The new Fall Season of the Toronto Pinball League starts on Monday (September 10th)!

The Toronto Pinball League (ToPL) has been running continuously for more than 20 years!

Open to women and men of all ages, if you are looking for some friendly competitive league pinball, ToPL has got your fix! We play at some of the most fantastic private and public collections all around the GTA. ToPL has a great welcoming, social atmosphere for all skill and experience levels.

Want to look forward to Mondays? Our league plays almost every Monday over three seasons each year.

You can find more information about the Toronto Pinball League, contact us, and even join online at http://topl.ca

We’re looking forward to this new season and hope you can join us!

David Newman
President – Toronto Pinball League

The ToPL Playoffs this season were a huge success and we have a lot of people to thank for that!

First off, Jerry Power and Player 1 provided a superb venue for the Toronto Pinball League to hold our season playoffs!  In addition to their showroom and all the machines, they also contributed pizza, wings, bottled water, and a lot of Player 1 swag as giveaways!  Furthermore, on behalf of Player 1, Jerry donated the host fees for the evening back to the league to contribute to the awards that we provide to players!  Thanks so much Jerry and Player 1!

Thanks to Chris Bardon for setting up and running our tournament software and for running our random draws for the prizes provided by our generous sponsors!  Thanks also to Luch and Myles for meeting me early at Player 1 to set up, level, and clean all the machines to ensure they were running tip-top for the tournament!

Finally, thanks to all our great membership for coming out and making our playoffs such a fun finish to our season!  We had 100% of our members come out to playoffs, and we’ve been hearing a lot of really positive feedback on the evening!

Our dinner was catered by Sofra Mediterranean Cuisine of Richmond Hill, and Gino’s Pizza.

Check out our site at topl.ca, and our Pinside page for photos from the playoffs and details about our new season starting on September 10th.

The CNEPC is on at the CNE this weekend (August 24-26), and it’s a really well run tournament that you don’t want to miss!

Looking forward to seeing everyone in September!

Dave

Congratulations to our A Division finalists!:

1st place: Kirk Hutton

2nd place: Myles Cameron

3rd place: Mike Faria

4th place: Andrew Lounsbury

Congratulations to our B Division finalists!:

1st place: John Clegg

2nd place: Chris Frolic

3rd place: Duncan McFarlane

4th place: Steve Machado

Here’s more photos from the event!:

Thanks to Walt for opening up Bluffs for us this week!  Scores are up on the PAPA site, which officially wraps up the regular season for Summer 2018.  First off, Congrats to Charles for winning the Season Championship for the first time in several years!  He takes home the trophy as well as a replay into next season.  Adam Hollander also had a great season, taking both the handicap and the most improved awards, narrowly beating out Chris Draper, who also had a fantastic season this year.  Trophies will be available at the beginning of next season. 

Next Monday is the season playoffs at the Player One showroom(6420 Viscount Road Mississauga, NOT the old location off the 401).  For this event, doors open at 6pm, and we’re aiming to have food there for 6:30.  We’ll still aim to start the tournament at 8 if you can’t make it until then, but it’ll at least give everyone a chance to play some games and get something to eat before starting.  Based on the number of players we had this season, we’re splitting 12 players in A, and everyone else in B.  Right now A division looks like this:

1    Charles Blaquiere
2    Chris Draper
3    Kirk Hutton
4    Mike Faria
5    Adam Hollander
6    Andrew Aiken
7    Andy McNab
8    Josh Zilberberg
9    David Newman
10    Myles Cameron
11    Andrew Lounsbury
12    Les Kowal

If anyone on that list can’t make it, we’ll keep going down the list to fill out the division.  Both A and B are going to work like this:

• 4p Match Play groups with standard 7-5-3-1 scoring
• 1 game per round, with groups getting re-balanced after each round
• Swiss groups-similar win/loss records get put together.  The best players have to beat the best players
• The top 4 after 4 rounds go into a single elimination bracket to determine the division champ!

Hope to see everyone out next Monday-it should be a good time!

Hey everyone, I didn’t send out an email for the week 12 scores because I was trying to get the Most Improved standings fixed once and for all.  Some of you may have noticed that they were already up in the usual place, but as a few of you have pointed out, the percentages for Most Improved have been off.  The reason for this is because of the changes we made to the scoring system for calculating Most Improved:

9.3  Most Improved
The Most Improved Award is based on a player’s Season Performance Percentage (SPP) improvement over their Lifetime Performance Percentage (LPP).  The player with the largest improvement wins the Most Improved Award, and will be awarded a Replay into the next season.  For the purposes of this award, a player’s SPP is calculated on the player’s best 10 scores (13 total minus 3 dropped scores).  A player’s LPP is calculated over the previous six TOPL seasons or two calendar years (whichever is longer), and do not need to be consecutive.  A new player is eligible to be considered for this award in their 2nd season.

So the percentage shown on the main standings page is using the old format (counting all played weeks), while the one on the improvement leaderboard is filtering out your dropped weeks, but counting everything else (including missed weeks after 3). The reason for this was to try to correct for people winning the Most Improved award by not showing up to league events.  We’re also comparing against a lifetime percentage vs a previous 2 seasons, since we now have the data to do so.  Sorry for the confusion on this, and thanks to everyone who pointed out that there was something wrong with the percentages.  Also, a big thank you to Joe Schober (from the FSPA), who’s the developer behind the league manager software that we use.  He’s been incredibly generous with his time in building this software for leagues to use, and implementing changes for us like the Most Improved calculations, handicap system, and IFPA style scoring.  

Also, just a couple of notes on the end of the season, and what’s going on over the next couple of weeks.  Monday we’re playing week 13 at Bluffs, which is now the last “regular season” week of the summer.  At that point, we’ll have the scores for the Most Improved, Season Champ (highest adjusted points total), and Pinball Wizard (handicap) awards.  We’ll also know how many players qualify for each playoff division the following Monday at Player One (A is the top 50% of players who have played at least 7 weeks, B is everyone else).  Playoff rounds will be a hybrid of a regular league night and the tournament from last season.  We’ll be doing 4p match play rounds, re-balancing groups after each of 4 rounds to determine the top 4.  We’ll then put the top 4 through a single elimination final to determine the playoff champ.  B division works the same way.  Once we’re through next week, I’ll post lists of qualified players and information on the payouts.

We’re also still looking at doing a separate standalone tournament on a weekend later in the year, but the end of August is already getting pretty crowded.  The weekend we’d normally use is already the CNE tournament, which we don’t want to get in the way of.  If you can make it downtown, this is set up to become the biggest tournament in Canada, and entry is free with CNE admission. 

Congratulations to all our local participants playing at Pinburgh this year!

Adam Becker made it to the final 8 (quarter finals) in A Division and tied for 7th in very tough competition with Keith Elwin, Eric Stone, and Andrei Massenkoff!

Great to see Adam’s 2012 Pinburgh Champion banner above the stage!

John Flitton and Barry Brdar made it to the final 4 in B Division, with John finishing in 2nd place, and Barry finishing in 3rd place!  Awesome finish!

In the inaugural E Division tournament, Myles Cameron vanquished all others to be crowned the E Division Champion with none other than former World Champion Bowen Kerins applauding Myles’ performance on Monaco in an exciting final tie-breaker!

These guys did an incredible job representing the GTA leagues at Pinburgh!  Congratulations!

Pinball is returning to the CNE for 2018 with another 3 day tournament at the CNE’s Gaming Garage August 24 – 26.

The tournament has $1500 in prize money and IFPA points.

Click here for more details! – Discount admission tickets for the CNE are available at this link with registration.

Shout out to Eddie at DRAPL for the hard work making this happen!

Thanks to Nick for hosting this week, and thanks to Jeremy for bringing out his custom game for everyone to check out!  Scores are up on the PAPA site, and it looks like Charles still has a narrow lead on Chris Draper for the season champ.  Also, it looks like the Most Improved percentages are messed up, but we’re looking into it.  I’ll let everyone know when they’re fixed. 

Good luck to everyone going down to Pinburgh this weekend!  We’re back for more TOPL at Andy’s place on Monday.

Thanks to Kim for hosting this week!  Scores are up on the PAPA site, and Charles and Chris Draper continue to fight for position at the top of the standings, while Draper and Adam Hollander are tied with the handicap taken into consideration.  Also, there does seem to be an issue with some of the most improved percentages, but we’re looking into it. 

We’re back out to Nick’s place next week-have a great week everyone!

Thanks to Adam for hosting this week!  Scores are up on the PAPA site, and Charles is holding onto the lead, but Chris Draper is catching up.  They’re also in a dead heat for the Most Improved trophy, so it’ll be interesting to see how the next few weeks play out. 

A reminder that there’s no pinball next Monday because of the long weekend, so have a great Canada Day, and I’ll see everyone at my place on the 9th!