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!