The day LITT opened: 87 players, 261 games and twenty-eight people's first tournament
October 14, 2023, LITT Pinball Bar opens its doors with a Venom launch party and eighty-seven people sign up. Three players went 6-for-6, twenty-eight played their first tracked tournament, and a scene got a new center of gravity.
·5 min read·Tilt Stats
Opening day tournaments are usually a mess. Half the room has never played competitively, the machines have not been set up for tournament play yet, and the person running it is also the person trying to get the bar open. LITT Pinball Bar put eighty-seven people through 261 games on October 14, 2023 and made it look routine.
It is the seventh-biggest tournament in the Minnesota data and the second-biggest field ever recorded in the state.
The numbers
LITT Grand Opening / Venom Launch Party used max matchplay, which pairs people head to head and keeps feeding them games. Everybody got six.
| Players | 87 (69 IFPA-rated) |
| Format | Max matchplay, head-to-head |
| TGP | 100% |
| WPPR to the winner | 35.85 |
| Completed games | 261 across 42 machines |
| Clocked playfield time | 63.2 hours, averaging 14m31s a game |
Two hundred and sixty-one games is the most of any single-day event on this list, and the 14m31s average is the fastest. Head-to-head pinball moves. Nobody is waiting on three other people to finish ball two.
Three perfect afternoons
Three players won all six of their games: Andy Fleming, Zack Schuster and Taylor Stein. The tiebreak sorted them Fleming, Schuster, Stein.
| Pos | Player | IFPA rank then |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Andy Fleming | 2,010 |
| 2 | Zack Schuster | 1,676 |
| 3 | Taylor Stein | 15,964 |
| 4 | Nathan Reardon | 598 |
| 5 | Cody Marino | 4,069 |
| 6 | Derek Fagerwold | 3,812 |
Taylor Stein going 6-0 out of nowhere is the headline result. He has six tracked events total and this is the only one that went anywhere. Along the way he beat Jared Eshelman, then ranked around 1,000, on Attack From Mars, and Whitney Lindaas on Galactic Tank Force. Two wins over players more than fourteen thousand places above him, back to back.
Andy Fleming has since played 360 tracked tournaments, more than anybody else who appears anywhere on this top ten. His career started six months before this event and it has not paused since.
Twenty-eight first-timers
This is the number that makes the grand opening matter beyond the result. Twenty-eight players had their first ever tracked tournament on LITT's opening day. A large fraction of them are still playing:
| Player | Tracked events since |
|---|---|
| Chris Vaaler | 193 |
| Brendon Hertz | 159 |
| Mark Larson | 137 |
| Joel Ring | 104 |
| Jurgen Hagedorn | 101 |
| Bryan Young | 99 |
| Leonard Passofaro | 98 |
| Cori Korpela | 98 |
| Patrick Reep | 90 |
| Mark Dalton | 74 |
Mark Larson finished ninth here in his first tournament and has since won forty of them, including a second place at Kentucky Derby #5 against a field of 101. That is a career that started on an opening day.
The machines
Forty-two machines, and one of them did a lot of work.
| Machine | Games | Average |
|---|---|---|
| James Bond 007 (Stern, 2022) | 13 | 15m11s |
| Meteor (Stern Electronics, 1979) | 9 | 8m57s |
| Venom (Stern, 2023) | 8 | 20m54s |
| Future Spa (Bally, 1979) | 8 | 13m16s |
| Target Alpha (Gottlieb, 1976) | 8 | 12m04s |
| Cyclone (Williams, 1988) | 8 | 10m42s |
| Paragon (Bally, 1979) | 8 | 10m22s |
Thirteen games on James Bond is more than any single machine saw at any other event on this list. Venom, the game the party was named for, took eight games at the slowest average of the lot. Brand new machine, nobody knows the rules, everybody plays carefully.
Meteor at eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds for a two-player game is the other extreme. It is a 1979 Stern with a wide-open outlane geometry and it does not care who you are.
Three players locked down a machine for the day: Aaron Krongard won four games on Future Spa, Drew Lundstrom three on Bride of Pinbot, and Jeff Lillibridge three on Theatre of Magic.
The long ones
- 39m34s on The Wizard of Oz, Tate Nahorniak beating Mike Muggli. Nearly forty minutes for a two-player game is a Wizard of Oz special.
- 33m31s on Venom, Derek Fagerwold over Melissa DonCarlos.
- 31m40s on Cactus Canyon, Mark Larson over Eric Greife.
- 30m24s on Venom again.
- 30m12s on Indiana Jones, Amber Johnson over Joseph Lind.
The quickest was 5 minutes and 29 seconds on Stranger Things.
The upsets
An opening-day field with eighteen unrated players in it produces rank gaps that look absurd on paper:
- Patrick Reep, unranked and playing his first tournament, beat Les Ingledew on Spider-Man. Twenty-four thousand places of separation.
- Amber Johnson beat Les Ingledew on Star Wars LE and Dana Platt-Nelson on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
- Jocelyn Aswege beat Chad Lietz on Godzilla.
- Nick Ledin beat Mark Larson, then ranked around 561, on Paragon.
What it became
LITT has hosted 341 tracked tournaments since this day and taken 10,623 entries. The monthly open that started two weeks later is fourth on this list, and the Derby that broke a hundred players is fifth. The current lineup, which runs to forty-seven machines, is on the venue page.
Eighty-seven people on day one turned out to be the floor.
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.
- Last Chance at Lukie's 2025: the biggest pinball tournament in the Minnesota data
- Last Chance at Lukie's 2023: thirty-seven players, 233 games and a year-end scramble
- The NPC Amazing Race: fifty machines, sixty-nine players and a Friday night that ran past midnight
- Eighty-five players at LITT: the October 2023 open that set the template
- One hundred and one players: the Kentucky Derby Tournament at LITT
- Thirty players, 188% TGP: the NPC Spring Classic and the value of playing all day
- The day LITT opened: 87 players, 261 games and twenty-eight people's first tournament (this post)
- Sixty-five players, thirteen machines: Broken Clock runs the tightest room on the list
- Sam and Jared's farewell party: fifty-seven people show up to say goodbye
- 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.