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STOCKHOLM |
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Date: June 6th - 8th 2008 Report by Mats Runsten
As usual it was held in the light and airy halls of the Royal Institute of Technology in the centre of Stockholm. This year it attracted around a 100 players from four different countries: Sweden, the Netherlands, USA and Finland. Stockholm Open is known to focus heavily on tournaments, and indeed it has a lot of them!
Set the Highscore on Tales of the Arabian Nights was won by Per Holknekt with 113 million. Set the Highscore on Who Dunnit was won by Fredrik Lindberg with 12 billion. The Onehanded was played on Junk Yard and saw Mats Runsten as the winner with 15 million. The Reversed Flippers was played on Dr Who and was won by Jörgen Holm with 1.1 billion.
The fifth and oddest game was the Delirium Pinball. It was a Fish Tales game with Theatre of Magic backglass and T2 sound ROMs. The flippers were one upside down banana flipper and one small Addams “Thing” flipper, and just to make sure it wasn´t too easy, the flippers were reversed. The winner of this strange sport was Reidar Spets with 80 million. There was also the Parallel Pinball - two linked NBA Fastbreaks - and a single elimination cup tree with head-to-head matches. Victorious was Linus Jorenbo who beat Trent Augenstein in the final, 44-32.
A bunch of youngsters showed up to play in the newly introduced juniors division. The juniors had only one entry each, but on the other hand the entries included eight games. Jacob Steggers and Hoda Lamari both managed to be the best on two games, but Jacob had more second places, making him the qualifications winner. Eight players made it to the finals and here’s the full list:
The players entered two four-player semi-finals with the two best of each advancing. The four who managed to reach the final were Jacob Steggers, Ibrahim El Chammas, Hoda Lamari and Selatin Yildiz. The final was very exciting, and when the dust settled Selatin Yildiz was on top. Second place came Hodar Lamari and third was Ibrahim El Chammas. The qualifications winner Jacob Steggers came fourth. The winner Selatin Yildiz had one battle left to fight though. One of the World Champions, Jorian Engelbrektsson, stepped up at World Cup Soccer. Selatin was quite close to victory, but in the end, Jorian won the game.
This year the classic tournament followed the same pattern as the main tournament. That is, each player composed an entry with three games of his choice from a bank of 12 games. The player could play as many as 12 entries and when the qualification closed the top-24 made the play-offs. The top 8 qualifiers also got a bye for the first round. Due to the somewhat more random nature of classic games they were all set to 5 balls/game throughout the tournament. The extra balls were switched off though. The machines were: Capersville, Cleopatra, Eight Ball, Fireball, Hotdoggin´, Joust, Jungle Lord, Mata Hari, Nip-It, Olympic Hockey, OXO and Sea Ray.
There were 53 participants and the following 24 players made the play-offs:
Four players made it all the way to the final which was played on OXO, Mata Hari and Capersville. When it was time for the last game - Capersville - all four players still had the chance to win. Games collector and co-arranger (for classics) Leif Spångberg drew the longest straw and won the last game with his 4,400 points and thus also won the tournament. Trent Augenstein finished second, Fredrik Lindberg third and Morgan Dungmark ended in forth place.
This year the split flipper tournament was the biggest ever, with no less than 22 teams competing for the title. Each team could play as many as 12 entries, all composed of three machines of their choice from the bank. The top 8 teams in the qualifications made the play-offs, and they were:
The play-off was a single elimination cup where each match was best two out of three. Lag Peja beat CCCP in the final to grab the gold. In the match for the bronze Chicks with Dicks beat Kuttlans Fina. Results:
Main tournament
The main tournament was played using the same format as always. Each participant may play as many as 12 entries, each consisting of three different machines of his choice. There were 28 machines to pick from:
The top 32 players would make the play-offs. Going for a really good qualification spot wasn´t without merits however, since the top 8 got a bye for two rounds in the playoffs and players 9-16 got a bye for one round.
The following players qualified:
The play-off was a single elimination tree where matches were best 2 of 3 on random games. Of course lots of exciting events took place during the playoffs, but we may point out a few? Two times Stockholm Open Champion Fredrik Lindberg won his first two games but was defeated by Karl Broström in the 1/8-final. Karl kept his momentum and beat the reigning world champion Jorian Engelbrektsson on WCS and AFM in the quarter-finals. Last year´s champion Mats Runsten got an immediate “bye-bye” against Alvar Palm, a young, up-and-coming player from Gothenburg. Trent Augenstein, who already had two silver medals in his collection (Classics and Parallel Pinball), was defeated by Per Ahlenius in the quarter-finals.
After five hours of intense playing, the last two remaining players were Karl Broström from Sweden and Paul Jongma from the Netherlands. In the final they got to pick one game each and the third (should it be needed) was randomly drawn. Paul chose Guns N Roses and Karl picked Pinball Magic. Third game was Dirty Harry. On GnR Paul played for multiballs and did it well, scoring about 2.3B. Karl was chasing, but drained with about 1.1B when he tried to start his second multiball.
On Pinball Magic, Karl was player one. He didn´t play it as well as he usually does and ended with 350M after his third ball, which was less than Paul already had. So, Paul Jongma became the Stockholm Open champion 2008 after playing strongly throughout the whole tournament.
In the match for third place Per Ahlenius beat Jörgen Holm on CFTBL and DW. So, the top four were:
All in all this year´s tournament was very well executed and spectators got to see a lot of exciting matches and nice scores. For complete information about qualifying, play-offs, machine scores, statistics etc., please visit:
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