LITT Pinball Bar: 362 tournaments in, and Tuesday night is still the main event

Three hundred and sixty-two tournaments. That is the number sitting on the LITT Pinball Bar venue page as of the middle of September 2026, and it covers a little under three years. The first one was the grand opening on 14 October 2023, a Venom launch party that pulled 87 players through the door on a Saturday afternoon. Andy Fleming won it. Nothing about the place has slowed down since.

If you play competitive pinball anywhere in the Twin Cities, you have almost certainly played here. Across those events the site has logged 14,668 completed tournament games and 390 different players. The average field is 30.9. That number is worth sitting with for a second, because a thirty-player average is not a casual bar night that happens to have a bracket. That is a room that runs tournaments as its main business and fills them.

What is on the floor

Forty-seven machines, and the lineup turns over fast. The current list on the venue page is pulled from Pinball Map, so it reflects what is in the building now rather than what was there when somebody last wrote a guide. At the moment that includes Pokémon in Premium trim, a Jersey Jack Sonic the Hedgehog, a Transformers LE, and the Spooky trio of Beetlejuice, Evil Dead and Looney Tunes. Barrels of Fun has two games on the floor. There is a Dutch Pinball Big Lebowski, which you do not see often.

The back half of the room is where it gets interesting for tournament purposes. Centaur, Embryon, Meteor, Paragon and a 1976 Target Alpha are all in the bank, and on any given league night one of them may be the game that decides your group.

The machines that have actually seen the most tournament play tell a slightly different story from the machines people talk about:

Bond leads by a wide margin, which surprises people who assume the newest game always gets the most play. It has been on the floor a long time, it is reliable, and it sits in a spot that makes it an easy pick. Attack From Mars, Jurassic Park, the Williams Indiana Jones, Twilight Zone, Wizard of Oz, JAWS and Ghostbusters all sit between 149 and 163 games, which is about as flat a distribution as you will find at a venue this size. The bank gets used.

Each of those machine pages carries its own tournament record, the best scores on file, and a playbook tab with strategy notes and video where somebody has written them. The Medieval Madness playbook is a better use of five minutes than another practice ball.

The schedule, as the data sees it

Half of every tournament this venue has ever run started at 7pm on a Tuesday. That is the league, and it is the heartbeat of the place: 180 tournaments have gone off in that slot. Sunday at 4pm is second with 54. Thursday evenings account for another 34, and Wednesdays pick up 25.

The league runs in six-week seasons, split into two divisions that play the same night. The 2026 Fall Competitive League has been running 17 to 19 players a week; the Recreational League on the same night has been closer to 35. Previous seasons live on their own pages, so you can walk back through the 2026 Summer Competitive League, the Spring season, or the 2025 Holiday league and watch the same names climb.

Then there is the monthly open. Those are the big nights. August 2026 drew 49 players into qualifying with a 16-player final, and Steven Skochinski took both. Going back further, the October 2023 open had 85, November 2023 had 81, January 2025 had 84, and February 2026 had 79.

The largest field the venue has ever put on a machine bank was the Kentucky Derby Tournament #5 in May 2026: 101 players, three figures, on a Saturday. Chris Frame won it, which is a slightly awkward result for everybody who thinks of Chris as a Blainbrook player.

Belles and Chimes Minneapolis has run 36 events at LITT, and there is a monthly split-flipper knockout that is exactly as chaotic as it sounds.

Who actually wins here

One name sits on top and it is not close.

Mark Larson has won 45 tournaments at one venue. He has also shown up 142 times, which is the part people skip. A 32 percent conversion rate in fields that average thirty is absurd, and it holds up against the current league: he has taken the competitive division back to back this fall.

Skochinski's line is the one that jumps out on a rate basis. Nineteen wins in 73 starts, and he is IFPA ranked 541st. Reardon is similar, twelve in 69.

Attendance is its own leaderboard and a different set of names leads it. Elizabeth Boelke has played 166 events here. Betsy O'Connor and Jim Hartley are tied at 158. Nicholas Brannan is at 155 with eleven wins, Madison Reine at 152. If you play a Tuesday, you will see these people. They are the reason the league fills whether or not anyone advertises it.

Showing up for the first time

A few things worth doing before you walk in.

Open your own profile from the players directory and go to the All machines tab. It scores every machine you have played in a tracked tournament, weighted by who you beat, so you can see at a glance which of LITT's 47 games you should be picking when the choice falls to you. Pair that with the venue page, which lists the current lineup, and cross off anything that is not in the building.

Once groups go up, the scouting report does the comparison for you. Pick LITT, pick yourself, add up to three opponents, and it returns the machines where you hold an edge and the ones you should be banning. If you want the raw record against one specific person, the head-to-head tool has it, along with how you both did against shared opponents.

The arena report is the deeper version: every machine in the bank with a leaderboard, plus each regular's best and worst games at this venue. It is a lot to read before a tournament. It is an excellent thing to read the morning after one.

The short version

Tuesdays at 7pm for league. Monthly opens on a weekend afternoon, and those run big. Forty-seven machines with heavy turnover at the new end and a solid classic bank at the old end. Mark Larson probably wins.

Everything above updates itself as events import, so the LITT Pinball Bar page will always be a step ahead of this post. Other rooms in the metro have their own write-ups: Northstar Pinball Collective, Blainbrook and Broken Clock Brewing are the other three that run at this volume.

More from the blog: where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota puts LITT in the context of the rest of the circuit, and what a machine page tells you is worth a read before you take on a lineup this size.

Featured photo from the LITT Pinball Bar listing on Pinball Map, which is also where the current machine lineup on this site comes from. If a game has come or gone, update that listing and it will show up here.