Shipyard Brewing Company: the one-night venue
One tournament, four players, two games, and a name that explains itself. What happens when a travelling player runs an event in a bar that has never hosted one.
·3 min read·Tilt Stats
Every venue guide on this site so far has covered a room with a schedule. This one covers a bar that has hosted exactly one tournament, and it is here because the story of how it got into the record is worth telling.
On Monday 7 September 2026, at 6:26 in the evening, a four-player group knockout was created at Shipyard Brewing Company. The event is called, in full, "Some Minnesotan has wandered into my bar and wants to run a tournament tournament". Matthew Sitko ran it. Matthew Sitko won it.
Two completed games. Four entries. That is the entire history of the venue.
Why a one-night event is still in here
Tournaments land in this database because they are sanctioned and because they involve players the site already tracks. Nothing about the size of the field or the reputation of the room comes into it. A four-player knockout on a Monday counts the same way a sixty-five-player Super Series leg counts, and both feed the same machine records, head-to-head tables and rating history.
That has real consequences for the people who played. The two games recorded there are now part of every calculation on those players' profiles: their pairwise machine scores, their record against each other, their results tab. Small events do not move a rating much, which is exactly why the site keeps the game count next to every score. A 1.000 win rate over two games is a number you should be laughing at, not quoting.
What it looks like on the site
The venue page works like any other. It lists the event, it will list more if more appear, and it would sync a machine lineup if the venue had a Pinball Map listing to sync from. It does not have one, so the machines tab is empty.
If somebody links it up on Pinball Map, the lineup appears here within a sync cycle. That is how Stray Dog went from a blank page to a full one in a few months.
The travelling tournament
There is a small genre of event in this database: a player goes somewhere on holiday or for work, finds a bar with a couple of machines, and runs something. It is one of the more charming things about competitive pinball that the paperwork supports it. Sitko directs a regular Friday series back home at Flaherty's Arden Bowl, so he had the process down before he walked in.
If you are ever in that position, the same applies to you: run it, submit it, and it lands here with the rest.
The rest of the venues
The other ten rooms in the record have full write-ups. LITT Pinball Bar and Northstar Pinball Collective are the two busiest. Blainbrook has the deepest classic bank in weekly play. Broken Clock Brewing has the biggest average field. The full list lives on the venues page.
More from the blog: where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota is the tour of the rest of the state, and how to scout a tournament before you walk in is the ten-minute routine for a room you have never played.
Featured image generated for this post. Shipyard Brewing Company has no Pinball Map listing on file, so there is no synced machine lineup or photo for it here.