Before you plunge: everything a pinball machine page can tell you

You have two minutes before your group is called. You know which machine you are on. What is the single most valuable thing you could be doing with those two minutes?

Not staring at the rule card, which is a list of shots with no indication of which ones matter. The machine page is better, and it takes about ninety seconds to read properly.

We keep one for every game that has appeared in a tracked event, which is currently somewhere north of 260 machines across the state. Start at the machines directory or search the game's name in the nav bar, which is faster.

The overview: who runs this game, and who it eats

The default tab is performance, and it is a leaderboard for that one machine. Best players by machine score on the left, worst on the right, each with their IFPA rank, games played on the game, win rate and finish spread.

Two ways to use it.

Looking yourself up tells you where you sit on a game you are about to play, with a game count attached so you know how much evidence is behind it.

Looking up the room is the sneakier one. If three of the six strongest players on this machine are in the building tonight, it is a machine you would rather not have picked for you.

There is also a venues section listing every room the machine has appeared in, with first-seen and last-seen dates and game counts. Handy for the frequent question of where else you can practice a game before a big event, and for spotting that the copy you have been practicing on has actually moved.

Upset rate, which is the stat to learn

Each machine carries an upset rate: how often the lower-ranked player in a pairing beats the higher-ranked one. It is the best single-number description of a machine's character that exists in our data.

A low upset rate means the game rewards skill consistently. Long ball times, rules that pay for knowing them, few catastrophic drains. The favourite usually wins. If you are the strongest player in your group, this is your pick.

A high upset rate means the game is a coin flip with flippers attached. Brutal outlanes, short games, a big jackpot anybody can stumble into. If you are the underdog in your group, this is the game you want, and if you are the favourite, it is the one to ban.

The records page keeps a biggest-upsets board, ranked by the gap in IFPA rank between the winner and the loser, which is a fun read and also a decent way to spot which machines keep turning up in the list.

Average game length, which matters more than it looks

We also show how long a game typically runs on that machine, worked out from the timestamps on actual tournament games. It feeds into a composite difficulty measure alongside the upset rate.

Length is strategically relevant for two reasons. Long games grind, and in a four-round night a group stuck on a twelve-minute machine is a group that plays fewer games and enjoys them less. And long games favour the player who knows the ruleset, because there is time for that knowledge to pay off. Short games favour whoever gets a good bounce.

The records page has a marathon board for the genuinely absurd ones.

The scores tab: four sources, one board

The Scores tab collects every score we know about on the machine, from four different places:

• Tournament games played here, with the player and the event.
• Self-logged scores, which any signed-in player can add from their own page.
• Stern Insider Connected, for players who have connected their IC account, which pulls in scores from every Insider-enabled Stern they play.
• Pindingo, the flippd.gg score-tracking service, for players who have linked that.

The result is a genuine high-score board for the state on a given machine rather than a tournament-only list, which was always an odd thing to call a high score board given tournament games are three balls played under pressure.

If you want your scores on it, signing in with your Match Play account at /signin gets you a personal page where you can connect Insider Connected and Pindingo and log scores by hand.

The playbook tab: how to actually play it

This is the tab to open in those two minutes. It collects:

Written strategy notes, where somebody has added them, covering what to shoot first and what to leave alone.

Tutorial videos, embedded, which is the single fastest way to learn a ruleset you have never seen. Watching two minutes of someone explaining the main mode beats twenty minutes of discovering it by accident.

Player tips pulled live from PinTips, which is a crowd-sourced collection of one-line pieces of advice, sorted by votes. The quality varies and the best ones are gold.

Rulesheet links out to the main community resources, so you are one click from the deep version when you want it.

A short read on how the machine behaves competitively, generated from its own games: how many recorded games it has and where, how long a game tends to run, and how often the better-ranked player loses on it. This part is written from the data rather than by a person, so it exists even for machines nobody has written notes for.

A few examples worth a look if you want to see the shape of it: Godzilla, Jurassic Park, JAWS, Iron Maiden, Attack From Mars and Metallica.

The old games deserve attention too

Something the data makes obvious: the most-played machines in Minnesota tournament pinball are not all modern. Eight Ball Deluxe has more recorded tournament games than anything else on the site. Comet, Paragon, Hot Tip and Sinbad are all near the top of the list, and several of those are electromechanicals or early solid states.

If you are new to competitive play and have spent your practice time on the newest Sterns, that is a real gap. The older games have short rulesets and long-established strategy, which means the gap between knowing them and not knowing them is mostly about plunge technique, nudging and knowing which lanes matter. It closes fast if you put an hour in. And the upset rates on some of them are high enough that they are genuinely good picks when you are the underdog.

The recent games tab

Last one: a log of the latest completed games on that machine, each showing the finishing order with scores. It is the raw material behind everything else, and it is useful when you want to know what a competitive score on this game looks like tonight rather than in theory. Knowing that 40 million wins most groups is worth more than knowing the machine's all-time record.

Putting it together

The two-minute routine, in order:

1. Playbook tab, skim the tips, watch thirty seconds of video if you do not know the game.
2. Check the upset rate. Decide whether you want variance or not.
3. Check the recent games for what a winning score looks like.
4. Look up yourself and the other three on the leaderboard if the pick is still open.

Step four is the one worth automating, and the Scout page does it for the whole lineup at once. The scouting walkthrough covers that routine, and the ratings explainer covers what the scores on these pages are built from. More on the blog index.