I’d say it’s most like golf, even the whole “hit a ball around the same course several times, total your score” bit is like weekend tournaments. (The big psychic difference is no matter how bad a hole of golf you eventually succeed and sink it, no matter how good a ball you eventually fail and drain it.)

Like golf, competitive players *are* better (and have specific strengths), and have more skills - aim, timing, yes, but also how to slow and trap a ball (which might include *not* using the flippers and letting a ball bounce safely to the other), how to a get physical with the machine for maximum effect without tilting, how to cradle and trap and tap pass and bounce pass and post pass and shatz the inlanes. (At the extreme, with deathsaves and bouncebacks you can save a ball that’s by normal standards completely lost already, but that’s considered unsporting and even potentially injurious to the game and the player and not done in competition.)

But beyond that knowledge is important. This can be things like just knowing that a shot that looks angled to be hit with one flipper can not only be “backhanded” with the other, but that that’s even safer, because the ball picks up different spin based on which wall of the orbit it’s riding.

It can be knowing the ruleset - there’s a LOT of stuff not on the instruction cards or even obvious from the screen, audio or playfield lights, like that all modes in Simpsons Pinball Party use, and reset, the same timer, so you can keep going to finish a difficult TV mode through to victory laps with a safe 2-shot sequence to light and collect the Otto shot multiplier.

It’s knowing a LOT of rulesets, for old and obscure games, so if you’re ever called on a Mystic you know all the good points are in the weird tic-tac-toe bonus.

It’s knowing trends in design even, so if you’re up on something you’re not used to, you know 2010s Sterns have a lot of combos and minor hurry-ups that build value across balls, that 2000s are about stacking every mode with each other, that ‘70s you should probably light a spinner to increase its value a hundredfold or more and keep nailing it, that if you clear all the drop targets on an EM and they don’t reset you should probably look for a bonus collect somewhere.

It’s knowing how tables in general work, how strong the flippers are, how fresh the rubbers are and what brand, how dirty or waxed the table is, what pitch it’s set at. It’s being able to pick that all up from feedback, then subconsciously process it so you can see a ball heading one way and intuitively know where it’ll be 3 bounces later and when and where to slap the table to disrupt that.

It’s being able to start a multiball and do that for 3 balls at once.

It’s knowing the difference between the strategies with the best risk/reward ratios (for head-to-head competition), the highest upside potential (for GCs, some qualifying rounds, risky come-from-behind wins and 4-player games where 1st takes a bonus), and feature advancement (for reaching wizard modes).

(Which leads to high-level strategy being sometimes unintuitive - say playing Whitewater and ignoring the multiball, spending 2 balls scoring few points while advancing Boulder Garden, then getting 5x playfield scoring, picking up a bunch of rafts and getting hundreds of millions in seconds.)

At the very extreme *weather* can be important which sounds ridiculous for a game that’s played indoors in sealed boxes, but flippers, bumpers, and slings are powered by induction coils that heat up with use and get weaker with heat, so ambient temperature and circulation matter in terms of how play changes within and across games, especially in tournaments where a lot of bodies crowd around keeping the same tables in constant use. So it’s knowing if you’re playing first on 3rd ball in a hot, stuffy room it can be worthwhile to flip a lot just to leave your opponent with weak flippers.

It’s knowing your opponents - Robert Gagno’s an autistic savant who does great on tables where blind orbits feed an upper flipper cause he can send balls around as fast as he wants and know exactly when to flip, Keith Elwin’s a route operator who’s spent hours a day for decades making every shot on all sorts of tables and is so great at cradling (well, at everything, but particularly) he can play even a 5-ball MB as a succession of 4 single balls with jackpots lit, Cayle George is a game designer who plays like a speedrunner, knows every rule and exploit (I’ve seen him get 14m on Ripley’s before the game realized his first ball even started). And knowing that, be able to estimate how they’ll do on any given table, and how risky a strategy you should take against them.

It’s even having a guess about opponents you don’t know. THIS one comes from a city that’s never even *seen* a Johnny Mnemonic, THAT one comes from a basement & garage league with a bunch of early solid states and a guy that collects Data East.

So.

As it stands pinball rulesets are mostly designed to offer a decent balance between newbie approachability and competitors’ balance/challenge (& collectors’ depth and replayability). They’ll have one big obvious feature that’s easy to trigger (or even automatic as a final ball “mercy” if you haven’t yet), and sets off a flashy mode, usually a multiball, with animation and sound cues and playfield toys, but a lot of times isn’t worth all that many points if you play it like you’re “supposed to”. (Competitors might ignore the jackpots and use the ball save and multiple balls to shoot risky shots advancing something else, or hold off and only trigger it with other modes started first, say.)

On top of that you’ll have enough modes scattered around the playfield that just flailing you’ll trigger *something*, ideally for keeping interest something different each time.

But the deeper ruleset, and the stuff that gets most polished in updates (pinball’s now like ‘90s PC games, where the final polished version comes as a update patch months after release, with lost causes ::cough cough Avengers cough:: left to wither on the vine) is for competitive players.

Pinball’s kind of in a renaissance right now, and with traditional arcades in decline or focusing on redemption games while hipster barcades open, educated disposable-income types return to the dense cities and bars compete for their patronage, leagues and tournaments are leading the way. So keeping that scene happy is a priority, which is why you have things like Stern calling top players in to advise on revamping the Star Trek ruleset (which at top levels used to favor starting a game, holding the ball still 40 seconds, making one shot and repeating SIX TIMES before you’d get Kobayashi Maru and start playing for real).