The 2026 Minnesota pinball top 25, one profile at a time

The IFPA runs a state championship series in every region, and Minnesota's 2026 standings are settled enough to write about. The series counts each player's best twenty results from the year, so the table rewards a good season rather than a good career.

We have written a profile of every player in the top 25. Each one pulls from the tracked tournament data behind this site: every game, every machine, every head-to-head record, going back to 2022.

The table

The rankings page has the live standings, all 767 of them, alongside the world-rank list for Minnesota players.

Four rooms decide the state

All twenty-five of these players do the bulk of their competing in one of four venues.

• Northstar Pinball Collective is the busiest, and it is where the state's No. 1 plays. Ten of the top 25 play there more than anywhere else.
• LITT Pinball Bar runs the largest fields in the state, including the 101-player Kentucky Derby in May and two 79-player and 81-player monthly opens.
• Blainbrook produces the deepest rivalry records anywhere in the data. Three of its regulars have played each other over 1,300 times between them.
• Bad Penny, Broken Clock, 56 Brewing and Stray Dog fill out the rest of the calendar, and a couple of players in this list win there far more often than the standings would predict.

Before you read

Machine scores. The score you see on a player's machine list runs from 0 to 1 and comes from every pairwise result on that game, weighted by who the opponent was. Half a point is average. Games count: a 0.85 over nine games is a hint, and a 0.73 over 63 is a fact. Every table in these profiles carries the game count for that reason.

Wins and shared firsts. Some Minnesota events post qualifying standings where several players tie at the top, and the record then shows a first place for each of them. Where a profile says a player won something, it means they were alone in first. Where several people shared the top, the profile says so.

Rankings measure a year. A player with a 33% game win rate can finish above a player with a 55% one, because the series counts twenty results rather than career quality. Several profiles in this set are about exactly that gap.

Tools that do this for your own group

The profiles are a reference. If you want the same analysis pointed at a tournament you are actually playing:

• The scouting report takes a venue, you and up to three opponents, and returns the machines where you hold an edge and the ones to avoid.
• The head-to-head tool gives your record against any player, machine by machine.
• Each venue page carries the current lineup and the tournaments that have run there.
• Each machine page has a playbook, the best scores on record and a cross-venue leaderboard.

There is a longer walkthrough in how to scout a pinball tournament before you walk in.

The profiles

Start anywhere. They are all linked from the table above and from the players category.