Winter League at Eighteen Twenty Lounge
Happy New Year Space City Pinball! We hope everyone had a great holiday season and 2018. Our next 2019 mini season is coming up. We will again be playing at Eighteen Twenty Lounge next to Joystix on Monday evenings starting at 7 pm. We will have 4 qualifying weeks and a 5th week for finals. Will will need to take a week break between week 4 and 5 due to scheduling at the location. We can’t wait to see everyone again! Planning to win it all? Look over the list of past league champions to check out the competition.
Below are the dates:
Jan 14
Jan 21
Jan 28
Feb 4
Feb 18 (finals)
Project Pinball
This fall Space City Pinball League has teamed up with The Game Preserve Arcade to raise funds for Project Pinball charity. Our November Monthly Matchplay tournament will include a high-score side tournament on Houdini, which costs $1/play to support Project Pinball. SCPL will provide prizes for the top players. The league also hosted a Critical Hit tournament in August. Twenty-six players battled it out beginning with a card auction to shatter scores with invulnerability spells and confuse opponents by switching games and groups. Congratulations to Fred Revnew, David Pollock, and Elizabeth Dronet for using their “special powers” to dominate the day.
Through both financial donations and volunteer repair work, Project Pinball has placed nearly 40 pinball machines in children’s hospitals across the United States. They are currently working towards purchasing a pinball machine for Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. So far, $4000 has been raised, which is 50% of the goal! If you would like to contribute, visit http://projectpinball.org/donate.
Space City Open
And that’s a wrap! The Space City Open results are posted on IFPA. Go check out your WPPR haul! Congrats to Preston Moncla for taking the crown. Hell of a finals!
https://www.ifpapinball.com/tournaments/view.php?t=26670
The Space City Open was truly a community effort. Thank you to everyone who brought games and those who lended their technical expertise to keep the games running. You can’t have a tournament without games, and you all stepped up and provided.
Finally, big thanks to Keith Christensen, Erich Stinson and the rest of the Houston Arcade & Pinball Expo crew for your infrastructural support throughout the weekend!
2nd Phil Grimaldi
3rd Allen Robertson
2nd Eric Fisher
3rd Chris Doyle
4th Frankie Griffin
1st Jessica Shepherd
2nd Lisa Shore
3rd Miette D.
4th Kelly Moncla
Fall League at Eighteen Twenty Lounge
The 2018 Fall League schedule is locked down! We’ll be doing a short “mini” season this time around with four weeks of qualifying plus finals. You must attend at least two weeks to qualify for finals, and we’ll use your three best weeks (i.e., one drop week) . This is (probably) only a temporary change. We weren’t able to get the season scheduled earlier, and there isn’t enough time to do another long season without bleeding into the holidays.
We’ll do another mini season in early 2019 as well. After that we’ll probably return to our 8 week seasons.
Chris Palis will be taking over as Tournament Director while former director Erich Stinson raises a child.
Dates:
22 October
29 October
5 Nov
12 Nov
19 Nov (playoff)
The competition begins at 7pm.
Space City Open at the 2018 Houston Arcade Expo
The SCPL will be hosting the Space City Open on October 19-20, 2018 at the Houston Arcade Expo! The tournament will be a two-day, matchplay tournament. Players will be placed in groups of four, and compete on both modern and classic machines. The full rules and format can be found here.
The League Welcomes New Board Members!
Space City Pinball League is excited to welcome new leadership! These board members will work together to promote the growth and expansion of the league in Houston and the surrounding area.
- 1820 Director: Erich Stinson will organize the seasonal weekly league meetings.
- The Game Preserve Monthly Director: Marc Gammons will oversee the monthly matchplay events.
- The Game Preserve Weekly Director: David Pollock will run the Three Strikes Tuesday tournaments.
- EinStein’s Monthly Director: Matt Quanz will supervise EinStein’s Drainiacs.
- Belles & Chimes Houston Director: Elizabeth Dronet will lead the Belles of Space City women’s tournaments and socials.
- Chief Financial Officer: Chris Palis
- Marketing and Communications Director: Phil Grimaldi
For more information about the league visit the Events and Calendar section of the website, join our Facebook group, or follow us on Instagram. Additionally, scheduled tournaments are published on the IFPA calendar.
Space City Pinball Gives Harvey Relief!
Hurricane Harvey brought unprecedented floods and destruction to the city of Houston. Nearly 200,000 homes are estimated to have been damaged or destroyed, including those of members in the Houston arcade and pinball community.
For this reason, the 2017 Houston Arcade Expo pinball tournament was held as a charity fundraising event where tournament entry fees were waived for any family whose home was flooded during the storm. Additionally, the Space City Pinball League donated tournament entry fees to the Greater Houston Community Foundation and to support Allen Robertson and his family, who suffered a catastrophic loss of their home. The league offers their gratitude for all those who participated in the event and to the Bat City Pinball Club in Austin for their sizable contribution.
The Fall 2017 Season Starts September 11!
The best beer league in Houston will be returning for its 6th season at the Eighteen Twenty Lounge on September 11, 2017. There will be an 8 week season, followed by finals.
The Space City Pinball League offers friendly competition for players across a wide range of skill levels, from complete newbie to seasoned star. Our host, the Eighteen Twenty Lounge, provides a fresh array of new games each week. The league is a great opportunity to meet new friends, learn the rules to the latest games, and pick up some sweet flipper skills.
If you are interested in learning more about the league, please email phil@spacecitypinball.com or visit us on facebook! The full schedule can be found on our Calendar page. 
An Empirical Evaluation of the IFPA Endorsement Fee
The purpose of this analysis is to provide a data driven perspective on the impact of the IFPA’s recent announcement to charge $1.00/per player for every tournament submission. My approach was to examine the 2016 calendar year as a proxy for determining the impact in future years. The data for this analysis was obtained directly from the IFPA via their API. Analysis code and data files are available at my github repository. Readers are encouraged to report errors by contacting me directly or by submitting a pull request in github.
The full report can be viewed here.
