Date: March 28th - 30th, 2014
Location: Embassy Suites Dallas-Frisco, 7600 John Q Hammond Drive, Frisco, TX 75034, USA.

Additional photography by Ken Kemp

Welcome to the final part of our Texas Pinball Festival coverage.

Sunday at the show is a shorter day to allow vendors and machine donors time to pack up and return home at a sensible hour.

And speaking of vendors, let's take a look at who had booths at the show over the course of the three days.

Starting in one of ths side rooms, Rob Anthony's Pinball Classics had their regular selection of pinball parts, mods and while-you-wait board repairs.

Pinball Classics' room

Back in the main hall, Multimorphic were demonstrating the latest advances with their P³ pinball platform

Mezel Mods had a Metallica machine to showcase their range of pinball mods

Wizard Enterprises had a wide range of illuminated pinball plastics and artwork

Arcade Factory brought a selection of pristine video games

Starship Fantasy had teamed up with Classic Playfield Reproductions to offer an impressive range of NOS and reproduction playfields, backglasses and plastics

Farsight Studios had a big screen version of their The Pinball Arcade

The Game Preserve had a DeLorean parked in front of their stand
to go with the Back to the Future game

Rottendog Amusements had their regular selection of replacement pinball circuit boards available to purchase

The Houston Arcade Expo team were here to promote their show in November

This vendor's stand had numerous marquees, manuals and spare parts

CoinTaker had their regular brightly-lit stand selling a multitude of LEDs

Pinball Side Mirrors were also brightly-illuminated with their in-cabinet mirrors and custom game parts

Elevation Games had once again brought a large number of machines to the TPF

Marco Specialties were, once again, flying the flag for Stern,
as well as selling a selection of their own parts

Pinball Swag had a number of branded pinball parts and apparel

Fast Pinball (previously SkillShot Pinball) were answering questions about their
new board system and tie-up with Planetary Pinball Supply

Nifty LED had a large stand to sell their LED wares

Flip N Out Pinball were showing their Escalera stair-climbing pinball lifter

Bob Herbison was showing a trio of EM machines,
although one sold before we got to take our picture

ModMyPin were showcasing their glow-in-the-dark and fluorescent-coloured balls

Pinballz Arcade were tempting people to visit their Austin location

Kimball's Pinball's had machines to play and were selling illuminated speaker kits, LEDs and speaker panel decals

X-Pin had a large display of their displays and circuit boards
to the left of the main doors

X-Pin also had a free prize draw for a colour LED -
X-Pin's Brett Davis presents the prize to the lucky winner

For those who missed out on the free draw, there was a charity raffle running throughout the show. Tickets for this cost $5 or you could get 5 tickets for $20. Door prizes were drawn every hour, with the main prize being drawn at 2:30pm on Sunday.

Tickets were placed in a red drum for drawings every hour throughout the show

Winning ticket numbers were posted for winners to claim their prizes

The winning numbers and their associated prizes

Proceeds from the raffle went to the Wounded Warrior Project, while the main prize was a brand new Star Trek Pro machine.

The winning ticket is picked

The winner of the Star Trek was Jared Parker

Over in the tournament area, things appeared a little quieter than usual. This may have been due to the holding of Pinburgh on the same weekend which absorbed 400 tournament players, or maybe the games were just concluded faster than normal.

The tournament area

As usual, the TPF had a wide range of tournaments - nine in total - and competitive play began even before the show opened to the public with qualifying in the main tournaments starting at 2pm on the Friday.

There were four main tournaments - Texas Shoot-Out, Texas Tilt, Classic, and Electromechanical. Their results from these four events combined to give a player an overall ranking which was used to determine qualification for the Texas State Championship.

Results were displayed by a projector which called for good eyesight to read.

The top players

Fortunately, results were also available on the pinballtourneys.com website for those with smartphones, tablets or laptops.

Qualification for the EM tournament started at 2pm on Friday and continued until 5pm on Saturday. The Classics ran an hour longer, finishing at 6pm, while the Texas Tilt's qualifying closed at 7pm and the Texas Shoot Out's at 8pm. Each tournament had three divisions of play: A, B & C with the top 8 qualifiers automatically being allocated to the A division, the next 8 to B and the next 8 to C. Players in the top 100 IFPA rankings could only qualify in A, so if they were placed below 8th they were eliminated from the tournament.

The results from each division in the four tournaments are available at the pinballtourneys.com site.

The earlier ending of the qualifying rounds caught out some players but avoided the problems from last year when play continued through Saturday night, giving players just a couple of hours break before Sunday's rounds began again.

The first round of play-offs in each tournament began 30 minutes after the end of qualifying with the 1st, 4th, 5th and 8th playing in one round and the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th playing in the other in 4-player matches. The winner of each match went into the final, while the remaining players were re-mixed into two 3-player games where the winners also joined the final.

Play-offs in the Texas Shoot Out

Each division in each tournament had its own play-offs and finals, and the results from the four main tournaments combined to give players an overall ranking for the Texas State Championship.

The same format was then used to decide the winners of this overall title.

We'll be back to update this article with the tournament winners, so check back shortly as we wrap up our coverage of the Texas Pinball Festival 2014.

© Pinball News 2014