The NPC Amazing Race: fifty machines, sixty-nine players and a Friday night that ran past midnight

Fifty machines. That is the number to sit with. In 102 completed games, Super Series Event #3 at Northstar Pinball Collective touched fifty different titles, more than any other tournament in the tracked Minnesota data. Half of them got used once. Gulfstream, Lost World, Embryon, Time Warp, Big Game, Count-down: one game apiece, then never again all night.

Most tournaments circle the same dozen machines. This one went through the room like a tour.

The numbers

The event ran on the evening of Friday, September 20, 2025 and finished after midnight. Luke Nahorniak organized it as the third stop of that year's Super Series, with a $500 prize pool. The format was four rounds of group matchplay, two games a round, one modern and one classic each time, top half into A finals with B and C finals underneath depending on turnout.

Sixty-nine is the combined field once the linked finals are folded in, which is how the IFPA values a qualifier-plus-finals pair. The qualifying tournament itself listed fifty.

The one-modern-one-classic rule

Splitting every round between a modern Stern and something from the seventies is the design decision that shaped the whole night, and you can read it in the pace numbers.

The classics were the slow ones. A 1977 Prospector averaging forty minutes a game while a 2019 Munsters averages twenty-one is the opposite of what people expect, and it happens because a four-player game on an unfamiliar EM turns into five separate exercises in not tilting. Nobody rushes a machine they have never seen.

How it played out

Luke Nahorniak qualified first on 50 points and then won the A finals as well, which makes this his third appearance in the top three of this whole list.

The qualifying board had some surprises in it:

Bob Cahill qualifying second in a field with a top-fifteen player in it is the kind of result that gets a quiet round of applause from people who have watched him grind. He has four wins across seventy-four tracked events and a career-best IFPA rank of 1,779.

Finals ran Luke first, Keith Hanson second, Adam Turgeson third, Whitney Lindaas fourth. Lindaas had not cracked the top eleven in qualifying and went home with 20.76 points.

The longest game of the night

Forty minutes into round four, four of the top eight qualifiers were still standing at Prospector, a 1977 Segasa machine most of the room had probably never played before that year. Bob Cahill, Luke Nahorniak, Daniel Hammond and Dave Prosen, 55 minutes and 36 seconds, and Luke came out of it first. That game alone accounted for more than one percent of the entire night's clocked playfield time.

Other long ones:

• 49m31s on Hot Hand in round one, won by Steven Skochinski.
• 46m59s on Granada, a 1972 Williams, in round one. James Skelley first.
• 46m52s on TX-Sector in round three, Skelley again.
• 46m30s on Comet in round two, with Zack Schuster beating Luke Nahorniak.

The quickest was 9m05s on Demolition Man, won by Matthew Sitko in round one.

The upsets

• Luke Mutchler, then ranked around 20,900 with barely any tracked events behind him, beat Brooke Hipsher on Wild Fyre in round one. He is now inside the top 1,500.
• Dave Prosen, around 12,000 at the time, beat Keith Hanson, around 619, on Time Warp in round three. Hanson finished second overall that night, which makes the loss stand out more, not less.
• Joshua Wentland took two off Brian Spencer in round three, on Game of Thrones and Hot Hand.
• Matias Parada beat Adam Turgeson on Iron Maiden in round one, with roughly 8,400 places between them.

The rivalries

Four rounds is not enough for anybody to rack up fifteen meetings, but eight pairs still managed four apiece:

• Bob Cahill vs Dave Prosen, 3-1 Cahill. Their only tracked meetings ever, all in one night.
• Zach LaVone vs Steven Skochinski, 3-1 LaVone, which cuts against an all-time record of 20-9 in Skochinski's favor across twelve events.
• Luke Nahorniak vs Zack Schuster, 3-1 Luke.
• Luke Nahorniak vs Daniel Hammond, 3-1 Luke. All time these two have played 115 tracked games across thirty-nine events, 72-29 to Luke, which is about as lopsided as a long-running local matchup gets.
• James Skelley vs Michelle Ebert, 3-1 Skelley.

One debut

Stacy Chapman played her first tracked tournament here and beat Dustin Auwerter on Attack From Mars in round two for an upset on the way. She has thirty-two tracked events now.

Where it sits

Third on the list, behind two editions of Last Chance at Lukie's. Sixty-nine players at 140% TGP is a lot of value in one Friday, and the fifty-machine spread is a record that is going to be hard for anybody to beat without a bigger building.

---

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.

1. Last Chance at Lukie's 2025: the biggest pinball tournament in the Minnesota data
2. Last Chance at Lukie's 2023: thirty-seven players, 233 games and a year-end scramble
3. The NPC Amazing Race: fifty machines, sixty-nine players and a Friday night that ran past midnight (this post)
4. Eighty-five players at LITT: the October 2023 open that set the template
5. One hundred and one players: the Kentucky Derby Tournament at LITT
6. Thirty players, 188% TGP: the NPC Spring Classic and the value of playing all day
7. The day LITT opened: 87 players, 261 games and twenty-eight people's first tournament
8. Sixty-five players, thirteen machines: Broken Clock runs the tightest room on the list
9. Sam and Jared's farewell party: fifty-seven people show up to say goodbye
10. 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.