Is That Score Good Enough? Live Pinball Qualifying Dashboard
Stop guessing in qualifying. The new live tracker shows the score you need on every game to make the cut, and you can even hand it to a chatbot for a game plan.
Nick C
After the EPC and UK Open I posted some graphs of all the qualifying scores. In response, I got some pretty positive feedback on pinball forums and via WhatsApp messages. The obvious next step was to make a live version of it, allowing the players to strategise about what games might help them to achieve qualification based on the dynamic situation. It’s also a bit of fun for those following along at home, or watching the twitch streams. Think of it as another window on the action.
It’s up on the new live tournament tracker page, using the Hungarian Pinball Open as the test flight.
What it does
Most tournaments run qualifying on Matchplay. This is the web app we all know well as competitive tournament players, used for managing the event scoring. As players we can join queues for machines, and request our scores be noted at the end of the game. In the background, it runs all the scoring for the whole event. It’s great for what it does and allows the player to look at detailed stats across many pages. What it doesn’t do is provide the player with much in the way of an overall strategic dashboard.
During qualifying the tracker checks Matchplay every couple of minutes, works out where the finals cut is right now, and then shows the score you need on every game in the bank to keep pace with it.
Every score on a machine is ranked against everyone else’s on that machine and given points, so the best score gets 200 and it drops off as you go down. Each game gets a card like this one.
- Top score is the best score on that machine so far.
- Cut pace is the score you need on that game to be on track for the last place in the finals, if you put up that sort of score on every game.
- Bye pace is the same thing for the top spots that skip the first round of finals.
- 100 pts is the score that gets you 100 points on that game.
Under each card there’s a histogram of every score put up on that game, with the pace lines marked on it. You can see how spread out the scores are, and how far off the pace a score really is.
Under the games there’s the leaderboard. Each player has their IFPA seed (where their world ranking puts them in the field), with an arrow showing whether they’re currently above or below it.
You can refresh the page as often as you like. Although that will not speed up how often our server will synchronise with Matchplay. The page will auto refresh anyway.
HPO the first test
I found out loads of UK players were heading to the Hungarian Pinball Open. I’d had this all planned out, and was going to set it live over the Christmas period before INDISC, but HPO made me stick a rocket in it. The HPO also has 2 compatible tournament formats running in parallel.
- HPO 2026 card game, where you play cards of 6 games and your best card counts
- HPO 2026 high score, where your best 12 scores count, up to 2 per machine
Upcoming pinball tournaments
I’ll be adding upcoming tournaments as soon as they’re published on Matchplay, as long as their qualifying format works with the tracker. Upcoming events show up with an amber dot and the time qualifying starts, and they go green on their own when it begins. Once qualifying is finished, the page stays up as a permanent record of the final qualifying results.
This is an early first version, so feedback and suggestions for improvement are most welcome. If you’ve got feature requests, spot something wrong, or want a tournament added, shout on the Pinside thread or the Pinball Info thread.
The (even more) nerdy bit
How most websites show live data
Most pages on a site like this one, blog posts and product pages, never change once they’re written. So they’re built once and every visitor gets the same copy. Live scores don’t work like that. The usual trick is to send a static page, and then have a bit of JavaScript in it (code that runs in your browser) ask a backend server for the latest numbers and swap them in.
That’s fine for most humans as the numbers appear a moment after the page loads. But anything that just reads the page without running that JavaScript only ever sees the static content, including whatever numbers were in it when the last snapshot was made. That includes search engines, link previews and chatbots like ChatGPT.
Astro’s superpower
We moved this site over to Astro earlier this year, and this was the perfect excuse to use one of its best features. Astro lets you pick individual pages to be built fresh every time someone asks for them, which it calls on-demand rendering. The live pages work like that. When you open one, the server grabs the latest numbers and builds the page server-side with them already in it. So the very first thing anything sees, person or bot, is the live data.
Ask a chatbot for a qualifying strategy
Because the live numbers are in the page itself, you can give the link to a chatbot and it can actually read them. Paste in the URL of the live page and ask it to help you work out a strategy, like which games to go after and what scores you’d need on them.
Make sure you tell it to fetch the live page. Chatbots like to answer from an old copy of a page they’ve seen before, or from search results, and those will be out of date. Something like this works.
Fetch https://mayapinball.com/live/hungarian-open-2026-high-score/ right now and use the live numbers (… blah blah blah add your own emotional support prompt here)
It then might spit out something like the following (MAYA Pinball takes no responsibility for the validity of any chatbot hallucinated strategy 🤣).
Don’t fight the LLMs
Loads of sites are trying to block AI tools. For something like this I think that’s the wrong way round. People are going to ask chatbots about tournaments if website authors like it or not, so it’s much better they get the right numbers. Make your websites easy for them to read. They are not going away.
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