Sixty-five players, thirteen machines: Broken Clock runs the tightest room on the list

Thirteen machines. Sixty-five players. A hundred and eight games.

Every other event in this top ten had at least forty titles to hide behind. Broken Clock Brewing Cooperative had thirteen, and that single fact shaped everything about how the day went. You could not get a machine nobody in your group had played. By round six, half the room had been on Buck Rogers twice and knew exactly which shot to avoid.

The numbers

Broken Clock 3-Strike Tournament: Super Series Part Deux ran on September 13, 2025, organized by Aileen Beno-Lietz. Three-strike group knockout, thirteen rounds.

Sixty-one rated players out of sixty-five is a high ratio for a brewery three-strike, and it is a big part of why the value came out where it did. This was a Super Series stop, so the regulars turned up.

Steven Skochinski's night

Steven Skochinski survived all thirteen rounds, taking a non-strike finish in eleven of his thirteen games. He was ranked around 1,785 in the world that month and has since climbed inside the top 600. Across 106 tracked events he has twenty-four wins, and this is the most valuable of them.

Paul Tvedt in second is the result that should stick. He has 228 tracked events across two years and twelve wins, all of them earned the hard way, and he went eleven rounds deep here against a field with Keith Hanson, Louis Acre-Kendall and David Marcis in it.

The machines

Here is the whole floor, in order of use:

That is a genuinely good thirteen-game lineup. Two brand-new Sterns, a Spooky, a pair of nineties Williams that still get respect, and two fast classics to keep the rounds moving. Eight Ball Deluxe is the most-played machine in the entire Minnesota dataset with 969 tracked games, which tells you something about where these games live.

Broken Clock has since swapped some of it out. The current listing has fourteen machines including a 2026 Pokémon and a 2026 Transformers, with Bram Stoker's Dracula and Space Shuttle in the mix.

The long ones

• 38m14s on JAWS in round nine, with Steven Skochinski and Paul Tvedt both surviving while Rob Koppelman and Louis Acre-Kendall took strikes. The eventual first and second, through together.
• 37m38s on Austin Powers in round six, David Marcis and Skochinski through.
• 36m57s on Red & Ted's Road Show in round five.
• 36m35s on Elvira's House of Horrors in round six.
• 35m57s on JAWS again in round seven, Keith Hanson and Skochinski through.

Skochinski appears in three of the five longest games of the night. Whatever else was happening, he was not drawing quick ones.

The fastest was 5 minutes 50 seconds on Eight Ball Deluxe in round three.

The upsets

• Kyle Nordstrom, ranked around 11,300, beat David Marcis, then #280, on Dungeons & Dragons in round two. He had already beaten Daniel Hammond, then #486, on Spin Out in round one. Two top-500 scalps inside two rounds.
• Josh Trippz, around 14,400, beat Bob Cahill on D&D in round one.
• Tim Weaver, around 13,100, took three across rounds three, four and five, on Eight Ball Deluxe, Elvira's and Star Trek: TNG.
• Matias Parada, around 9,700 then, beat Keith Hanson, around 619, on Buck Rogers in round nine. Parada finished equal sixth.

The rivalry

Steven Skochinski and Paul Tvedt met five times in one night and finished first and second. Skochinski took the night 2-1 with the rest going to shared strike positions.

Their all-time record across fourteen events is 36 games, 20-10 to Skochinski. He is the higher-ranked player and the record says so, but Tvedt keeps turning up and keeps going deep, which is most of the job.

Other repeat pairings: Rob Koppelman vs Paul Tvedt four meetings, Zach LaVone vs Steven Skochinski four meetings with Skochinski taking both decisive ones, and Jason Lynch vs Matias Parada four meetings.

Scores worth writing down

Spin Out, a 1975 Gottlieb, is the only machine at the event where raw scores got entered, and the spread is instructive. Jon Sieker put up 63,820. Chad Lietz, who finished equal sixth overall, managed 27,340. The gap between a good Spin Out game and an average one on an EM with no ball save is enormous, and it is entirely about nudging.

The venue

Broken Clock has hosted thirty-five tracked events and taken 1,386 entries since September 2023. It runs a monthly three-strike that regularly pulls forty to sixty, including a 59-player March 2026 edition. For a brewery with a fourteen-machine row, that is a serious operation.

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The full top ten

Ranked by the WPPR value paid to the winner, which folds field size, field strength and TGP into one number. Recurring events appear once, at their best edition.

1. Last Chance at Lukie's 2025: the biggest pinball tournament in the Minnesota data
2. Last Chance at Lukie's 2023: thirty-seven players, 233 games and a year-end scramble
3. The NPC Amazing Race: fifty machines, sixty-nine players and a Friday night that ran past midnight
4. Eighty-five players at LITT: the October 2023 open that set the template
5. One hundred and one players: the Kentucky Derby Tournament at LITT
6. Thirty players, 188% TGP: the NPC Spring Classic and the value of playing all day
7. The day LITT opened: 87 players, 261 games and twenty-eight people's first tournament
8. Sixty-five players, thirteen machines: Broken Clock runs the tightest room on the list (this post)
9. Sam and Jared's farewell party: fifty-seven people show up to say goodbye
10. NPC opening day: sixty-eight people in a brand new room, and Neil Graf wins eleven of twelve

Every number here comes from the tracked Match Play data behind Tilt Stats. Tournament, player, machine and venue pages update as new results land, so the live figures will drift from the ones written down above.