How to follow a pinball tournament live, and how to put it on a stream

The worst part of a long tournament is the twenty minutes between finishing your round and finding out whether it was good enough. Somebody has a laptop open at the front. The standings screen at the venue is behind by a round. You end up doing arithmetic on the back of a score sheet, badly.

Every event we track has a page that updates while it runs, and on a phone it is considerably better than the arithmetic.

What a live tournament page shows

Pull up the event from the tournament directory, where anything in progress carries a live badge, or find it through the search box in the nav. A running event opens on the round view; a finished one opens on standings.

Standings is the obvious one, and it has the detail that matters most mid-event: the playoff cut line, drawn in the right place for the event's format. Sitting two points outside the cut with a round to go is a different mental state from sitting comfortably inside it, and you should know which one you are in before you pick your next machine. There is also a toughest-draws list, which is the polite way of finding out whether you have had a rough schedule or have simply been playing badly.

Rounds is laid out the way Match Play lays it out, which means it reads like the sheet at the front of the room. One card per group per round. Players down the side, the round's games across the top, each cell showing your play order for that game and the points you took from it, with the pinball score itself in the tooltip. Machine names are linked, so you can jump straight to a machine page from the group you are about to play. A progress bar shows how far through a round each group is, which answers the "are we waiting on anybody" question without walking around the room.

On a phone it scrolls sideways with the player column pinned, so you can keep your own row visible.

Games groups every completed game under its round heading, with the machine and the full finishing order including pinball scores.

Bracket appears for single and double elimination events, drawing the tree one column per round, with match scores, the winner in bold, seeds, and the machine where the crowd filled one in. Byes name the player who sat out. Double eliminations show the elimination side below. It is the view that makes a knockout event comprehensible to somebody who was not there.

Players lists the field, and before an event starts the details view carries a forecast of how it is likely to go, based on the registered field.

WPPR estimates the ranking points the event will pay, which is explained in full in the WPPR post.

How live the live pages actually are

Worth being specific about, because "live" gets used loosely.

The site holds an open connection to Match Play for the duration of an event rather than polling every minute, so a result entered by the organizer reaches the page in seconds. New rounds appear as soon as they are posted. Deleted games, added or renamed machines and late sign-ups all come through too. If your phone loses signal in a basement bar, reconnecting pulls in everything that happened while you were dark instead of quietly missing it.

The timestamp on the page counts from the last time we checked with Match Play, not the last time something changed, so a page that says "updated a few seconds ago" is current even if nothing has happened for ten minutes.

Qualifier and finals as one event

Plenty of events are run as a qualifier plus a separate finals, which on Match Play means two tournaments. We link the pair, either automatically or by hand, and the tournament page shows the relationship both ways. There is a compare view that puts the two standings tables side by side, so you can see who qualified where and how they finished, which is where you discover that the person who scraped in eighth won the whole thing.

For ranking purposes the two halves get merged into one field before the points estimate, because that is how IFPA treats them.

Sharing an event

Each tournament page has a share box that produces a printable card: the event name, the venue, and a large QR code pointing at the page. Print it, or throw it on a screen at the venue, and everybody in the room can get to live standings on their own phone without anybody typing a URL.

The card is built to stay useful, so it holds the name and the code rather than a snapshot of the standings, which would be wrong within about four minutes.

Putting stats on a stream

If you broadcast your events, there is a Stream Deck plugin that is worth the ten minutes of setup.

It works like this. You tell it which tournament you are covering and which machine is on camera. The plugin follows whichever group is playing on that machine, and its buttons fill with that group's players. Press a button and a stat block slides up over the bottom of your scene in OBS:

• The players in the game, with their ranks and how they have done on this machine.
• The matchup, the head-to-head record between them, the same data as the head-to-head page.
• The machine favourite, who the numbers like on this game.
• The standings, with the finals cut line drawn in.

Press the same button again and it hides. The overlay is a transparent browser source with no page furniture, so it sits over your scene cleanly, and it takes a scale parameter for whatever resolution you stream at.

The practical effect is that a commentator can bring up "these two have played each other thirty-one times and it is 16-15" at the moment it is relevant, which is the difference between a broadcast and a camera pointed at a machine. Install instructions, the full button list and the download are on the Stream Deck page.

After the event

Results land on everybody's player profile within minutes: the finish goes into the results tab, the games feed the machine scores, the recent-form strip updates, and the ratings move on the next sync.

The Pulse page picks it up in the weekly summary, with results from the last few days, the machines that got the most play, the upsets, and who is climbing. The records page catches anything that belongs on an all-time board. And if the event was big enough to move the state race, it shows up on the rankings page.

Related reading: where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota, how to scout an event before you walk in, and what the ratings on your profile mean. Everything else is on the blog index.