| STOCKHOLM OPEN PINBALL
TOURNAMENT
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Story dated
April 12, 2005
The Stockholm Open Pinball Tournament was founded over a year ago, to celebrate the first year of the local pinhead community – stockholmpinball.com. This year the organizers aimed for more than just a local celebration tournament – the Stockholm Open should be an international event attracting pinball players from around the world. In this, they succeeded. The vast majority of the players were of course Swedes, but there was also registered players from Finland, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, the United States and Namibia (!).
The tournament was scheduled to begin at 5pm on Friday April 1st (no, this is not a joke!). Due to some computer troubles the gates didn't open until one and a half hours later. By then all the players were located in the bar and ready to play as a cattle herd about to stampede. It got pretty hectic in the beginning with so many people wanting to play and a little too few scorekeepers. More people volunteered to do some score keeping though, and the tournament was soon up and running. The first qualification day ended around 1am , Saturday morning. At 9am the gates opened up again for the second half of qualification. At 2pm no more entries were sold and the waiting for the final rank began as the last scores were registered. The qualification format was entry-based. Three free entries were included in the participant fee and every player was entitled to buy at most five more entries in the qualification.
Each entry consisted of three different games (from a bank of 25 different titles). The scores on each machine were ranked and points from 100 down to 1 were given to the top 40. The combined points for the three games in the entry made up that entry's score, and the 32 players with the highest scores made it into the finals. The finals system was double elimination (more or less). The top 16 players got into the A-side of the bracket, places 17-32 started on the B-side. Eight head-to-head matches (best of 3 games) were played on each side. The losers on the B-side were eliminated from the tournament; the winners on B met the losers on A in another round, and the winners from A stayed on the A-side. (A very comprehensive picture is to be found at http://www.stockholmopen.nu/images/SO-finals2.gif ) Even though all the machines were set on tournament mode - no extra balls, maximum outlanes, strict tilt etc - we saw some respectable scoring in the qualification. Jörgen Holm's 5B on ST:TNG, Fredrik Lindberg's 5.1B on No Fear, Victor Håkansson's 161M on LotR and, of course, Chris Newsom's 173M on TSPP were all impressive.
Also impressive was Stefan Andersson's sole entry, late on Friday night. Stefan is on the organizing team and has done most of the programming, both scoring system and web site. He has also helped with the moving and adjustment of pinball machines for the tournament. Even so, he registered one entry that made fourth place in the qualification rank after reaching #2 on Dr, Who, #3 on The Shadow and #5 on Star Trek:TNG! But there was more to come… The good playing continued into the finals (and why shouldn't it, these were all the best players around?) with some really good games. Stefan Andersson lost a set on TSPP to Henrik Olaisson with 28M - 54M. Reidar Spets managed to get 3B+ on a regular multiball on his last ball of the decisive AFM game over Jorian Engelbrektsson.
The non-Swedes in the tournament made quite an impression. Of the 32 players making it into the finals, 10 were from abroad: 3 Americans, 3 Germans, 2 Dutch, 1 Belgian and 1 Dane. The highest placed non-Swede in the qualification was the former PAPA world championship division champion Albert Nomden. Peter van den Bergh, who ended on fourth place in the tournament, was the best placed foreigner after the finals. The final on the A-side stood between Jörgen IFK Holm and Stefan FEZ Andersson. FEZ won 2-0 and was guaranteed a place in the “grand finale”. Jörgen got a second chance of reaching the final in a meeting with B-side winner (and reigning SO champion) Fredrik FL Lindberg, who had dismissed Peter van den Bergh in the B-side final. IFK showed why he is the reigning Swedish champion and won 2-0, to be head-to-head (again!) against FEZ in the grand finale.
The first match of the final was on Addams. FEZ stayed on 119M and IFK had “only” to get 50M for a 1-0 lead. He didn't do it, even though he had both regular and quick multiball going, and FEZ had the upper hand going into the second match, on Corvette. No favourite game of any of the players, but FEZ still managed to get 600M+ after two balls. IFK struggled to get his multiball going, but things weren't just rolling his way today. His second lock wasn't registered since the ball got stuck in the motor, and shortly after getting the stuck ball served on the plunger, he lost it.
Stefan FEZ Andersson was the new champion of Stockholm Open! Congratulations!
Apart from the trophy Stefan also won a trip to either the European Pinball Championships in The Netherlands or PAPA 8 in the USA including entry and hotels. He chose the PAPA trip and will be competing there in August.
Successful Mini-Tournaments Thanks to Rolph Ericson for the report. Aside from the main Stockholm Open tournament there were a few mini-tournaments going on.
The mini tournaments were:
A lot of players tried their luck on Saturday between 14.00-20.00 when the qualifications were running. Reversed flippers and blindfolded were two really difficult mini-tournaments. To qualify for the finals in the Reversed Flippers tournament some poor (during normal circumstances) 11M was required on Cirqus Voltaire. 10M on LOTR was enough to get into the blindfolded finals. In the one-handed mini-tournament Fredrik FL Lindström got a pretty impressive 354M game during the qualifications. The doubles qualifications attracted a lot of players, and very nice scores on CV and Dr Who. The finals in the Reversed Flippers was played between Anders ACE Carlsson and Mats MCR Runsten. Anders won the finals and got all the eternal Reversed Flippers glory. The finals in the Blindfolded tournament was played between Per APB Holknekt and Linus SP Jorenbo. Per won this final, quite easily. The doubles finals was played between Magnus LIX Rostö/Jörgen BOT Boström vs. Reidar LEL Spets/ Joakim ACE Stork. Magnus and Jörgen won this final. Fredrik FL Lindström played against Chris CLN Newsom in the one-handed finals with Fredrik coming out the winner. A full list of all the placings can be found on the Stockholm Open website at:
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© Pinball News 2005 |
