Saturday, February 28, 2009

Allentown Website Updated!

Allentown Pinball Wizards Convention
May 1st, 2nd, 3rd

We are excited to again be returning to the Allentown Pinball Wizards convention for yet another wonderful tournament and show!

Last year we had a record turn out for the tournament and we would love to keep that momentum going. We invite everyone to come out and show support for the sport of competitive pinball.

Returning this year are the 3 main divisions: A division, B division and E division for all skill levels. Also again this year we will be giving away a pinball machine to the top winner in the A division. So sharpen your skills and get ready!

What's New This Year?
We have added our popular Monthly Masters format to the line-up for all day Sunday tournament play!

To accommodate this we have removed the no-limits tournament from our line up. We apologize to everyone who was looking forward to no-limits but promise that you'll love our new tournament format.

Unlike no-limits, Monthly Masters is a non-elimination style tournament. What this means is that no player is ever eliminated from the tournament and over time you will end up playing players of your own skill level. It is a fun and social competitive pinball playing experience!

Registration for both the Main Tournament and Monthly Masters Tournament are now open on our website:


http://www.p3tournament.com/p3tournament/allentown/


Also don’t forget about our Monthly Masters Tournament coming up on Saturday March 21st, 2009 at Ricks Place near Broomall, PA.

http://www.p3tournament.com/p3tournament/masters/

Looking forward to seeing everyone again this year!

Brian Smith
P3

Friday, February 20, 2009

Holy Trophies Batman



Castle video is coming up and this will be our largest turnout ever for a tournament!

With over 27 players registered, we have had to create trophies for a group G!

Just look at this photos, crazy:

(BTW, each trophy is hand made by the P3 staff)

Now for the artistic shot:


Anyways, if you wonder why I never win any of these things... its cause I'm really tired after spending all night preping for the tournaments.

Side Tournament

After reviewing feedback from our players and the
declining interest in the secondary side tournament, we have removed
the secondary tournament from the Monthly Masters Format as of 2009

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Monthly Masters Time Again

Well its about time for another monthly masters tournament.

I wanted to let everyone in a little bit on the behind the scenes work that goes on before the tournaments.

The majority of the work that takes place for the monthly master's tournaments is the creation of the trophies.

Creating the trophies takes over 6 hours of work from start to finish. Each trophy is hand made.

The flipper trophies are made using the older style flippers without flipper shafts. They first must be filled in to make the bottom surface flat. To do this several layers of cardboard are cut out and then glued into the flipper bottom. Once the surface is flat the flippers are they super-gluded onto the frames.






Each of the frames is then preped for the artwork that has been created in adobe photoshop.











Each of the pieces of artwork are then printed onto thick paper stock using a termal printer.











Each of the pieces has to be cut out individually to match the size of the frame, then carefully positioned and aligned. They are they taped from behind into place to preserve the alignment.













Here are the completed trophies (well almost). Each player in a monthly masters tournament receives a trophy. So the typical tournament has an average of 20 trophies!









The trophies are pretty easy to make, but it just takes time to make this many of them.

New Servers


Look at our new rack of servers. This year we have gone over the top with redudancy

For tech geeks only past this point!:

We have two servers running both with Raid 1.

They will identical servers mirroring each other. The database will be replicated between the two servers real-time and if either machine goes offline the tournament will continue un-interrupted.

The database is also backed up in time intervals between both servers. In case of data corruption (unlikely) a checkpoint can be restored loosing only a few minutes of data.

On top of all that, we have even another server for spare parts in case both the first two go down.

This is in addition to our already redudant kiosk systems and redudant score entry systems. Should prove to be a very bullet proof system.

Whats this thing?

A new piece of equipment has showed up at the P3Tournament labs today.


Any guess what it is?


This new toy might show up at the Allentown show. As you know we love anything that involves automation.

Monthly Masters Tournaments

I want to personally thank everyone who has participated in our monthly masters tournaments! They have been a wonderful success.

We will be taking a short break to coincide with our two upcoming open format tournaments. Therefore there will be no Masters Tournaments the months of April and May.

We are also expecting a new addition to the family, and will not be able to host a tournament in June either. However expect the Monthly Masters to resume after that date.

Sign up for our email newsletter to be informed when our next monthly masters tournament will be scheduled. We also might have some other events running in the area during that time, and we will notify everyone on the email listing.

Thanks for your understanding and see everyone at the Rochester and Allentown Pinball Conventions!