of Helsinki. Although the tournament was organized in quite a hurry this year and the event wasn’t advertised anywhere outside Finland, we got international participants since Andreas Thorsén from Sweden participated in the tournament among 32 Finnish players. Eventually Andreas was one of the four finalists, other finalists being Olli-Mikko Ojamies, Johan Holmberg and the reigning SPO-champion Ari Sovijärvi.

The 4-player final was played on 5-ball game on Strato-Flite. Ari Sovijärvi was the winner by rolling the game over, scoring more than 100 000 points having 3x bonuses on multiple balls. Second was Johan Holmberg, Andreas Thorsén was third and Olli-Mikko Ojamies finished 4th.

The full results of the tournament (including qualification results) can be seen here as a Google Docs spreadsheet.

For the first nine years of SPO history the tournament had different winners every year, but now Ari made history by being the first player to win two different SPO-tournaments but also being the first one to win two consecutive SPOs. Congrats Ari, this definitely is your tournament!

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Ari Sovijärvi wins Finnish Pinball League event 3

Posted on May 5, 2013 by marble

Season 2013 of Finnish Pinball League reached its halfway point yesterday, when third event of year was played at Hopeakuula association arcade in Kouvola.

33 players played in three qualification groups. Eventually all three qualification group winners and the winner of 2nd place qualifiers’ tiebreak met in the top four. The winner of the event was Hopeakuula staff member Ari Sovijärvi, who played really well throughout the day. Congratulations Ari! Top three players of the competition were:

1. Ari Sovijärvi (Kouvola)
2. Olli-Mikko Ojamies (Espoo)
3. Pekka Salmia (Helsinki)

Google Docs standings of the event can be found here and the overall standings of the league season here.

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Pinball in Finnish TV again!

Posted on April 4, 2013 by marble

Pinball was featured today in Finnish TV program Puoli seitsemän. The four-minute long clip was mainly about pinball and pinball artwork in general, but also about playing pinball. Some footage of playing from various angles was shown and I was interviewed shortly too. The best thing is that the newly opened public pinball bar location Extraball-pelihalli got some fame and hopefully will have new visitors in future.

The clip can be seen in YLE Areena: http://areena.yle.fi/tv/1849008?start=21m12s (unfortunately viewable in Finland only, I guess)

(edit: updated link with correct starting time, thanks Marco)

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Borås Pinball Classic Open 2013 results

Posted on February 25, 2013 by marble

Borås Pinball Classic Open 2013 was played last weekend in Borås, Sweden. Main tournament was played on classic machines and side tournament on modern machines. Also a split-flipper tournament was played on classic machines and there were some other smaller side tournaments too. The best players of divisions were (from Sweden unless other mentioned):

Main tournament
1. Christer Carlsson
2. Mats Holmqvist
3. Andreas Frid
4. Jörgen Holm

Side tournament
1. Jorian Engelbrektsson
2. Jörgen Holm
3. Olli-Mikko Ojamies (Finland)
4. Therese Lundgren

Split flipper
1. FIN (Olli-Mikko Ojamies & Janne Toukkari) (Finland)
2. WC (Claes Wikner & Christer Carlsson)
3. PIC (Per Ahlenius & Stefan Cederlöf)
4. DPE (Paul Jongma & Albert Nomden) (Netherlands)

Other side tournaments (not 100% sure about these, will correct later if wrong)
Set the high score (Eight Ball): Jörgen Holm
Set the high score (White Water): Mads Kristensen (Denmark)
One-handed play (The Amazing Spider-Man): Antti Peltonen (Finland)

I took a bunch of photos during the event so I’ll add a photo gallery later. Pinball News article written by Ad Jonker from the event should also follow.

Once again the Borås tournament was so much fun. Thanks Christian INK Holmsten for organizing the event!

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Further tournament plans

Posted on February 16, 2013 by marble

Pinball year 2013 hasn’t almost started yet, but there are plans for year 2014 already:

Pinburgh is one of the first tournaments to announce its exact dates for year 2014. According to PAPA blog the tournament will be held during late March 2014 (March 28-30).

At the same time on Europinball forum, the hosting country of European Pinball Championship 2014 has announced that EPC 2014 will be played in Italy during March 2014. Though the exact dates haven’t yet been announced, the weekend for EPC won’t be the same as Pinburgh. That is good news, since the pinball community really should’t never ever repeat the 2011 situation again, when EPC and Pinburgh were played during the same weekend.

It’s somehow bad that these two big tournaments will be played during the same month, but since the organizers of EPC have announced that the competition won’t be after 20th day of March, there should be at least two weeks between these competitions and enough time for anyone interested to arrange the trip to Pinburgh too after EPC.

Plans for EPC 2014 seem to be decided already, but it’s not entirely sure how EPC 2013 will be. After Hungary announced it’s incapability of arranging EPC 2013, it has been quite unsure if the competition will happen this year. Now it seems that Sweden will host the competition, but it’s still unsure whether the competition will be played in Stockholm or elsewhere (which would be most likely in Borås). Anyway EPC held in Sweden would be an awesome thing, since those guys really know how to put up a world class tournament. EPC 2007 in Stockholm was in my opinion still the best EPC that I’ve ever been to.

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Tournament plans for this spring

Posted on January 28, 2013 by marble

My tournament calendar is quite nicely booked for this spring. I’m planning to attend at least following tournaments:

K15 Match Race (February 9th in Helsinki, Finland)
First match-play tournament ever held in Finland! It took only 90 minutes to get the maximum number of 24 registered players.

Borås Pinball Classic Open (February 21-24 in Borås, Sweden)
Traditional Swedish tournament with main tournament and split flipper played on classics machines and a side tournament played on modern machines. The tournament director INK has really nice collection of games a such a great location to spend the weekend playing pinball. Over 100 players registered to the tournament which of 14 are from Finland!

Pinburgh 2013 (April 11-14 in Scott Township, PA, USA)
The greatest match-play tournament and for me the best tournament overall in the World. The number of participants is limited to 400 and it might well be that this limit will be reached. More than 300 players registered already within first couple of weeks of registration! Three Finnish players attending.

IFPA10 World Pinball Championship (May 31 – June 2 in Eschzell, Germany)
64 players based on their world ranking will be invited to participate in this tournament. 30 out of 40 possible country exemption spots have been filled and in total 75 players have committed to attend the tournament. This year you have to be well within top100 in overall rankings to get qualified to the tournament with your overall ranking. See the list of registered players here.

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