Season 17 ended on March 14 with Danny Clark winning the double-elimination playoff and Dan Nelson taking home the B division trophy. Ten people qualified to play in the top division and the tournament wrapped up shortly before midnight, helped out by Danny going straight through the winner bracket to victory and sweeping Derik in the final match.
The league voted to continue using the new rule, adopted last season, that allows each player to choose the same game only once during the entire tournament. This required everyone to choose their games carefully, either using their best games early on to avoid an early knockout or saving them for harder rounds later. In the final match, as the lower seed, Danny ended up not getting any game choices. Derik chose the first game, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and then after a loss, chose Indiana Jones, which Danny also triumphed on.
In the B division finals, Dan battled out of the loser bracket to a second round against Jake, winning four straight games in the process. The score sheet for their first round must have been filled out by Jake since the winner on The Beatles is listed as “Fucking Dan!” and the winner on Tales of the Arabian Nights is recorded as “FUCKING DAN!”
Third place in the A division went to Tim, and in the B division it went to new player Mark Cutler, taking home hardware in his very first league season. Last season’s champion Mike, hampered by having missed a few qualifying seassions, went in as the #6 seed and finished fourth, defeated by Derik.
We also gave out a few end-of-season awards (or “awards”), including the Best Game award, given to the player with the score highest above the night’s average on a specific game, which Danny won with a Deadpool score of 617 million. Mark won the Most Improved award, given to the player whose scores showed the strongest upward trend across the season, and Bryan won the Worst Game award for the score furthest below the average for the night. The score that secured Bryan the coveted “LOSER” ribbon was 382 million on Attack from Mars.
In order to avoid blocking any games that might be chosen for finals, the consolation tournament was held on The Flip Side, the miniature American Girl pinball machine. I won, not surprising since I’ve had a lot of chances to practice it.
That closes the books on Season 17, but we do have our traditional post-season tournament, Super-Ball XVII, the split-flipper tournament. That will be tonight and Prime Time Awards has supplied beautiful (and splendidly cheesy) trophies for us so I am hoping a lot of people turn out for the competition.