Play Meter

(continued from page 16)
getting to be great now. Any place you go, you put
out a foosball table and these high school kids will
go crazy over it.
PLAY METER: What's the life of a player or can
that really be established now? Say a guy starts
playing foosball in high school, how long does he
play until he gets disenchanted or whatever?
HOINES: A lot of them do quit when they get
married. This happens quite a lot but not all the
time. This is generally true-quit coming to the
bars when they get married, to play pool or
anything. We're generally catering to the bars,
thus to the kids 18 to 25, somewhere in there, and
they're generally all single. But I don't think there's
any way to determine the life of a player. Thez:e's no
set time that a guy's going to quit playing for the
fun of it. He might quit playing in tournaments and
travelling around the country when he gets older.
But for the fun of it-I think eventually you're
going to see guys forty or fifty years old playing
foosball. When I get that old, I'll probably still be
playing.
PLAY METER: What else can you do, speaking
from an operator's stand-point to improve the play
on foosbaJi tables. Are players very particular
about the condition of the table?
HOINES: Oh yes. You have to keep your table
clean and keep all the men tight, keep the same
kind of men on the table that the table came with,
keep good balls on the table, good clean balls that
aren't out of round or anything like that. You have
to keep your rods straight-you can hurt your
wrists with a bent rod. And it's the guys that are
the best that are going to hurt their wrists because
they put more power on the ball. You can hurt your
wrist too, if a bearing is dragging, if it's not clean. It
can slow your shot down and you might get beat on
a table where you shouldn't. So upkeep does make a
lot of difference, especially to those players that
take it seriously.
PLAY METER: Do foosball players play for money
between themselves?
HOINES: Not too often. Foosball is not like pool. It
happens once in a while but not very often really.
Generally the money part is tournaments.
PLAY METER: Do foosball players play for money
between themselves?
HOINES: Not too often. Foosball is not like pool. It
happens once in a while but not very often really.
Generally the money part is tournaments.
PLAY METER: Then they don't gamble between
each other.
HOINES: Very seldom. The most gambling
involved is loser pays; that helps interest-loser
has to pay. But that's the only gambling element
there is really.
PLA Y METER: So they play for glory instead of
money?
HOINES: And just for the plain fun of it. It's a
highly sociable game. It's got a lot of action in it but
there's only one guy getting action too a lot of
~ times, so the other three can joke and talk if they
• don't worry about winning that much. So it makes it
~ a highly sociable game where you can get to know
~ strangers. Also it's very easy for a person to go ask
=
34
a stranger to playa game of foosball. And after a
while you get to know that stranger just by playing
him a couple of games. You ask him about a few
shots and you've got something in common. I've
gotten to know quite a number of people through
foosball just by asking them to play the game. Pool
doesn't really work that way. You just don't go ask
anyone to playa game of pool. You generally have
cliques that come down and play pretty much
among themselves.
Also foosball is pretty much a partner game. So
it's a good mixer really for the girls as well as the
guys. I think that's why a lot of the girls hang
around foosball tables, more so than the guys,
because they figure a guy might ask them to play or
something.
PLAY METER: Why is it that when you travel to
different parts of the country, you'll find that the
players are addicted to one and only one kind of
foosball table? Like up here, it's either Tournament
Soccer or Deutschmeister; on the Atlantic Coast it's
the Rene Pierre; up in the New York area it might
be Irving Kaye's Hurricane; and if we were in
Texas, it'd be Tornado or Dynamo. Why is that?
HOINES: Foosball's just been growing in the last
three years and I think it's all part of a spin-off on
Tournament Soccer, the big Tournament Soccer
promotion. But to a lot of people that are novice
players , foosball is foosball and they're going to
play it on any kind of a table for six months or so
until they find out that the table has no challenge to
it, that there's only one or two shots to learn. Then
finally there is no promotion, no local promotion like
tournaments to keep it going, and it'll just die out in
six months or so.
PLA Y METER: In these areas I've mentioned
though, there is promotion. It's been most
successful and it's keeping the players loyal to those
particular games. But the question is, why is a
player so "spoiled," if you will, by only one game?
Why is he so hesitant, to play all the other games?
Can't he adapt his game easily to any table?
HOINES: What happens is this. You get so you can
play one table well, one certain table that you can
shoot all your shots on. Then you get on another
table and it takes quite a little while to
learn those same shots on that table. So this
player doesn't want to start all over again to
develop his shots; he would rather go back to the
original table.
PLA Y METER: Do you think it would be a good
idea for foosball manufacturers to standardize a lot
of the important features of the game so that there
wouldn't be so many vast differences in tables and
the players could more easily adapt to the different
kinds of tables?
HOINES: I think eventually this is what's going to
have to happen to really keep the game going across
the nation. Then you'd have to have only one
promotion a year where if you have tables which
are quite a lot different from one another, each
individual manufacturer is going to have to promote
his table through tournaments. Of course , they'd
have to select one table over all the rest to play the
tournament on, too.
(continued on page 42)