Triple Drain Pinball Podcast Ep 36: Josh Hates Tom
Triple Drain Pinball Podcast Episode 36: Josh Hates Tom Hosts: Joel Engelberth, Tom Graf, Travis Murie and Josh Sharpe Tonight we asked Josh Sharpe to join us and explain why he personally hates...
Highlights
- Josh Sharp founded the IFPA rankings in 2006 as a spreadsheet project to compare players who never met each other competitively
- The new WPPR system (version 5.8+/6.0) will use efficiency percentage and penalty scaling for over-play to equalize ranking opportunities across geographically disparate players
- The ranking system change was prompted by COVID-era lockdowns making Josh unqualified for the 2022 World Championship despite being able to recover from 200th to top 25 after lockdowns ended
- District 82 in Fox Cities, Wisconsin is positioned as the epicenter of competitive pinball in North America with frequent high-level tournaments
- Top overseas players like Johannes struggle to compete internationally due to limited tournament access in their regions, while American players in key locations have disproportionate ranking advantages
- Tom dropped significantly in proposed rankings due to playing 870+ events while maintaining top-20 results inconsistently with his overall play efficiency
- The top-ranked players (Escher, Ray Day, Keith Elwin) will not be significantly affected by the new system because their top-20 results are representative of their overall play quality across hundreds of events
- A new rule was implemented for 2024+ that prevents top-250 ranked players from dropping out of tournaments once they begin play
Notable quotes
“I wanted to find a way to declare that I was better than Jorgen Schmorgen from Sweden who I never met”
“It would be like you challenging Travis to Godzilla. He gets to play it once, and you get to play it 4,000 times. Who's going to win?... That's a shitty system.”
“the opportunities that I had to compete through my ability to take time off, my ability to live pretty close to District 82... I was able to go from 200th in the world back to the top 25 relatively easily”
“Americans do not understand how good we have it”
“you go to 200 events, you will find your way to having 20 good ones... the current system goes, 20 good events, Joel, you're fucking great”
“I think it's one of those things that it's hard to judge something until you see an actual sample size come out of it”
Entities
- InDESC· event
- Texas Pinball Festival (TPF)· event
- World Championship Germany 2022· event
- Godzilla· game
- District 82· organization
- IFPA· organization
- Adam Becker· person
- Brian· person
- Escher· person
- Joel· person
- Johannes· person
- Josh Sharp· person
- Keith Elwin· person
- Neil Graff· person
- Ray Day· person
- Raymond Davidson· person
- Roger Sharp· person
- Shepard· person
- Steve Bowen· person
- Tim Sexton· person
- Tom· person
- Travis· person
- Zach Sharp· person
- WPPR / Whopper· product
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