Friday Night Flips Episode 5: Back to the Start

Friday Night Flips is a series of 4 player match play get togethers at The Lower Playfield. 4 players will compete on the games downstairs in 4-2-1-0 matches until a player hits 21 points. They will be the winner! Each player will put in an ante to the match and the winner goes home with it all. Learn more about Friday Night Flips and watch past episodes on our dedicated Friday Night Flips page.

All the fun of the Lower Playfield, now available wherever you are! All the action will be broadcast on Twitch at twitch.tv/TheLowerPlayfield starting at 7PM.

Episode 5: Back to the Start

Tonight we go back — way back. Before Friday Night Flips. Before The Lower Playfield. All the way back to the genesis of all of these things: Pinball with Fudd and Jord, our irreverent pinball stream that started in 2020 and sent us from having a couple of games at home that we’d share and broadcast online to the full blown problem that is TLP today! In honor of all of that, we present four players who were very early supporters of our stream during the pandemic times, and the opportunity for us to bring Pinball with Fudd and Jord to the modern era of Friday Night Flips. You may not know all of these players, but they’re near and dear to us:

• Derek and Ivy Beam are a dynamic father/daughter team who were some of our earliest viewers, channel moderators, Twitch stars of the “Friday Night Ivy League” stream, and are now mainstays of many a Lower Playfield tournament. Derek was goaded by the Other Derek into playing more pinball and it seems to have stuck, as he has a penchant for blowing up a game while insisting he doesn’t know what he was doing. Ivy has a knack for EM’s and prefers not knowing whats going on, which is normally when she pushes her scores to the max.
• Barrett Huntress is another early moderator, viewer, and supporter who also possesses a Joe Hinkle score of 1*. In Pinball with Fudd and Jord streams, Barrett is also famous for the Careless Whispers dance. A long time friend of the stream, Barrett got in to pinball because of the stream and has since logged a ton of FX hours, in preparation for his recent move back to the area and dreams of TLP dominance.
• Rich Lasker, in addition to being a long time supporter of the original form of the stream, is the member of this quartet we’ve known the longest. Derek and Rich worked together for many years prior to the pandemic and the start of the stream, when pinball at TLP went from a hobby to a clinical diagnosis. Along with his wife Jaime and son Ricky, Rich got bit by the pinball bug over too many beers and long nights of Total Nuclear Annihilation. Rich is responsible for our amazing AFM translite and provides a good retirement home for the ex-TLP Godzilla, helping it live it live it’s best life.

* The Joe Hinkle Score is a metric similar to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in which you try to determine if you know this person because of Joe Hinkle, if this person knows Joe Hinkle, or if you can connect them to Joe Hinkle via a series of other people you mutually know. Virtually 78% of New England has a Joe Hinkle score of 1.

On commentary:

• Derek Correia and Jordan Knights are the owner operators of The Lower Playfield, and since we’re partly responsible for getting some of these people into pinball in the first place, it only felt right for them to do commentary for this very special episode.