Tucked in the basement of a Halifax hotel, 15 of the city’s best pinball wizards gathered to play out a story as old as time: man versus machine.

“The play of the silver ball... it's you against the machine,” said John Greatwich, organizer of Sunday’s tournament held at the Chocolate Lake Best Western.

To Greatwich, the thrill is only multiplied by the competition.

“It's you battling against your fellow competitors trying to have the best score, to boast that you've got a score that's (a record), until somebody else beats you to that score. To try and wipe somebody down or try and wipe somebody completely off the board,” he said.

Fifteen people, aged from six to 60, gathered on Sunday to battle the machines and each other for a cash prize. The $10 buy-in ($5 for kids) leaves $72.50 for the winner.

Cody Nodding is one of the competitors who showed up Sunday, and he remembers exactly when he fell in love with pinball: December 16, 2016.

“I found out about it on Facebook. They have a page on social media and I was following it for a while, but I found out anybody could go into it. So I came up and tried it out and fell in love with it.”

Brian Audain, a lifelong pinball player, has been playing competitively for two and a half years now. He says his love of the game is rooted in the randomness of the fight against the machines.

“The artwork, the fact that they all have a different theme, the fact that it's mechanical,” Audain said when asked about why he plays.

“Even if you're having the greatest game of your life, something can go wrong. The ball can bounce off something and you just have no control over that. Or, you know, something can just bounce wrong in the machine and hop over the flipper, which is unfair. But that's just a part of life and definitely part of pinball.”

As much as the players revel in the randomness, with the games being built for maximum chaos, there is a certain level of skill that comes with practice.

“The worst player in the world could be playing against the best player in the world but any given day, it's basically a coin toss because there's randomness involved,” Audain said.

“But, on the other hand, the more you practice and the more you know the games, because, I didn't realize until I started playing competitive pinball, that each game has an in-depth rule set, and if you don't know what you're doing [with] some games you just cannot score any points.”

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Although pinball is popular in Halifax, with Greatwich saying they often get as many as 30 people at a tournament, there are not a lot of places left to play it. He says most machines are in the hands of private collectors.

For those interested, The Facebook pages of Silverball Games and the Halifax Pinball League explain how and where to become a pinball wizard.

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