As an avid pinball player trying to improve, I’ve been watching some videos and reading up on skills I should practice. One of them is referred to here (Skills for the Pinball Wizard) as the “Flip Trap,” and the site has a crude animation of what it is; this technique is also seen at 2:30 in this video: Pinball Love - YouTube.
Essentially (for those that don’t want to follow the links), the idea is that the ball is coming down and you press the flipper button and bring the flipper up to “meet” the ball; the ball and flipper should arrive at the flipper’s highest point at the same time, I guess.
The first site I linked to describes it as:
"Hit the ball so that it collides with the flipper just as the flipper reaches the point where the flipper is fully extended. If you hit the ball such that it meets the flipper just before it stops extending, the energy imparted by the flipper hit will cancel out the momentum the ball has and the ball will stop right on the flipper where you can trap it. "
Is that really what’s going on? That the flipper is imparting an equal and opposite force on the ball and there’s absolutely no bounce at all to the ball when it hits the flipper? If so, doesn’t this depend on the speed of the ball coming down (since the speed of the flipper moving up to meet the ball is not controllable, I don’t think)?
That’s not really what’s going on. You can cancel out momentum, but you can’t cancel out energy: If it were just a matter of the collision, the ball would react the same way that a baseball does to the bat.
At a guess, what’s happening is that the ball is rolling, and so after the collision, it ends up shedding most of its energy via friction with the table, since it’s no longer moving the right way for its roll. But that’s just a guess, since I’ve never studied the problem in depth.
This has the kind of trap I originally referenced at 0:30.
At 0:35 there’s another kind of trap in which the flipper is lowered as it comes into contact with the ball - this one makes more sense to me, like catching an egg by bringing your hands down as you catch it.
As a former pinball player in college, yes you “catch” the ball by extending the flipper all the way up and then letting it drop just as the ball hits it.
Disclaimer: This is just my intuition, and I have no scientific basis for any of this.
If you were to just leave the flipper extended, the ball would bounce right off of it. Perhaps what’s going on here is that, by timing the flipper just so, it’s meeting the ball at a much higher point in its arc. Instead of meeting the ball head on, it’s imparting angular momentum on the ball, causing it to veer sideways rather than bouncing off of the flipper.
ETA: I’ve done this many times, but purely by chance. I never knew this was a practiced technique until I read this thread.
An important consideration is that the ball and the flipper don’t necessarily meet at a right angle. Depending on the timing, the ball will bounce off the flipper or can be caught into a resting place where it can be aimed by the shooter. The timing is everything and the fact that the flippers are being controlled digitally (on or off) while the player is thinking analytically (how hard I hit the the flipper button should make a difference) is what makes it such an amazing and frustrating game. Not to mention that you are always trying to defy gravity.
The ball can be caught. It may also do some strange things when you think you have caught it. A pinball is solid stainless steel. There are no markings. Yet, it can be spinning in ways that are imperceptible to the human eye and will go in a direction that seem illogical. That’s why the ball seems to be doing crazy things or makes you think the machine is rigged against you.
I own an arcade pinball machine and have the manual. It is possible to set a machine up to be as forgiving or as difficult as you want. Changes in the setup can make a significant difference in what the machine will reward you. Still, basically, it is reaction against gravity. There is skill and technique involved.
I love pinball. To me it is better than any video game.
The rubber on the flipper absorbs a lot of energy so I think that’s all that’s happening. Catch it just right and the ball will sit on the end of the extended flipper. A little off and it will bounce or roll down the flipper. A little more off and you’ll propel the ball.
“I love pinball. To me it is better than any video game.”
The skill in the catch is knowing exactly when to release your flipper.When the ball hits it, you can impart a little bit of counter energy - which sort of stuns the ball. In this case the flipper will return to rest and leave the ball behind for a moment, this can be useful for for your next shot, when you use, for example, the left flipper to strike the ball in such as way that it hits a target on the left side of the table.
That action is very counter tuitive, you look at a pin table and logically you think that you can only hit right hand targets with he left hand flipper, but you can set things up to use the left flipper to strike left hand targets and channels, yet if you time it just a tiny bit later and let the ball follow the flipper to the rest position, then you are aiming for the right hand targets.
It’s no less a technique that can be practiced and perfected than Christiano Ronaldo being able to receive a 70yd pass and just catch it on his outstretched foot.
