Bad Penny Pinball Arcade: two years of Friday nights, and what the record left behind
155 tournaments, 5,800 games and a late-eighties Williams bank that ate people alive. A look back at a room that was still growing when it stopped.
·4 min read·Tilt Stats
The Bad Penny Pinball Arcade page carries a badge that reads "Temporarily shut down". The last tournament in the record ran on 8 August 2025, a Friday, 41 players, won by Mike Jacobson, who had directed every single one of the 155 events that came before it.
Whether that badge ever comes off is not something this site can tell you. What it can tell you is what happened while the lights were on, because all of it is still here: 3,097 entries, 5,800 completed games, 263 different players across a little over two years.
That is a lot of pinball for a room that most of the metro thinks of as the newer place on the list.
Friday was the whole thing
A hundred and nine of the 155 events started at 7pm on a Friday. Twenty-three more went off at 7pm on a Thursday, which was the women's monthly. Twelve landed on Wednesdays and eleven on Saturday afternoons.
The Friday night ran under two names. It started as Friday Night Fight Club, which is what you will see on events through early 2024, and later became Bad Penny Friday Night Match Play. Same night, same director, same crowd. Group match play accounted for 126 of the 155 events, with eleven knockouts and eleven group brackets making up most of the rest.
Fields averaged twenty, and the last summer was the busiest the venue ever got:
Fifty-two events in a partial 2023, 65 in 2024, and 38 more in 2025 before it stopped in August. It was still growing when it stopped.
The bank was old and it was mean
Bad Penny never had a Pinball Map listing, so this site has no synced lineup for it. What it has instead is better for competitive purposes: every machine that actually took a tournament game, ranked by how many.
| Machine | Tournament games here |
|---|---|
| Taxi | 283 |
| Pharaoh | 250 |
| Big Guns | 208 |
| KISS | 197 |
| Swords of Fury | 181 |
| Black Knight 2000 | 156 |
| Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast | 156 |
| The Walking Dead | 156 |
A 1988 Williams Taxi at the top, a 1981 Pharaoh second, and Big Guns third. Add Jokerz! at 138 and Sorcerer at 131 and you have a picture of a floor built by someone who liked late-eighties Williams and was not embarrassed about it.
The modern side did its share. Game of Thrones, Elvira's House of Horrors, Godzilla, Ghostbusters and Star Trek each cleared 129 games.
Who won and who showed up
Matthew Sitko has the most titles with twelve, from 51 starts. Under him the list is unusually spread out, which is what you would expect from a venue whose defining event was a weekly open match play with a churning field:
| Player | Titles | Events played |
|---|---|---|
| Matthew Sitko | 12 | 51 |
| Elvira Khanaveral | 9 | 112 |
| Andy Fleming | 8 | 71 |
| Whitney Lindaas | 8 | 39 |
| Luke Nahorniak | 7 | 9 |
| Brooke Burns | 6 | 68 |
| Michelle Ebert | 6 | 44 |
| Matthew Sommerfeld | 6 | 37 |
Look at the Nahorniak line for a second. Nine events, seven wins. He did not come often, and when he did the night was effectively over.
Elvira Khanaveral played 112 events at Bad Penny, more than anyone, and won nine. Brent Schimnoski is second in attendance at 94, then Mike Jacobson himself at 86 with three wins, and Chris Adelmann and Andy Fleming tied at 71. Lindsey Koppelman and Brooke Burns both hit 68.
The Thursday women's monthly is its own thread running through the record. The last one, on 7 August 2025, pulled 22 players and went to Angie DonCarlos. Twenty-two is a healthy field for a monthly anywhere.
Why the record still matters
Venue data does not expire when a room closes. If you played here, those games still count toward your machine scores, your head-to-head records and your rating history. A win over somebody on Big Guns in 2024 is still part of the reason the scouting report thinks you are good on Williams from that era.
It also means the Bad Penny crowd did not vanish. Look at where those names show up now and you will find most of them at LITT, at Broken Clock, at Stray Dog and at Full Tilt Tavern. Sitko now directs at Flaherty's Arden Bowl.
The venue page has the full tournament list, all 155 of them, and the arena report still builds machine leaderboards out of those 5,800 games. It is a fair snapshot of what a good weekly looked like in the Twin Cities between 2023 and 2025.
If the room reopens, the numbers pick up where they left off.
More from the blog: where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota covers the rest of the circuit, and head-to-head records is how you work out who on that list has your number.
Featured image generated for this post. Bad Penny has no Pinball Map listing, so there is no synced lineup or photo for it on this site.