Luke Nahorniak, the runaway leader of Minnesota's 2026 season

There is a gap at the top of the 2026 Minnesota rankings, and then there is a second, much larger gap between first and second. Luke Nahorniak sits on 429.91 NACS points. The player in second has 238.75. In a scoring system where your best 20 results count, and where everybody near the top is playing a full calendar anyway, a lead that size comes from winning.

The raw count: 25 wins on the series calendar this season. Across everything Tilt Stats has tracked, 210 tournaments, 111 of them won outright, 161 podium finishes. Those numbers also put him at IFPA world #15, which reframes the local picture. He is a nationally ranked player who happens to spend most weekends in Minnesota.

What 61% actually looks like

Of the 285 players with enough tracked games to rank, Nahorniak has the highest game win rate in the state at 60.5%. Sixty-one percent of the individual games he plays, he wins. In four-player match play, random chance gives you 25%. Strong local players live somewhere in the 40s.

His average finish percentile sits at 75%, meaning that across 1,879 games he finishes, on average, three quarters of the way up the group. Both figures land in the 99th or 100th percentile of the tracked field, which is the statistical way of saying there is nobody else in his tier.

Recent form has him running even hotter than his own baseline: 83% over his last ten games against a career 75%. The Super Ball XL finals on September 19 stopped him in third out of 20, which counts as an upset.

Northstar is the whole story

Nahorniak plays at Northstar Pinball Collective and he plays there constantly. The split:

Seven out of ten of his tracked events are at Northstar, where he wins 54% of his games outright and averages a finish of 1.73 in four-player groups. The Bad Penny line is the eye-catcher: 50 firsts from 72 games, an average finish of 1.56, from a place he has visited nine times. Small sample, but the direction is unmistakable.

His longest streak of consecutive months with a tournament entry runs to 31. That is two and a half years of never missing a month.

The machines

Tilt Stats builds a per-machine score from every pairwise result on that game, weighted by who the opponent was. Half a point is average. Nahorniak's top of the list looks like this:

The James Bond figure comes from 12 games, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a settled fact. The ones to respect are further down the sample column. Forty-eight games of Mustang at an 83.6% win rate and thirty wins is a body of evidence. Same with Demolition Man: 42 games, 31 firsts, one third place, three fourths. If a machine pick comes down to Demo Man against Nahorniak, pick something else.

Which raises the obvious question. The thin end of his list:

• Nip-It, 0.430 over 10 games, zero firsts
• DE Jurassic Park, 0.452 over 12 games
• Time Warp, 0.458 over 12 games
• Buccaneer, 0.473 over 14 games

A pattern lives in that list. Every one of them is an older electromechanical or early solid state game with short ball times and a lot of variance. Nip-It in particular has produced ten games and not a single win. If you draw him in a group and the bank has a wide-body 70s title on it, that is where your equity is.

The one he has not solved

Here is the strange part of the record. Against Chris Frame, who sits at No. 11 in this year's standings, Nahorniak is 48-59-7 lifetime across 114 games. That is a 45.2% clip, and it is the worst record he holds against anyone he has played more than twenty times.

The recent picture has flipped. Inside the current rivalry window, he leads that matchup 27-20. Whatever Frame had figured out, some of it has stopped working, and the two of them are separated by three points of win rate over more than a hundred shared games. You can pull the whole record on the head-to-head page.

The other names that keep him honest:

• Bryan Moen: 33-37-3 lifetime, 47.3% over 73 games
• Trevor Klungseth: 44-40-1, 52.4% over 85 games
• Adam Turgeson: 47-56-1 in Turgeson's favor over 104 games

Three of those four are Blainbrook regulars. The pattern holds: when Nahorniak leaves Northstar and plays in Blaine, he runs into the only group of players in the state with a claim on him.

At the other end, the records that explain the 111 tournament wins. He is 16-0 against one opponent, 15-1-1 against another, 14-1-1 against a third. Against most of the field he does not lose games at all.

Signature results

• NPC Amazing Race, Super Series Event 3, 58 players, September 2024
• Blainbrook Strikes #4, 55 players, April 2023
• 56 Brewery Progressive 10-Strike, Super Series 4, 51 players, September 2025
• Broken Clock 3-Strike, February, 50 players, February 2026
• Flip Into Summer Classics Strikes, 33 players, June 2026

The Broken Clock result is the one that travels. Fifty players in a room, a 3-strike format that punishes one bad game, and he came out of it first. The Flip Into Summer weekend in June was a double: he took the Classics Strikes out of 33 and the main event A finals out of 16 on the same day.

If you draw him

You will not out-flip him. What you can do is narrow the format. Pick old, pick fast, pick anything where four balls end in ninety seconds and a lucky drain matters as much as a good save. His bottom four machines are all in that family and none of them are modern.

Run your own numbers against his on the scouting report before the event starts, and check the machine pages for whatever is on the bank. The rest of the 2026 top 25 profiles are here, and the full standings live on the rankings page.