One hundred and one players: the Kentucky Derby Tournament at LITT

Every tournament in this scene has been chasing a hundred players for years. On Derby Day 2026, LITT Pinball Bar got 101.

No other tournament in the tracked Minnesota data has broken three figures. The closest anybody has come is LITT's own grand opening at 87, and its October 2023 open at 85. This one cleared both by a full table of players.

The numbers

Kentucky Derby Tournament #5 ran on Saturday, May 2, 2026, starting at three in the afternoon. Eight fair-strike, groups of four scoring 0/1/1/2 and groups of three scoring 0/1/2, until one player is left.

Eight strikes is a generous allowance and it is what makes a hundred-player field survivable. It also means thirteen rounds and eighty-four hours of clocked pinball. The people still standing at midnight had played thirteen games.

Chris Frame's day

Chris Frame won nine of his thirteen games. Ranked around 636 that month with a career best of 42, he has 188 tracked events and 45 wins, and by 2026 he had become the most consistently dangerous player at LITT who is not named Nahorniak.

John Snyder finishing third is the result that should have made the room stop. He was ranked around 14,200 in the world going in, had thirty-two tracked events to his name and had never won one. He took 26.11 WPPR points home, easily the biggest haul of his career, and he did it by winning six of his thirteen games in a field that included half the state's top thirty. He is inside the top 7,000 now, and that result is most of the reason.

The final

Round thirteen, three players left, Cirqus Voltaire. Chris Frame, Mark Larson, John Snyder. Forty-four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Frame first, Larson second, Snyder third.

A 1997 Bally with a ringmaster that eats people is a fine place to end a hundred-player tournament. It is also a mean one: Cirqus averaged 33 minutes a game all day, one of the slowest machines on the floor.

The machines

Forty-two machines took games, and the top of the list is a snapshot of what LITT looked like in spring 2026.

Centaur and Embryon are the two fastest machines on the list and both are 1981 Ballys. A fourteen-minute four-player game on Centaur means somebody drained a lot of balls very quickly, which is exactly what Centaur does to people who have not learned to nudge it.

Winchester Mystery House being the most-played game in the building is the kind of detail that dates a tournament perfectly. Barrels of Fun's 2025 title was six months old and everybody wanted a go.

The long ones

• 53m52s on Pulp Fiction in round eight, a four-player with Cori Korpela coming out on top.
• 48m11s on Scooby-Doo (CE) in round two, Nathan Reardon first.
• 44m33s on Cirqus Voltaire in round thirteen, the final.
• 42m35s on Star Wars: Fall of the Empire in round three, James Skelley through.
• 38m40s on Medieval Madness in round five.

The quickest was 8 minutes 18 seconds on Meteor in round eleven, which is a 1979 Stern doing what it does.

The upsets

A hundred-player field is an upset factory, because half the room has never played a tracked event and the other half has a rating.

• Thomas Schneider, ranked around 29,100, beat Luke Mutchler, around 2,850, on Embryon in round one. A 26,000-place gap on the very first game of the day.
• Nick Ledin, around 22,300, took three: Jack Copeland on Meteor in round seven, Leonard Passofaro on Pokémon in round five, and Chad Lietz on Bride of Pinbot in round two.
• Jackson Benda beat Leonard Passofaro on Medieval Madness in round three.
• Jim Hartley, ranked around 1,018, lost to two different players ranked outside 13,000 on the same afternoon, on Looney Tunes (CE) and Pokémon. Some days the machine picks you.

The rivalries

Chris Frame and Mark Larson played each other nine times on the day and Frame took it 6-3. Their entire tracked history together is ten games across two events, which means nine of the ten happened in a single Saturday. The finish was 1-2 in that order, so the day series and the tournament agreed.

Elsewhere:

• James Skelley vs Chris Frame: four meetings, 4-0 Frame. All-time it is 11-4 Frame across nine events.
• James Skelley vs Mark Larson: six meetings, split 1-1 with ties. All-time 15-6 to Larson.
• Nicholas Brannan vs Zac Juelich: three meetings, 2-1 Brannan.
• James Skelley vs Leah Odegard: three meetings, 3-0 Skelley.

Two debuts

Adam Sippl and Brittani Wright played their first tracked tournaments here. Wright beat Kaitlyn Schick on Jim Henson's Labyrinth in round five for an 18,000-place upset on her way out.

The record that will be hard to beat

One hundred and one entries is the ceiling for a room of this size. LITT ran 341 tracked events between October 2023 and August 2026, pulling 10,623 total entries, and this is the only one that went past a hundred. If it happens again it will probably be another Derby Day.

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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 (this post)
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
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.