Chris Frame won the biggest field of the Minnesota season and then stopped playing
A 101-player win in May, the second-highest IFPA rating in the state, a winning lifetime record against the No. 1, and no tracked entry since July 8.
·4 min read·Tilt Stats
On May 2 at LITT Pinball Bar, 101 players entered the Kentucky Derby Tournament. It was the largest field Minnesota produced this season by a distance. Chris Frame won it.
Two months later, on July 8, he won the Blainbrook Matchplay #2 MAX finals. Since then, nothing. His entry streak reads zero months.
He is eleventh in the 2026 standings on 162.16 points from 18 counted events, and he got there having played less of the calendar than most of the names around him.
The strongest player in the state who is not named Nahorniak
Frame's IFPA rating is 1802.3. In this year's top 25 only the No. 1 rates higher. His Match Play rating of 1744 is third.
Rating measures how good you are. World rank, where he sits at #610, measures points banked. Frame's rating says he is a top-two Minnesota player; his ranking says he does not chase enough big events to prove it on paper.
The career file backs the rating: 184 tracked tournaments, 45 wins, 107 podiums, a 46.2% game win rate in the 93rd percentile of the ranked field, and an average finish in the 97th.
He owns the No. 1
Here is the record that makes him unusual. Against Luke Nahorniak, a world top-20 player and this year's runaway state leader, Frame is 59-48 with seven ties across 114 games.
That is 54.8% against the best player in Minnesota over a sample big enough to be real. Nobody else in the state holds a mark like it. The full head-to-head is here.
The rest of his long-form rivalries sit in the same range:
| Opponent | Record | Games | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam Turgeson | 195-174-1 | 370 | 52.8% |
| Bryan Moen | 171-150 | 321 | 53.3% |
| Trevor Klungseth | 166-117-2 | 285 | 58.6% |
| Jack Copeland | 36-12 | 48 | 75.0% |
| Phil Frazier | 82-31-1 | 114 | 72.4% |
| Zac Juelich | 22-9 | 31 | 71.0% |
Winning records against every single one of them, including two players who have shared a room with him for 300 games apiece.
The handful of names who trouble him: Ben Granger at 6-12, Neil Graf at 6-8, Tony Midtling at 8-10-2, and Mark Larson, who is 6-4 up on him over ten games.
Pinbot, and a 95% record on Freddy
| Machine | Score | Win rate | Games |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freddy: A Nightmare On Elm Street | 0.897 | 95.2% | 8 |
| KISS | 0.789 | 88.5% | 10 |
| Pinbot | 0.781 | 81.7% | 33 |
| Eight Ball | 0.776 | 80.5% | 18 |
| Doctor Who | 0.755 | 80.6% | 22 |
| Nip-It | 0.748 | 80.0% | 14 |
| The Munsters | 0.753 | 80.3% | 11 |
The 0.897 on Freddy is the highest qualifying machine score in this year's entire top 25. Eight games is a small sample and it is still seven wins and a second.
Pinbot at 33 games is the one to take seriously: 21 firsts, eight seconds, three thirds, one fourth. Twenty-two games of Doctor Who at 80.6% puts him in the argument with Klungseth and Moen on the state's most contested title.
And then Nip-It. Fourteen games, 80% win rate, a 0.748 score. Nip-It is the machine that Nahorniak has never won a game on in ten tries and that Klungseth sits at 50.9% across 19. Frame wins four out of five on it. If you want one explanation for the Nahorniak head-to-head, it might be that.
His weak list is short:
- Monster Bash, 0.386 over 10 games
- Bobby Orr's Power Play, 0.478 over 34 games
- Lost World, 0.506 over 12 games
- JAWS, 0.533 over 12 games
Thirty-four games of Bobby Orr's Power Play at exactly 50% is the most reliable negative number he has, and Monster Bash at 38.3% over ten is the steepest.
The wins
- Kentucky Derby Tournament #5, 101 players, May 2026
- Blainbrook 2023 Finale, 42 players, December 2023
- Blainbrook XVI, 40 players, December 2022
- Blainbrook Matchplay the Ocho, 39 players, September 2022
- NPC Amazing Race Qualifying, 34 players, June 2024
Forty-three outright wins and two shared firsts. His 2026 alone includes the Kentucky Derby, Blainbrook Steeeerikes out of 27 in May, and Summer Strikes #2 out of 25 the week after.
Where he went
His last tracked result is July 8. Before that his form was running at 87% over ten games against a 68% baseline, the third-hottest reading in this year's top 25.
A player leaves the calendar for all kinds of reasons and the data does not know any of them. What the data does say is that he banked 162 points from 18 events before stepping away, and that a player with his rating who played a full 20-event season would be much higher than eleventh.
If you draw him
Take him to Monster Bash, which is his one clear hole. Bobby Orr's Power Play if you have a decent record there yourself, since 34 games have him at break-even.
Everything else is a bad idea, and Nip-It is the worst idea of all. Run the scouting report against the actual floor before you commit to anything. The rest of the 2026 top 25 is here.