How to scout a pinball tournament before you walk in
A ten-minute routine for turning tournament stats into machine picks: check the lineup, find your strong games, look up your group, and run the scouting report.
·2 min read·Tilt Stats
Match play nights are decided by machine picks as much as by flipper skills. When the choice is yours, choosing a game where you hold an edge over the rest of your group is free points. Everything you need to make that call is on this site, and the routine below takes about ten minutes.
1. Check what is on the floor
Start on the venues page and open the place you are playing. For venues linked to Pinball Map, the lineup follows the Pinball Map listing, so it tracks what is in the building now, including games that arrived since your last visit. The same page lists past tournaments at the venue, which tells you the usual format and how many players to expect.
2. Find your strong machines
Open your profile from the players page and go to the All machines tab. Every machine you have played in a tracked tournament is there with three numbers:
- Score: a rating from 0 to 1 built from every pairwise result on that machine and weighted by IFPA standing. 0.5 is average.
- Win rate: how often you finished first.
- Finish spread: how your 1st through 4th place finishes are distributed.
Sort by score and note the machines that are in tonight's lineup. Check the game count next to each one before you trust it.
A 0.70 score over 25 games is a pick. A 0.90 score over 2 games is a coin flip with good memories attached.
3. Look up the people in your group
Once groups are posted, the head-to-head tool shows your record against any player, along with an estimated win probability and how you both did against common opponents. The Opponents tab on your profile holds the same records for everyone you have faced, which is quicker when you only want to know who has your number.
4. Run the scouting report
The scouting report does the comparison for you. Pick the venue, yourself, and up to three opponents. It returns two lists:
| List | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pick these | Machines where you hold the edge over the group. Positive edge. |
| Avoid or ban these | Machines where someone in the group is stronger than you. Negative edge. |
Recommendations only use the venue's recent lineup, so it never tells you to pick a game that left last month.
5. Read the machine page for the game you picked
Each machine page has a Playbook tab with strategy notes and tutorial videos, and a Scores tab with the best scores on record. Two minutes there before you plunge is a better warm-up than staring at the rule card.
During the event
Tournament pages update live while an event runs: standings, the current round, and where the finals cutoff sits. If you are near the line late in qualifying, that is the page to keep open.
The short version
- Check the venue lineup.
- Note your best machines that are on the floor.
- Look up your group.
- Run the scouting report and write down two picks.
- Skim the playbook for those two games.
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