Luke Mutchler is fifth in Minnesota and his biggest win came against 21 players
No single result on his sheet would turn a head. Twenty of them stacked together put him fifth in the state, ahead of players with four times his trophy count.
·4 min read·Tilt Stats
There are two ways to finish high in a state championship series. One is to win a big event and bank a pile of points in an afternoon. The other is to play twenty events, finish in the money at most of them, and let the arithmetic do the work.
Luke Mutchler took the second route. He is fifth in the 2026 Minnesota standings on 212.04 points, within ten points of the player who won a 68-player open this summer. Mutchler's largest winning field all year was 21.
The grind, in numbers
- 116 tracked tournaments, 11 won, 42 podium finishes
- 894 games played
- 102 of those 116 events at Northstar Pinball Collective
- 12 straight months with at least one entry
Eighty-eight percent of his competitive life happens in one room. At Northstar he has 825 games on record, 312 of them won outright, and an average finishing position of 2.03 in four-player groups. That is the profile of someone who turns up on a Friday night whether or not there is anything at stake.
His game win rate is 38.7%, which places him in the 82nd percentile of the 285 ranked players. His average finish percentile is 57%. Both are good. Neither is elite, and neither needs to be, because the twentieth-best result of a player who plays fifty events a year beats the fifth-best result of a player who plays eight.
What he wins
| Tournament | Field | Date |
|---|---|---|
| NPC Monthly Matchplay | 21 | June 2026 |
| NPC Friday Night | 16 | June 2026 |
| Stern Army NPC Friday finals | 12 | May 2026 |
| NPC Friday Matchplay | 11 | January 2026 |
| NPC Sunday Strikes | 10 | February 2026 |
Every one at Northstar. Every one a weeknight or a monthly, none of them larger than 21 players. Six of those wins counted toward this year's series.
The exception to the pattern is the Flip Into Summer main event A finals in June, where he finished second of 16 behind the state's No. 1. That is his best result against a genuinely stacked field.
The JAWS record
Tilt Stats scores a player on each machine using every pairwise result, weighted for opponent strength. Half a point is average.
| Machine | Score | Win rate | Games |
|---|---|---|---|
| Granada | 0.706 | 75.0% | 8 |
| Mars Trek | 0.703 | 75.0% | 10 |
| Stranger Things | 0.690 | 74.2% | 12 |
| Game of Thrones | 0.675 | 71.9% | 22 |
| JAWS | 0.669 | 70.2% | 34 |
| Eight Ball Champ | 0.627 | 65.3% | 17 |
Thirty-four games on JAWS with seventeen firsts and eleven seconds is the most substantial single-machine record in his file, and the one you should trust. Twenty-two games of Game of Thrones with eleven wins and eight seconds says much the same thing.
Now the other end, because it is unusually steep:
- Eight Ball, 0.254 over 10 games, a 20.8% win rate
- Paragon, 0.333 over 12 games
- Count-down, 0.350 over 9 games
- The Walking Dead, 0.374 over 16 games
A 0.254 is among the lowest qualifying machine scores in the whole top 25. Ten games of Eight Ball have produced roughly two wins' worth of results. Sixteen games of The Walking Dead at 36% is the more actionable one, since the sample is larger and the game turns up more often.
There is a shape here. His good machines are late 70s Gottliebs and modern Sterns with clear main shots. His bad ones are early Bally solid states and a famously punishing Stern from 2014.
Sharing a room with the No. 1
The cost of playing 102 events at Northstar is that Luke Nahorniak plays there too. Their record: 70-18 in Nahorniak's favor with five ties across 93 games, a 22% clip for Mutchler. The full split is here.
That is the arithmetic of sharing a home venue with a world top-20 player for three years. Everyone else at Northstar carries a similar scar.
His genuinely even rivalries are with the other Northstar regulars:
- Paul Tvedt: 65-51 with a tie to Tvedt across 117 games, their busiest matchup
- Daniel Mickelson: 51-46 with four ties to Mutchler, 101 games
- Andy Fleming: 23-22-1, 46 games
- James Skelley: 24-19-2, 45 games
The Mickelson matchup is a coin flip after a hundred games. The Tvedt matchup is the one he keeps losing, and the two of them sit eight places apart in the standings.
Other names that give him trouble: Neil Graf at 2-12-2, Krista Larson at 3-8, and Keith Hanson at 23-42-1 across 66 games.
The current slump
Form sits at 45% against a 57% baseline, one of the coldest readings in the top ten. August produced a fourth of eight at NPC Sunday Strikes, a fifth of 25 at Broken Clock, and a seventh of eleven at NPC Friday Night.
The 212 points are already in the bank. The slump costs him nothing this season.
If you draw him
Pick an early Bally solid state. Eight Ball, Count-down or Paragon if any of them are on the bank, and The Walking Dead if they are not. Avoid JAWS unless you have your own record on it and it is better than 70%.
The scouting report does the comparison properly, taking both of your machine lists and the current venue lineup into account. Rest of the 2026 top 25 profiles here.