Hello and welcome to our live coverage from the Roundhouse of the Vancouver Flipout Expo 2018.
We’ll be here right across the three days of the show, and even the set up on Thursday, bringing you all the action from this, the largest Canadian pinball event of the calendar.
The venue for this year’s show is the Roundhouse Community & Arts Center in downtown Vancouver.  While previous shows had been held at the Holiday Inn hotel, also in downtown Vancouver, this year the show needed more space and so moved to the main exhibition hall at the Roundhouse.
The new home of the Roundhouse in Vancouver
It’s a ten-minute walk from the previous venue to the new one, but the Roundhouse certainly offers lots more space at the cost of not having your accommodation in the same building as the show.
Thursday
The actual show doesn’t open to the public until 10am on Friday but the tournaments can run for somewhatlonger, so the qualifying rounds began on Thursday at 4pm, even as the rest of the show was still being set up.
Tournament qualifying games
Classic tournament qualifying
More Classic games being played on Thursday afternoon
Some of the plaques for the winners
The tournaments are held on the right side of the hall, while the central and left areas are where all the free play machines are located along with the vendor tables.  Most of these machines were set up by the time the tournament qualifying games began, but there were still a few more to be added.
A few more machines to be added to these rows of classic machines
Lots more electromechanical pinballs
There are plenty of newer machines to play too
More newer titles
Among the newest titles at the show are Thunderbirds from Homepin, Deadpool Pro from Stern Pinball and Pirates of the Caribbean from Jersey Jack Pinball.  Both Mike Kalinowski from Homepin and Jack Guarnieri from Jersey Jack Pinball are appearing at the Vancouver Flipout Expo.  In fact, Mike had arrived a couple of days earlier and was helping at the show by checking the machines were working and managing all the machine keys.
Thunderbirds from Homepin
Mike Kalinowski sorts out the

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