Blainbrook: Wednesday nights in Blaine, decided on machines older than most of the players

Most tournament venues have a signature machine. Blainbrook has a signature decade.

Of the fifteen most-played machines in five years of Wednesday nights at this bowling alley in Blaine, fourteen were built before 1993, and ten of them before 1983. Eight Ball Deluxe leads with 773 tournament games. A 1977 Williams Hot Tip is second with 693. Third is Comet at 691, then Nugent at 676 and Silverball Mania at 658.

The room also has a Pokémon Premium, a JAWS Premium, an Elton John PE and a Cactus Canyon remake. They just do not decide many matches. That is the thing to understand about the Blainbrook tournament before you enter one.

Five years, 281 events

The first tracked tournament here ran on 1 September 2021. Since then the venue has put on 281 of them, drawing 6,310 entries and generating 12,755 completed games across 233 distinct players.

Two hundred and three of those events started at 7pm on a Wednesday, another thirty at 8pm the same night. If you ever hear somebody say "Blainbrook night", that is what they mean. Adam Turgeson has run 270 of the 281.

Volume by year has been steady with one dip: fifteen in a partial 2021, 51 in 2022, 31 in 2023, 68 in 2024, 64 in 2025, and 52 through mid-September 2026.

The format rotation

Group match play is the default with 144 events, followed by 68 group knockouts and 26 group brackets. What makes the calendar here more interesting than a pure match play room is the side stuff: twelve target tournaments, eight straight PinGolf events, three golf brackets, three Amazing Races, and a handful of ladders and best-game formats. The most recent PinGolf, Final Fall PinGolf, ran on a Saturday at noon with four players. Nobody is pretending those are the main event. They are a reason to come back on a day that is not Wednesday.

The biggest fields in venue history:

A typical Wednesday now runs 25 to 31. The recent Matchplay #9 banks night had 31 in qualifying and a 14-player final, both won by Turgeson. Fall Strikes #2 in September had 25 and went to Chris Adelmann.

The four who own it

Then a gap. Fifth place is Lance Bolson with eight.

Four players have taken 164 of the titles at this venue between them. Chris Frame's line is the efficient one: 38 wins from 149 starts, a shade over 25 percent, and he is the highest IFPA-ranked of the four at 515th. Klungseth has the most starts of anyone at 225 and converts about one in seven.

The attendance list past those four is a roll call of people who have simply never missed a Wednesday: Joshua Anderson at 196 events, Brad Steinke at 173, Keith Bittner at 154, Phil Frazier at 141, Rich Johnston at 137, Bill Wilson at 134, Gary Gazda at 128.

Visiting talent shows up for the bigger nights. Luke Nahorniak has six wins in 42 starts here despite running his own venue on the far side of the metro.

Studying for a classic-heavy bank

If your competitive record is built on modern Sterns, Blainbrook will find that out quickly. The machines that have taken the most tournament games in the past twelve months are The Amazing Spider-Man (196), Silverball Mania (190), Paragon (187), Nugent (186), Hot Tip (185), Firepower (170), Comet (170), Eight Ball Deluxe (167) and Bride of Pinbot (147).

Nine games. That is most of a Wednesday night right there, and none of them has a mode start button or a tutorial video that runs thirty minutes.

What works instead is reading the local record. Each of those machine pages has a Scores tab showing what has actually been put up on that machine in competition, which on a 1978 Bally is a far more useful benchmark than a global high score list. The Paragon page is a good example: the numbers there are from this room, on this machine, under tournament rules.

Your own All machines tab, reachable from the players directory, gives you a pairwise score on every game you have played in a tracked event. Sort it, find the classics, and be honest about the game count next to each one. A 0.72 score over three games is not a plan.

The scouting report narrows it further: pick Blainbrook, add the people in your group, and it works out where your edge is against those specific players on the machines currently in the building. For the whole picture, the arena report lists every machine with a leaderboard.

Practical notes

It is a bowling alley. Twenty-four lanes, a bar next to the game room, and the pinball on the south side. Games are in a room that Pinball Map describes, accurately, as nostalgic-looking. The listing also warns that some of the machines in the bottom right may need turning on, which tells you something about the character of the place.

Wednesday at 7pm. Bring quarters for practice, and read a rule sheet for something built in 1979.

More venue write-ups: LITT Pinball Bar, Northstar Pinball Collective, and 3rd Lair, which is the only other room in the metro with a classic bank this committed.

More from the blog: where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota is the tour of every other room in the state, and pinball ratings explained unpacks the numbers on the leaderboards above.

Featured photo from the Blainbrook listing on Pinball Map. The machine lineup on the venue page comes from the same listing.