Craig Pullen, UK Pinball Champion, explains how to nudge the machine during play, to either save the ball or help it on its way to where you want.
Craig: Next we're going to talk about nudging. When you talk about pinball, nudging is synonymous with pinball really the moving of the machine so that's what nudging is when you're moving the machine what happen is if you move it too far then danger comes up on the screen so if you move it too much then what will eventually happen is you'll tilt okay and obviously that's not what we want because that means basically your ball is then dead but what you have got as you saw, when I was shaking the machine there is you do have a certain amount of movement that you can use so if the ball is going down either of these sides or anywhere in this area there a certain number of things you can do in order to try to save it.
So the ball is coming in these areas what you've got if we can get in a little bit closer you've got a series of rubber posts and what you want to try and do is nudge the machine so the ball comes of off this one, off of this one and then back out into the main area of the play field and the way that we do that is kind of working against the machine so if the ball is coming to this area I'm going to be pushing up so it's kind of it feels weird because you're kind of going out so you don't want the ball to go out but you want it to go out into that other post so the ball is kind of coming out. Same on this side so you want to be pushing out into that area so then the ball is kind of coming out.
The other thing that you can do because if you got a certain amount of movement is you can kind of move the machine a little bit so say for example if the ball is coming out of that sometimes I might move the machine out that way so then the ball kind of moves in so you can actually you do have a certain amount of movement in the ball. I'm just going to have to play a ball to just try and demonstrate that but it does require you know I move the machine quite a lot in order to try and regain control of the ball so I just play and just try demonstrate some nudging.
So did just see what I did there I moved the machine one way so I nearly had it out there I moved the machine in that direction but then I couldn't quite get the ball out so I'll just try and demonstrate again. So the ball is out of control I'm constantly moving the machine in order try to regain control once I make a clean shot but again I'm on the machine so I'm trying to do that in order to regain control so rather than choosing the in lane I'm trying to get the ball back out in the right manner so I'm constantly moving the machine but still not doing it enough in order to get a danger. So I'll try and play properly
I'm doing it a bit too much now but again I do move the machine around a lot.
In an ideal situation like the other skills you been learning you would never miss a shot but in reality we're human and we are going to miss shots the skill of nudging in order to regain control of the ball is really really important. So again there the ball is going near the out lane so I just nudged it slightly in order to regain control of the ball. So again I just touch the machine there to get it back in.
Another one in terms of nudging is the ball sometimes can be going absolutely dead straight down the middle so a lot of people ask me like what do you do in that situation when the ball is absolutely dead center, no amount of flipping is going to change that. So depending on the machine there is a certain amount of movement that you can on the machine you can slide the machine a little bit and thats called a slide save so for example in this situation the is going straight down the middle, its not, but if the ball is going straight down the middle you just slide the machine slightly in order to change the course of the machine you have to be really sensitive with it and you have to understand where that tilt is. Because basically in the machine you've got a tilt bob and sometimes it can be really really sensitive so you can't really touch the machine at all and then sometimes its a lot more loose and so you got a bit more give with it and that's another thing you have to feel out so nudging is a real essential skill but again like with accuracy the only real way to understand that is by playing it, and playing it, and playing it, until you understand where those are the right decisions are.
Andy: Just show us where the tilt bob is just to understand what that looks like.
Craig: So if we open up the coin door there's a tilt bob in here as we can see it's still swinging a little bit because I've been shoving the machine around and what we do is we can tighten it up or loosen it up in order to make it more sensitive or less sensitive.
