3rd Lair: twelve classics in the back of a skatepark

Of all the places in the record that host sanctioned pinball, 3rd Lair is the one that needs the most explaining. It is a skatepark and skate shop on Florida Avenue South, and it has twelve pinball machines, and not one of them was built after 1986.

That is not a curated retro corner. That is the entire bank, and it is the most committed classic lineup in the metro.

The twelve

High Speed (Williams, 1986), Pin-Bot (Williams, 1986), Special Force (Bally, 1986), Bounty Hunter (Gottlieb, 1985), an Eight Ball Deluxe LE (Bally, 1982), Elektra (Bally, 1981), Stellar Wars (Williams, 1979), Totem (Gottlieb, 1979), Xenon (Bally, 1979), Dragon (Gottlieb, 1978), Mata Hari (Bally, 1978) and Surfer (Gottlieb, 1976).

Most games are fifty cents. There is a change machine that takes ones and fives. PAR Pinball operates the bank, and the floor is open to the public, which is worth saying plainly because people assume a skatepark means a membership desk and a waiver.

In tournament play the leaders are Aztec and Stellar Wars at 38 games apiece, then Surfer and High Speed at 35, Xenon at 34, Elektra at 31 and Special Force at 30. Mata Hari and Bounty Hunter have 26 each. Aztec, Jet Spin and Jungle Princess have since rotated off the floor, so the current twelve and the all-time list do not line up exactly.

Those are small numbers next to the hundreds you see at Blainbrook, and they are small for a good reason: the venue has only been running tournaments since October 2025.

A short and busy history

Twenty-four events in roughly eight months, from October 2025 through June 2026. Nineteen of them were group match play. Fields average eight players, which makes this the most intimate tournament in the metro by a wide margin.

The Sunday afternoon monthly is the main one. 3rd PLair monthly November is the biggest field the venue has seen at 24 players, won by Daniel Hammond. March had 16 and went to Phil Frazier, February had 13 and Eric Fryc took it, and January had 13 with Jack Copeland winning.

There is a second thread running alongside it. Erika Corio has directed ten events here, most of them womxn's tournaments: the December 2025 edition drew twelve and went to Erin Bjork, and the March 2026 one was won by Michelle Ebert. Phil Frazier has run the other fourteen.

The record goes quiet after the June 2026 sizzler, which Frazier won with a field of seven. Whether that is a summer pause or something longer, the venue page will show the next event the moment one is scheduled.

Who wins in a field of eight

Frazier is the venue's best player and its most frequent director, and he has won more than half the events he has entered. That is easier to do in a field of eight than in a field of fifty, and it is still six trophies.

Mary Palmer leads attendance with fourteen events and no wins yet, which is the kind of line that turns around fast at a venue this size.

The interesting thing about small fields is what they do to your IFPA-adjusted rating. A four-round match play with eight players does not move much, but the machine data it produces is dense: you play everyone, on everything, repeatedly. Twenty-four events here have produced 346 completed games across 54 players, and most of those games are on machines that barely appear anywhere else in the state.

What to study

If you have never played competitively on a bank this old, the honest advice is to go once without entering anything. Put ten dollars through Xenon and Stellar Wars and find out how they behave. The machine pages for each game carry a playbook tab where strategy notes and tutorial video have been collected, and a scores tab showing what has actually been put up on that exact machine.

Your profile's All machines tab will show you whether you have any history on games from this era. Most players who came up on modern Sterns do not, and there is no substitute for flipping them.

For the group itself, the scouting report handles the comparison, though with twelve machines and eight players it is more of a confirmation than a revelation. The arena report has the full per-machine breakdown.

Why it is worth the trip

There are not many rooms left where the average machine is 45 years old and somebody is running a sanctioned tournament on them once a month. Blainbrook is the other one in the metro, and it has 48 machines including modern Sterns. 3rd Lair has twelve and they are all classics.

Small field, cheap games, an unusual setting, and a bank you cannot practice on anywhere else. Check the venue page for the next date.

More from the blog: where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota covers the rest of the state, and pinball ratings explained walks through what the scores on this page are built from.

Featured image generated for this post. The machine lineup comes from the 3rd Lair listing on Pinball Map; if a game arrives or leaves, updating it there updates it here.