-The 7th annual Tecmo & RBI tourney is Saturday July 23rd! RBI Baseball at 11 AM, Tecmo Bowl at 5 PM.
-Hosted at DJ's Dugout (Miracle Hills location) in Omaha Nebraska.
-Tecmo Bowl trophy will be presented to the tourney champion by former Bears QB Jim McMahon. Sports media personalities Cole Cubelic(ESPN) and Adnan Virk(MLB Network) will be competing at the event.
-This day long celebration has attracted players from 11 states and Canada since 2016. Many of the top players in Omaha have impressive resumes competing in other states.
-Both tourneys feature group play followed by eliminations rounds and consolation games for players eliminated early.
-Cash prizes to the top players, and 1st place wins a trophy in each event.
-The elimination round is capped with the top 16 players from group play.
-Players seeded 17 & higher will face off in the "2nd Division" tourney with cash prizes to 1st & 2nd place.
This year's Tecmo Bowl tourney will be featured in a documentary by Forty FPS Films. The RBI portion of the event will have a small role in the film as well.
See teaser video for documentary below
https://youtu.be/qFKHt8VX75o
For a glimpse of the RBI tourney from 2021, see video below
https://youtu.be/iyxnyWopTSg
The most noteworthy film by Forty FPS is the Price Is Right documentary. See below.
https://youtu.be/HdFKZtZop7A
Promotional page by Forty FPS.
(https://i.ibb.co/yP7yJgW/july23-poster-1.jpg) (https://ibb.co/Jtg7Pr5)
No waiting around to play RBI here.
(https://i.ibb.co/5hLZLxJ/rbi-cart.jpg) (https://ibb.co/chQqQXs)
Gameplay rules
(https://i.ibb.co/PhVmCxC/rbi-rules-doc.png) (https://ibb.co/SnZsvNv)
Team selection process. I plan to make 1 small tweak to it this year.
(https://i.ibb.co/7VCGZnP/rbi-team-select.png) (https://imgbb.com/)
I WILL BE THERE!
(note that I am not the celebrity guest, there's someone EVEN BIGGER than me)
Confirmed attendees include Bears QB Jim McMahon who will handle duty of Tecmo Bowl tourney champion trophy presentation.
Cole Cubelic (ESPN sideline reporter) and Adnan Virk (MLB Network commentator) will be competing at the event.
Not sure who else CJ has up his sleeve at the moment, but will report when I know more.
(https://i.ibb.co/yP7yJgW/july23-poster-1.jpg) (https://ibb.co/Jtg7Pr5)
A guy emailed me from Canada. He's looking at bringing a group of about 5 players down for RBI. Said they really weren't gamers, but their group played a lot of RBI in college. :thumbsup: With all the additional fanfare this year, shouldn't be much work to get an attendance figure in the low to mid 20s for both games. The group of 5 Canadians would really get us a great turnout for RBI.
Not going to put much effort into promotion via social media this year as virtually every regular is going to be attending.
Quote from: BeefMaster on 02/25/22, 08:02:25 AM
I WILL BE THERE!
(note that I am not the celebrity guest, there's someone EVEN BIGGER than me)
Baines and Wife of Baines are planning a trip to Omaha for the event.
Joe Dirt has been looking at flights recently.
fucking awesome
How the fuck did you get Jimmy Mac?
Quote from: TbT on 04/03/22, 03:25:17 PM
Quote from: BeefMaster on 02/25/22, 08:02:25 AM
I WILL BE THERE!
(note that I am not the celebrity guest, there's someone EVEN BIGGER than me)
Baines and Wife of Baines are planning a trip to Omaha for the event.
Joe Dirt has been looking at flights recently.
HELL YES!
I'm bringing my college roommate, who will absolutely not be competitive but I think will be participating in both tournaments as well.
Quote from: Gantry on 04/04/22, 07:01:24 AM
How the fuck did you get Jimmy Mac?
The Producer for the film is nearing completion of his Jim McMahon documentary. CJ and Jim are BFFs. 😄
Quote from: BeefMaster on 04/04/22, 08:33:37 AM
I'm bringing my college roommate, who will absolutely not be competitive but I think will be participating in both tournaments as well.
I was just thinking about that recently. Awesome. I'll add him to the tally.
Currently sitting at a field of 20 players for each tourney from people that have confirmed. That number does not include 3 guys that have been successful at past tourneys that will more than likely attend and play in both. And there is a batch of 4-6 guys from Canada that are looking into the trip down here to play RBI, but are not on the spreadsheet yet.
RBI has a pretty good shot at hitting 26-28 players if even half of those Canadians attend.
I haven't planned on doing any facebook ads as I've been letting things play out with the regulars first to see where we are at numbers wise closer to the event.
This is beyond amazing
BUMP
Just booked my hotel this morning. I'm hoping for a better showing in RBI this year, and that my shockingly good results in Tecmo last year weren't just beginner's luck (and a VERY fortunate round robin group draw). TBT's latest announcement on the Facebook event page expects turnout in the high 20s for both tournaments. It was 16 in each last year, so it'll be really interesting to see what an expanded field looks like, comparatively... it's not clear whether the expanded field is from picking up more casuals or more high-end players.
I have arrived in Omaha, and I met Baines and his wife and daughter at the tournament venue. They are awesome. I'm gonna try to get there early tomorrow to help TBT with setup.
3-0 in group play, including a Dee-Nee battle against Baines. Not sure yet what I'll get for a seed in the knockout round
Made the semis in RBI, after winning a 15-inning bit of inanity in my first knockout game.
Holy shit, well done!
I beat Beales 1-0 to finish in third. Vic and Bridges are paying for the title right now.
You are doing something right if you beat Beales.
Absolutely, that's an amazing run
Just beat Cole Cubelic in Tecmo, 24-3.
AND I rematched against Cole in the knockout round and he upset me 14-10. I ended up with the consolation championship (9th place).
Made the news!
https://www.ketv.com/article/retro-gamers-drawn-to-omaha-for-video-game-tournament/40700125
ALRIGHT, LET'S WRITE THIS THING UP
This year I didn't come by myself - I brought Conrad (the non-Dee-Neer interviewed in that news clip), my college roommate and best friend. He was hoping to go along with me each of the last two years, but I didn't go in 2020 due to covid and he had a family conflict last year, so this year we finally made that work. He decided he was going to play in both tournaments even though he didn't expect to be competitive (he was right about that, but he said he's definitely coming back and I'm guessing he'll still at least play RBI again).
I made a token appearance at the venue Friday night during setup, getting the opportunity to say hi to a few of the core guys (TBT, NATE, Schwartz) and finally meet Baines in person for the first time, along with Mrs. Baines and his daughter. They were an absolute joy, just terrific folks, and Conrad had a great time talking books with both Baines and TBT's wives after he got knocked out of the tournament on Saturday.
So, the tournament...
Last year, I came into the day with no expectations in Tecmo, since I hadn't played the original game in 20 years, but I figured maybe I'd be competitive in RBI because at least I'd played a few games over the years, plus I know the rosters super-well. I did some cramming the night before in Tecmo, and I got Ben to play a practice game or two of RBI the week before the tourney, but that was it. My expectations, of course, ended up completely backward - in Tecmo, thanks to a lucky group draw, I went 2-1 in group play, got a high seed that gave me an easy first-round matchup, and lost two games by a field goal each on my way to sixth place; in RBI, I went 1-2 in group play (I lost to the eventual champ only 2-0, but still, not great!) lost the 8-9 first-round game, and fought back to the consolation championship game only to lost that as well. This year, I knew I had a puncher's chance in Tecmo but was still not really sure what to think of RBI, which I got the impression had a much deeper pool of top players.
Of course, I'm wrong about everything! It helped that there was a much bigger field in both games this year (28 in RBI, 26 in Tecmo), and it REALLY helped for RBI. I lucked into a group with BAINES and two more casual guys - I won my first game 4-1 and in my second game got out to a 10-0 lead before getting lazy with my pitching and winning 10-6, setting up a duel with Baines for ALL THE GROUP PLAY MARBLES. He suggested an All-Star game, which I eagerly accepted both for the chance to use NL and so he could have Baines on his team (who I think went 0-3). I got a couple dingers early while he tried to figure out how to control Saberhagen's pitches, and he wasn't able to recover enough to catch back up, so I ended up 3-0 in group play and snagged a 5 seed in the Round of 16.
My first-round game was against Jerry, the new guy from last year that placed in both tournaments - he beat me for fifth in Tecmo and got fourth in RBI. I called NY-SF, one of my go-to matchups, and he took the Giants. He had a bit of trouble wrangling Krukow's curveballs, managing to hit 6 or 7 of my players during the game (including Strawberry 3 times), but I was chasing a lot of stuff outside the zone and couldn't get solid contact on anything. Thankfully, he had the same problems I did, and we both sat scoreless through 9. At that point, the second starters were allowed, so we were back to square one, but this time with Reuschel vs Gooden (I started with Ojeda to get more L v R matchups). Finally, in the bottom of the 15th inning, Reuschel wasn't able to curve it off the plate enough, and I had enough time for Lenny Dykstra to turn on one and walk it off. This game was one of the ones on the "streaming TV", where they had an announcer for the game and a Twitch-style streaming setup - they weren't able to actually stream due to the internet at the venue, but I think the game might be on YouTube later.
My second game was not nearly as tough. I think because there was so many players, the group play was a lot more random than in previous years, which led to some wonky seeding. The guy I played was the 4 seed, but my game against him was way easier than the game against Jerry, and I got a few runs early and never felt like I was in a ton of danger. Holy shit, guys, I just made the goddamn semi-finals.
The other three quadrants of the bracket were apparently the "real" ones. From them came Mark Bridges, Vic Lipari, and Mike Beales. Beales you guys all know, a longtime force in the COTUT and the old Columbus tourney, and he was last year's runner-up. Mark got upset in the quarterfinals last year but has a prior Omaha championship and has otherwise always been top-three there when he's attended. Vic had won four of the last five Omaha titles and was runner-up the other year (to Mark). I drew Vic.
Vic DESTROYED me. I'd mostly stuck with him last year in an NL-Bo matchup. This time, I picked NY-Mn and he picked NY-SF, he got the Mets both times, and he threw a combined 15 innings with Dwight Gooden. On the other side of the ball, I deeply underestimated Vic's reaction speed on inside pitches, and I got a lot fewer strikeouts than I was use to. The result was a pair of pretty bad (for high-end RBI) shellackings, I think 6-1 and 7-2.
Meanwhile, Beales and Bridges hadn't even finished one damn game yet. They went SEVENTEEN INNINGS in their first semifinal matchup, and they already play a lot slower than I do (they're much more intense, competitive guys, and they're more likely to pause to collect themselves during the game). Bridges finally walked it off, then Beales took game 2. Game 3 ended disappointingly, with a rules violation - Beales was down big going into the 9th and managed to bring up the tying run with two outs. It was his pitcher, and he quickly paused the game and brought in Lee Mazilli to pinch hit. That was against the rules - the Omaha tournament only allows one starting pitcher in regulation, so only the home team can pinch hit for the pitcher in the 9th inning (unless they've only used one reliever). Bridges immediately called it out and Beales immediately realized what he'd done, and the game was officially over (an illegal sub is either an out or a forfeit, I can't remember which). They played it out and Bridges still won, although it kinda seemed like they both were half-assing the last few batters that didn't matter.
At this point we were already something like an hour past when TBT assumed RBI would be done, so Beales and I set up our third-place game on a side TV while they were making announcements for the Tecmo tourney. I won the toss and went back to NY-SF, which had been pretty good for me (all but two of my games included the Mets), he took the Giants, and we settled into a pitcher's duel. Based on my games against Vic, I took Gooden this time, and it was a very good decision - the extra speed of his pitches is a pretty big deal, and also from watching Vic I was more aggressive about mixing in drop balls for clutch strikeouts. I managed to keep Clark and Chili from hurting me, Beales' only real solid contact came from weak hitters, and I managed a lone dinger from Strawberry in the fifth, and my bullpen held up over the last few innings to close it out.
THIRD PLACE, BABY!
In the important series, they went all three games, and in game three Bridges came back from a 5-2 7th-inning deficit to win 6-5. I was Tecmoing and missed most of the championship series, and I'm hoping that next year we can figure out a way to speed up the last couple rounds - the RBI side took FOREVER to finish last year, too.
TECMO BOWL TIME
Group play was an interesting draw - in addition to Jerry, who beat me for 5th last year (after taking NATE NATE NATE to overtime in the quarterfinals), I got my buddy Conrad (who came in knowing he was going to be terrible) and ESPN college football analyst Cole Cubelic. According to TBT, Cole had been posting about practicing, but we didn't really know what to expect from him. We had the second game in the group, after I comfortably beat Conrad, and his results were... not great! I picked Indy-Denver, he took the Broncos, and I ran for about 200 yards with Dickerson while he kept selling out and missing dives with Mecklenberg trying to stick me in the backfield. He also lost pretty solidly to Jerry before beating Conrad something like 48-0... he was apparently tired of losing at that point. They put me on the streaming TV for my game against Jerry, the second featured game of the day between the two of us, and I managed to beat him pretty easily, something like 13-3. I was feeling confident going into the round of 16 with a high seed, particularly after drawing a rematch with Cole (his beatdown of Conrad salvaged his point differential enough to sneak in as the 13 seed).
It was not to be. Cole called Dallas-Indy, I took the Colts, and I proceeded to do absolutely nothing all game. The Dallas defense is god-awful, but that actually might have helped him - rather than using a quick interior player and coming after my running game, he instead settled for a defensive back, and with that patient approach he got enough help from the computer-controlled guys that I don't think I managed more than maybe one ten-yard run with Dickerson all game (I'm still not great at passing in original Tecmo, so I needed a solid running game to be effective). On the other side of the ball, Cole got a couple solid runs against me early with Herschel Walker, really nailing some great cutback moves, so I started calling more runs to keep him at bay, and he very quickly figured out that with me usually using Dwayne Bickett, the bottom OLB, it was impossible for me to stop a quick pass to the top WR, who got no CPU coverage when I picked a run. I managed an early stop and a field goal to go up 3-0 early, but after that point it was all Cole. He had a long TD drive in each half, and I didn't manage to score again until finally getting into the end zone with maybe 45 seconds left. He got a couple first downs to run out the clock, and that was that.
The "reward" for Cole was getting to lose to TBT in the next round. I was really hoping to have the opportunity to troll him with a Minnesota-Washington matchup (the two most-despised teams in high-end Tecmo Bowl), but alas, it was not to be. Instead, I dropped into the consolation bracket. After accidentally playing the wrong person thanks to a rewrite of the bracket that I wasn't aware of, I ended up going 3-0 on that side of the bracket, with two overtime wins and then a shutout win over the guy who I'd accidentally played from the old bracket, who had beaten me in group play the year before. Yay, I guess, I'm the consolation champ, officially "9th place" (out of 26 competitors, so unlike my 10th-place RBI showing last year I at least finished in the top half).
I went 6-1 on the day in Tecmo Bowl, but that one loss stung a whole lot. Anyway, who cares; I got third place in RBI! I beat Mike Beales! Everything after I made the RBI semifinals was gravy.
In the games that mattered, TBT got upset in the semifinals for the second straight year, this time by Daniel Patrick Slattery (DPS), one of the big-timers from Canada. On the other side of the bracket, NATE NATE NATE beat former champ Ben Schwartz in the semifinals, again for the second straight year. In the finals, both guys took advantage of some big kick returns to score early, but then Nate clamped down on defense while putting on a clinic of sustained drives, and he won about as convincingly as you see in a game involving two of those big hitters. Jim McMahon presented the championship trophy to our buddy NATE NATE NATE.
They also had a "Division 2" bracket for the folks who didn't qualify for the top 16, and Nate's daughter Sarah (my first opponent last year and a solid player in her own right) won that, so it was an all-Merz championship day.
That's pretty cool. How much prep did you do? I think my skills have eroded I'd do awful
Quote from: BDawk on 07/25/22, 01:45:34 PM
That's pretty cool. How much prep did you do?
Really, not that much. I played a few games of Tecmo on the Switch to get re-used to the mechanics, and I did get Ben to play a game or two of that with me (he'd never played Tecmo Bowl before), but no real high-end competition. The Switch version isn't actually the best one to use, because it's the Japanese version with updated rosters, but I don't have an original Tecmo cartridge and do have the Switch NES controllers, so it was good to get a better feel for those controllers, and I think the playbooks are the same in both versions. I crammed in a single possession with three or four different teams in the hotel room on an emulator the night before just to try out some playbooks and see if I could remember more defenders, but it didn't stick much, and that unfamiliarity was part of my struggles in the passing game on tournament day.
For RBI, Ben is a lot more competent player, although I could only get him to play a few games with me over the couple months before the tournament (and basically none before that). I had him be as merciless as possible with terrible pitching, but that didn't help a ton - I still was in "swing and miss at basically everything" mode my first few games of the tournament. I didn't do any study on rosters before the tournament beyond what I learned in all my years here, so I'm sure I was less than optimal with my NY/SF subs, but those benches are so terrible that you don't lose a whole lot if you're not fully optimized.
Honestly... a lot of it is just like riding a bike, especially RBI fielding and Tecmo running, and it comes back pretty quickly. If you feel like trying to practice, I think single-player practice helps a bit more in Tecmo than RBI (the computer throws too many strikes and swings at too few strikes), but it's better than nothing either way.
NATE NATE NATE
Quote from: BeefMaster on 07/24/22, 09:41:43 PM
Made the news!
https://www.ketv.com/article/retro-gamers-drawn-to-omaha-for-video-game-tournament/40700125
"I just made it into the semi-finals..."
GOLD
also how 'bout that extended close-up of Baines there at the end? Pure sex.
TBT does incredible work. This is fucking great.
Quote from: fknmclane on 07/26/22, 10:30:26 AM
TBT does incredible work. This is fucking great.
The amount of work he puts into this is absolutely amazing. Even before all the logistical planning that's required for the tournament itself, he has acquired enough TVs, NES-capable systems, cartridges, and (working!) controllers to have 30+ people playing games simultaneously. He rents a damn U-Haul for the weekend so he can get all the stuff to the venue, who he has been working with for months to make sure he has the space and they're okay with him setting up and tearing down before they open. He gets trophies made, plus the nice laminated award certificates for the less-successful folks like myself, plus rules sheets to place at every single station, plus score slips we fill out when reporting our results, plus a ton of promotional posters and signage for the tournament itself. He works with folks to set up a cool video capture setup, which this year also had an honest-to-god professional play-by-play announcer (AFAIK the game videos aren't up yet, but just hearing Jayson while I walked by his station, he's an absolute pro with a terrific voice). In addition to just the mechanical part of dragging everything inside and plugging stuff in, every cartridge and controller is tested beforehand to make sure there are no hiccups at game time. I am definitely leaving out dozens (hundreds?) of hours of other prep work.
And I will also give a HUUUUGE shout-out to Jeana, his wife, who supports her maniac husband every step of the way and devotes her whole dang Saturday to making sure things run smoothly. Jeana and a friend of theirs handled the score reporting and bracket updates throughout the day, allowing TBT to get additional setup work done during the RBI tournament and of course play in the Tecmo tournament. She also doubles as his biggest fan during the competition and is an absolutely delightful person.
I love everything about it.
Quote from: fknmclane on 07/26/22, 04:01:19 PM
I love everything about it.
... so much that you'll be making the trip to Omaha next year?