Date: 27th September, 2014
Location: Pinballseye, Göteborgsvägen 10, Borås, Sweden.

Report by David Mainwaring

Borås in Sweden is located approximately 70km east of the country's second largest city, Gothenburg. After a fifty minute journey from Gothenburg Airport in a hire car, we finally arrived at Pinballseye - our destination - and were greeted by a number of fellow players, including Mats Runsten.

Matts outside the venue

On arrival, there were plenty of sweets, chocolates and fresh fruit available to keep the energy levels up.

Energy food

In addition there was a variety of cold soft drinks and energy drinks to be had.

Coke, Pepsi, Fanta, energy drinks and water at 10kr ($1.30, €1.10, £0.86)

Can you name the 3 playfields on the wall?

Pinballseye is located in the basement of an office block and has over eighty machines to play!

A smaller room contained another ten machines

Machines in the side room

The main tournament format had four groups (A-D) with 30-36 players per group. Each group was assigned four machines to play; two dot matrix, one alphanumeric and one electromechanical.

Players could play ten games split over the four machines, but couldn't play any one machine more than four times. The best scores were ranked and the top eight from each group went through to the next round.

The central scoring desk where all the results were collected and entered

These thirty-two qualifiers were then split into eight groups of four and assigned a new group of machines to play with four points awarded for a win, two points for second and one for third. If anyone won two games they went through to the next round, and if they lost two games the were out, which helped speed things up a little.

These final sixteen were again split into groups of four, and this continued until the final four were decided.

This bank of monitors displayed all the scores during qualifying

There were also many side-tournaments such as a high score competition on Stern's Star Trek. Entries were 10kr each and the winner would take home half the takings.

High score competition on Star Trek

Other side Competitions included one-handed pinball on Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar where you had two attempts to try and achieve a good score with the top 50% going through to the final, and a split-flipper competition with two players having one flipper each.

There were several other high score competitions also available.

Fancy a quick game of air hockey?

GTI Club is one of my favourite driving games, so we managed to fire her up and try her out for a few games

Lots more pinballs to play too

Lots of thirsty people but all the rubbish was sorted and ready to be recycled

You can check out the Pinballseye facility in our exclusive Eight Minute Tour.

The main tournament is well underway. Let’s get ready to rumble!

Marcin takes a break

Play-offs for the main and side tournaments continued on paper

The main tournament enters the last few rounds

Christian, Lucasz and Mats kick off the last eight of the main tournament

Christian Holmsten gathering medals for the winners

In the main tournament is was a repeat win for Mats Runsten (MCR) who took the top spot for the third time. It was the third time for second-placed Per Ahlenius (PER) too, while Marcus Hugosson (MSH) was third and Tommy Andersson (JT) was fourth for the second time.

In fact, the first, second and fourth places were identical to last year's Borås Pinball Open.

In the side tournaments, Christian Holmsten and Jörgen Thornander won the split-flipper competition.

(L-R) Marcus Hugosson (MSH), Per Ahlénius (PER), Olli-Mikko Ojamies (OMO), Timo Valkonen (TTV), Jörgen Thornander (MOS) & Christian Holmsten (INK)

Pinballseye was a very nice location situated in the basement of an office block. Christian Holmsten did a fantastic job of hosting and running this event. The machines were very well maintained with very little in the way of malfunctions during the whole weekend.

We were also very lucky to have shorts and T-shirt weather during the weekend, although on Sunday night the heavens opened to the rain. The pinball played was to a very high standard, and there were no easy matches!

This is one to watch out for next time as I thoroughly enjoyed the whole event.

© Pinball News 2014