The Chill Maneuver is a play technique in
pinball. As the name implies, it's basically knowing when to do nothing as your ball heads straight for the
drain (aka
SDTM). The natural impulse is to start wildly hammering the flippers hoping... hoping... for what? I dunno. But the Chill Maneuver means hands off the
flipper buttons and letting the ball hit the
post in front of the drain and bounce back into play. If the ball does bounce off the post and you're
panic flipping, odds are the ball will simply bounce off the bottom of your activated flipper and go back into the drain.
Of course the Chill Maneuver can only be performed if there's a post in front of the drain.
The term seems to have originated in the
Detroit area, and brought to light in 1994 on
rec.games.pinball by poster Dave Hollinsworth.
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