When bunny_hugger was finally knocked out of the Women's North American Championship Series, we had a couple hours. We spent some of it sitting together and being amazed at just how great she had done, and then figured to go get coffee and maybe a snack before the next event. That would be the Satellite Target Matchplay, a women's-only tournament starting ( Read more... )

When the third round --- the Round of 16, they called it --- bunny_hugger and AMK disappeared to somewhere within the competition aisle. I went back to the stuff I'd been doing (more on that below) and occasionally checked in on the Matchplay brackets. These, the people running the Women's North American Championship Series tried to keep up to date at least ( Read more... )

Second round, to the delight of everyone except the people who lost in the first round. bunny_hugger now faces the Delaware representative. She's not from Delaware; she's from Washington, DC. But it's easy to get ranked in multiple states around there, and with the district not having enough of a women's pinball scene to send a representative to the Women' ( Read more... )

So bunny_hugger's first round would be against the New Jersey champion and ... oh, would I love to give you the game-by-game results. But as a non-competitor, I wasn't allowed back into the one aisle (of three) reserved for the Women's North American Championship Series. There was a streaming rig set up, and people for a Ypsilanti pinball podcast (``No Fun ( Read more... )

Despite my trouble with the law, bunny_hugger got into the Wizard's World on time and paid her $20 entry fee. There were a couple surprises in the morning announcements. Some of them were the ones we'd expect, a couple games being swapped out because they were behaving flakily the night before. One that was very welcome: a donor was putting a couple ( Read more... )

Our leisurely waking and breakfast-getting Friday threatened to be cut short when bunny_hugger realized she wasn't sure: did the tournament starting at 10 am mean she had to be at the venue by then, or was that when the first round was to start and she had to be there and check in before 10 am, the way state championships required? And she couldn't find the ( Read more... )

On with the Thursday night tournament. For round 5, bunny_hugger was set on Harlem Globetrotters, a late-70s table that chimes a little of ``Sweet Georgia Brown'' when you start it up. Despite the table's charms and its being of exactly her era, she takes a strike, I forget whether from third or fourth place. The table would be fussy over the weekend, ( Read more... )

87 people, all told, would come to play in the ``WWC OPEN Satellite tournament'' tournament, to use its elegant name. The format? Four strikes, match play, with the bottom two people in a group of three or four getting a strike each. And the only person I really knew there was bunny_hugger, so how long would it be until we were matched? ... Turns out, we ( Read more... )

Though I sat out bunny_hugger's field trip to practice at Wizard's World arcade, I always figured to be there to support her when she competed. But the tournament was scheduled for a Friday, and so I needed to take a day off work. This would be the first day I took off work since the transition between offices, so that I wasn't sure precisely who to ask. ( Read more... )

When she won the Michigan Women's State Championship back in January bunny_hugger was nothing but elated for hours. Then it set in that she would be expected to go to the Women's North American Championship Series. This is independent from the Women's World Championship --- that she attended back in 2017, when the pinball scene was incredibly smaller --- ( Read more... )