Flaherty's Arden Bowl: a best-game Friday and a bowling trophy

Most tournaments in this database are match play or strikes. Flaherty's Arden Bowl mostly runs best game, and that single choice changes everything about how the venue reads.

Nine of its eighteen events have been best-game formats: you buy entries, you post scores on a set of machines, the best one counts, and the top finishers go to a final. It suits a bowling center where people are already there for something else and can wander over between frames. It also means the venue has only 69 completed head-to-head games on record across a year of events, which makes it the thinnest data set of any active room in the metro and one of the more interesting ones.

The Friday afternoon slot

Nine events have started at 3:30pm on a Friday, four more at 4:30pm, and three at 7pm. That is an unusual window. Nothing else in the record runs a sanctioned tournament at half past three in the afternoon.

Matthew Sitko has directed fifteen of the eighteen, with Lou Ringgenberg taking the other three. Many of them run under the Stern Army banner, and there is a recurring thread called Battle for the Bowling Trophy that ties six of them together as a series stretching from January to September 2026.

Fields average 5.6 players. The biggest was Flippin' at Flaherty's #3 in July 2026 with fourteen, won by Michelle Ebert. The March best game drew eleven, and Flippin' at Flaherty's #2 in June had eight, taken by Brooke Hipsher.

The most recent event, the September Battle for the Bowling Trophy combined with a Pokémon launch party, is logged with a single entry. Launch-party events with best-game qualifying sometimes import that way before the full field posts, so it is worth checking the venue page rather than taking that number at face value.

The bank

There is no Pinball Map listing for Flaherty's, so no synced lineup exists on this site. What the tournament record shows is a modern Stern bank kept current:

A 2026 Pokémon and a 2025 Star Wars next to a 2007 Wheel of Fortune and a 2011 Rolling Stones is a good operator bank: new enough to draw launch parties, deep enough that not everybody has the newest game memorised.

Best game rewards a specific skill that match play does not. You are not managing a group or playing safe. You are trying to post one enormous number on a machine you may only get three cracks at. The Scores tab on each of those machine pages is directly useful for that, because it tells you what a winning number has looked like in competition rather than what the global record is.

Who has won

The list is short because the venue is young.

Sitko, IFPA 490th, has entered two and won two, including the March best-game final. Dave Potter and Lou Ringgenberg lead attendance with three events each.

A venue with 26 distinct players in its history is a venue where one good month changes the leaderboard completely. If you want your name near the top of something, this is a realistic target.

Going

Friday afternoons and early evenings. Best game, usually. Stern Army events show up on the calendar when a new game launches, and those tend to be the busiest.

The whole event history and whatever is scheduled next sits on the Flaherty's Arden Bowl page. If you want to see how your scores stack up on the machines they use, your profile's Scores tab pulls together everything the site knows about your numbers, including Insider Connected if you have linked it on the account page.

Other rooms directed by the same crowd: Bad Penny while it ran, and Stray Dog in Northeast.

More from the blog: where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota covers every other venue in the record, and following a tournament live explains what the event page shows while the rounds are running.

Featured image generated for this post. Flaherty's has no Pinball Map listing, so there is no synced machine lineup or photo for it on this site.