howto – Ignite Seattle

How To Not Suck At Pinball – Greg Dunlap

Pinball rules. Everyone loves to play. However everyone also loves to win, and the fact is pinball is hard. Luckily, getting better at pinball … not great but respectable … is actually pretty easy.

In this talk Greg Dunlap goes over the basics that will help you propel your game to the next level.

About Greg Dunlap

When Greg isn’t not at Shorty’s in Belltown, you can find him as a developer at Palantir.net. You can find Greg at his Web site, his Drupal blog and on Twitter @heyrocker.

You can find more about how to get better at pinball at Pinball.org and from the Pinball 101 video, both mentioned in Greg’s talk.

Fighting Dirty in Scrabble – Mehal Shah

Scrabble isn’t a game of who can get the best 6 letter words. It’s a game of points and squeezing 2 letter terms into corners. Mehal Shah takes us through clean (and sometimes dirty) ways to win at Scrabble.

Some of his tips include:

Thinking of Scrabble as a numbers game, instead of a word game
Learning how to double the value of every tile you play
Shutting down the board and holding on to every point you can get
Learning how to bluff effectively
Learning how to fake a bluff effectively
Using your opponents knowledge to trick them
Using foreign languages to psych out your opponent

About Mehal Shah

Mehal Shah is a software engineer at Amazon.com. You can find Mehal on his blog, on Twitter and his photos on Flickr. Mehal did a great post about his experience speaking at Ignite.