Where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota

If you have decided you want to play competitive pinball in Minnesota and you are trying to work out where to start, the honest answer is that there are more options than you think and they are not evenly spread. A handful of rooms carry almost the entire tournament calendar. The rest run something occasionally, and it is worth knowing which is which before you drive across the metro on a Tuesday.

We track around 1,300 tournaments and 50,000 individual games across the state, which is enough history to say something useful about each room rather than just listing addresses. Every venue named here has its own page with the current machine lineup, the full event history and a report on who plays well there.

Start with the directory, not with this post

Before the tour: the venues page is the live version of everything below, and it is always more current than a blog post. Each venue page shows the lineup that is on the floor right now, pulled from Pinball Map where the room is linked, plus every tournament we have on record there. A machine that arrived last week is on that page. It is not in this paragraph.

That matters more than it sounds. Lineups rotate. Turning up having practiced on a game that left in August is a specific kind of frustrating.

Every room below also has a full write-up of its own in the venue guides: the machine lineup game by game, the tournament schedule, the biggest nights on record and the players who keep winning there. This post is the map; those are the territory.

The big four

These are the rooms that run tournaments most weeks, and between them they account for the large majority of competitive pinball played in the state.

LITT Pinball Bar, Minneapolis

The busiest venue in our data by a comfortable margin, with well over 340 events on record. If you are looking for a regular competitive night in Minneapolis, this is the default answer. The volume means the stats there are the most reliable stats on the whole site: enough games on enough machines that the machine scores have real evidence behind them rather than a handful of results.

The LITT venue page has the current lineup and the event list. The arena report is the deeper read: every machine in the building with the ten players who run it and the ten it eats, filterable by time range and minimum games played. For the long version, with the Tuesday league, the monthly opens and who actually wins them, see the LITT Pinball Bar guide.

Northstar Pinball Collective, Savage

Close behind on volume, with a different feel. Northstar runs a heavy schedule and the field tends to be deep, which if you have read the WPPR explainer you will recognise as the thing that makes an event worth actual ranking points. Deep fields are worth more than large ones.

Machine lineup and history on the Northstar page, and the full write-up is the Northstar Pinball Collective guide.

Blainbrook, Blaine

A bowling centre with a serious pinball program attached, and nearly 300 events on record. Worth knowing about if you live north of the cities and had been assuming you would have to drive downtown. The Blainbrook page has the lineup, and the Blainbrook guide has the schedule and the regulars.

Bad Penny Pinball Arcade

Around 155 events on record. The Bad Penny page carries the history and the machine list, and there is a Bad Penny Pinball Arcade guide with the rest of the story.

The rest of the circuit

Smaller counts, but several of these run genuinely good events and a couple of them have machines you will not find anywhere else in the state.

• Broken Clock Brewing Cooperative in Northeast Minneapolis, on Marshall Street (guide).
• Flahertys Arden Bowl, another bowling centre with pinball (guide).
• Full Tilt Tavern (guide).
• 56 Brewing, on Columbia Street in Northeast (guide).
• 3rd Lair Skatepark and Skate Shop, which is exactly as unexpected a pinball venue as it sounds (guide).
• Stray Dog on East Hennepin (guide).
• Shipyard Brewing Company, one event in so far and worth watching.

The full venue directory has the rest, including rooms with machines but no tournament history yet, which are often where a new league starts.

How to find out what is actually on tonight

Three ways, in descending order of effort.

The tournament directory. Every event we know about, filterable by venue and by status. Planned events are listed before they happen, so it works as a calendar. Live ones carry a badge and update while they run, which is a whole post of its own: following a tournament live.

The Pulse page. Pulse is the weekly summary: results from the last few days, the machines getting the most play, the biggest upsets, who is climbing the ratings, and a "coming up" list that mixes our own upcoming events with the IFPA calendar for the state.

The calendar subscription. There is an .ics feed linked from Pulse. Subscribe once in whatever calendar app you use and upcoming events appear alongside your dentist appointments, which is either convenient or a warning sign.

What to expect at your first one

A few things nobody tells you, which are worth more than another venue name.

Formats vary and the format changes the strategy. Most local weeklies run some variety of group match play: you are drawn into groups of three or four, you play a game, and you get points for your finishing position. Some events are strictly ordered rounds; some are matchplay with rolling pairings; some are bracket formats. The tournament page for any event shows the format and, once it starts, the round-by-round view with every group and every game.

Machine choice is often yours, and it is worth points. In a lot of formats, somebody in the group picks the game. If it is you, picking a machine where you hold an edge over the other three is free scoring. That is the whole premise of the Scout page: pick the venue, pick yourself, pick up to three opponents, and it returns a list of machines to pick and a list to avoid, based on the actual results everyone has posted on the lineup that is currently in that building. There is a full walkthrough of the routine if you want the ten-minute version.

Nobody minds that you are new. The Minnesota scene is notably relaxed about beginners, and the standard response to a first-timer is to explain the format twice and then beat them politely. You will get drawn against somebody ranked in the world top thousand at some point in your first month. This is normal and you should enjoy it.

Your results will show up here. Once you play a tracked event you get a player page with your machine history, your opponents, your finishes, and, if you are IFPA-registered, your rank and rating charted over time. It is a slightly addictive thing to have.

The state race, if you get serious

Minnesota has its own IFPA state championship, and qualification runs off results across the year. The rankings page shows the NACS standings for the state alongside the world-rank list for local players, and marks which results counted toward the race. It is a good motivator around September when you realise you are four decent finishes off a qualifying spot.

The records page is the other one worth a look: longest game-win streaks, most event wins, biggest upsets by rank gap, longest games ever recorded, and a hall of fame across everything tracked. Good for settling arguments.

One last thing

Lineups, schedules and even venues change. Machines get sold. Bars close. Somebody starts a new league in a brewery nobody expected. The pages linked above update themselves from Match Play, IFPA and Pinball Map; this post does not. When in doubt, the venues directory and the tournament list are the current answer.

Related reading: the venue guides one room at a time, how to scout a tournament before you walk in, and what the ratings on your profile mean.