Which pinball machines produce upsets? Upset rates for 97 tournament machines

When the machine pick is yours, you are choosing more than a game you like. You are choosing how much luck to let into the room.

Every machine page on this site carries an upset rate, and the spread between machines is wide. At one end, the lower-rated player comes out ahead 46.6% of the time, close to a coin flip. At the other, 27.4%. That gap is large enough to plan around.

This post ranks the 97 machines we have enough games on, shows what separates the top of the list from the bottom, and turns it into advice for the two situations that matter: you are the favorite, or you are not.

What the number measures

Take every tournament game on a machine. Inside each game, take every pair of players who both have an IFPA rating and whose ratings are at least 100 points apart. Throw out the pairs that tied. The upset rate is the share of the remaining pairs where the lower-rated player finished ahead.

A four-player game holds six pairs, so the sample builds quickly. The 97 machines here have at least 150 tracked games each. Together they cover 33,000 games and 82,000 pairs. Across all of them, the lower-rated player wins 35.5% of the time.

That is the average to keep in mind. A machine at 40% is kind to underdogs. A machine at 30% is not.

The pattern: age and length

Two things predict a machine's upset rate, and they travel together.

Remakes are counted by the year of the original game.

The reasons are not hard to see. An early solid state game has no ball save, open outlanes and a ruleset that fits on a card. A ball can be over in ten seconds through no fault of the player, and there are only three of them. A modern game gives you a ball save, deeper rules that pay for knowing them, and ball times long enough for the better player's edge to show up. More shots taken means more chances for skill to separate two players.

Of the 21 machines with an upset rate of 40% or higher, 19 were built before 1990. Of the 16 machines under 31%, 12 were built in 2000 or later.

The most open machines

The most reliable machines

Three games from before 2000 sit in this list: Doctor Who, Embryon and Demolition Man. Star Trek: The Next Generation, from 1993, sits in the other. Age is a tendency and individual machines break it. How a particular copy is set up matters too: outlane posts, tilt, pitch and flipper strength all move the number, and our data sees one or two copies of most titles.

The 25 most-played machines

These are the machines in our tournament strategy guides, from most open to most reliable. Each name links to its guide.

If you are the favorite

Pick long and deep. The modern Sterns at the bottom of that table give your edge the most room. Game of Thrones, Foo Fighters and Jurassic Park are the three most reliable of the 25.

Watch the clock, though. A game that typically runs 23 minutes can be a problem in a round with a time limit. The Getaway is a useful middle choice: a 33.3% upset rate in under 15 minutes.

If you are the underdog

Pick short and old. Nugent and Firepower are the two best picks among the 25, and both are at Blainbrook. You are still more likely to lose than win, since even the most open machine favors the better player. But moving from a 28% game to a 42% game is a bigger swing in your odds than most decisions on tournament night can buy.

The pick has a second benefit. Short games on simple rules punish a favorite who has not played them. Some strong players have put most of their hours into modern games, and the older ones take practice of a different kind. How to play classic games in a tournament covers that.

What this cannot tell you

It is an average over everyone. The upset rate says how a machine treats the field. It says nothing about how it treats you. If you have a winning record on a 28% machine against the people in your group, pick it. Your own history is on your profile's machines tab, and the scouting report sets it against your opponents' records for you.

Small differences are noise. The machines near the bottom of our sample have around 400 pairs behind them, which puts a margin of four or five points on either side of the number. The gap between 27% and 45% is solid. The gap between 33.2% and 33.4% means nothing.

It depends on who plays there. A machine that lives in one room is measured against that room's players. Many of the older games here are played at a single venue, and a different crowd might produce a different number.

Where to find it

The upset rate for any machine is on the performance tab of its machine page, beside the leaderboard. The header of the page also shows a difficulty score out of 100, which is a different measure: it combines how often the best-ranked player in a game fails to win it with how long the game runs. What a machine page tells you explains the rest of the page, and pinball ratings explained covers the ratings that the upset rate is built on.

All numbers here are from late September 2026 and will drift as new results come in.