Date: May 31st - 1st June, 2014
Location: Club 1500m2, ul. Solec 18, 00-410 Warszawa, Poland

Report by David Mainwaring

This review takes us to the beautiful city of Warsaw and the Polish Pinball Open (PPO), one of the official 2014 IFPA European Championship Series events. This is their first main IFPA European Championship event. Can they make the grade?

Warsaw by night

Warsaw's old city square

After searching around for the venue, a fellow pinhead spotted my pinball T-Shirt, told us we were heading in the wrong direction and led us to the event.

The venue for the PPO

Please be aware that the place was very dark inside and full of winding rooms, resembling a cavern. So the pictures may not be of the usual quality.

Right, let’s get on with the report.

After the clinical and well air-conditioned office block of Nürnberg used for the German Pinball Open, we come to this Polish place full of character, culture and art.

My pass is good and the officials let me through!

Pinheads socialise with retro gaming freaks and relax in the sun with a cool beer -
they have plenty to talk about

The PPO was held as part of the Pixel Heaven retro gaming event.

Pixel Heaven - where retro video game guys and pinheads meet,
but am I a year too late?

If you like retro gaming you would be quite at home here in the main area,
which also hosted some interesting talks

Today’s schedule was very well organised, with a lot of work clearly put into the tickets and badges.

Pixel Heaven had great art and design work

A telephone call lasting the whole game of pinball -
“Yes Mum, I have packed clean under pants!”

Four of the eight practice machines which were overcrowded and often not working

Non-competition players were also playing the practice machines, which meant getting a game was quite difficult at times.

There should have been three Classic Tournament machines but Spirit of 76 was missing as it had been withdrawn before the start due to technical issues.

The Classics Tournament area

Later on, See Saw by Bally was also retired, making the Classics a one machine event with the top two scores winning the gold and silver trophies.

Here we have the Children’s and Team Tournament machines

Phantom of the Opera

Here are details of the machines used in each event and the free-play titles.

You can take a look around the Pixel Heaven event with my Eight Minute Tour video.

Back to the tournaments, and the winners in the Team event.

Team Tournament gold medal winners - Team Poland 2 (L-R):
Janek Nietrzebka, Marcin Dylewski, Jarek Nietrzebka

Team Tournament silver medal winners - Team Poland 1 (L-R):
Daniel Nowak, Alexander Żurkowski, Konrad Masłowski and Cezary Głowala

Team Tournament bronze medal winners - Team UK (L-R):
Kate Morris, Piotr Wiszniewski, Jim Lindsay and David Mainwaring

Team Tournament medal winners

Classics Tournament gold medal winner, Marcin Krysinski

Classics Tournament silver medal winner, Konrad Masłowski

The top two in the Classics Tournament

Main Tournament Rules:

Choose 8 of the 16 machines and play a single game on each. 32 points were awarded for top score on any particular machine, then 31 points for second and so on.

A joker was also available to replay any one of the machines that you had selected, and it would replace your old score whether higher or lower.

The top 32 scorers from the 72 entrants would qualify for the play-offs on Sunday.

Saturday at 10pm and the qualifying has finished, with the top 32 qualified players for tomorrow's play-offs highlighted in green

The play-offs used a double-elimination best-two-out-of-three bracket. Players who won advanced to the next level of the bracket, while the losers moved to the appropriate level on the loser bracket or were eliminated if they were already in the loser bracket

Players that reach the final of the winners bracket advance to the final. Only the winner of the loser bracket advanced to the final. The loser of the final of loser bracket ended in fourth place in the overall tournament results.

These last three went through to the final which was played on four machines chosen by the judges. Those machines were Scared Stiff, Metallica, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Mustang. The winner of each game scored 7 points, second place got 5 and last place got 3 points.

The score display for the final

The final scores were:

Bronze medal winner, Laszlo Horn

Silver medal winner, Daniel Nowak

Two long days of playing pinball pays off as David Mainwaring collects his trophy - Yes, it’s me! :-)

Polish Pinball Open gold medal winner, David Mainwaring

The top three in the PPO 2014

The winners with the organisers

Warsaw is a hidden Gem of Europe. Friendly, warm people and great food with fantastic buildings and architecture. The Venue was full of character and the event was overall well-organised with plenty of space to sit outside in the hot sun and drink a few cold alcoholic beverages.

We especially liked the way the main event was run from a magnetic board with the machines' names on. You could grab a machine name off the board if available, walk up to the machine and await a referee to put a credit on the selected machine for you. This stopped any kind of cheating and made things run very smoothly and kept non-players out of the tournament area.

Some of the Williams/Bally machines, although fully functional and playing fine, did feel a little slow and looked tired.

The Team Tournament ran as advertised with only a few minor delays. Although the Classics Tournament went down to just one machine, they did everything they could to keep it rolling.

From the amount of detail on the flyers, tickets, badges and other official artwork you could see a lot of work was put in.

Is this one to come back to next year? Yes, it’s a great place and I felt at home the whole time I was here. And I will be back to defend my championship! :-)

© Pinball News 2014