Austin Kemp walked into Free Play Arcade in Denton on Monday night as the highest-ranked player in the building — IFPA #335, the strongest stick in a 23-deep field — and promptly did almost nothing with it. Five rounds of group match play later, the favorite was buried in a tie for ninth, watching three other names share the top of the qualifier. Then somebody flipped the bracket over, handed him the eleventh and final seed in the finals, and Kemp turned into a wrecking ball. Eight games. Eight wins. Top score on every single machine he touched.
That’s the headline, and it’s worth sitting with: a man who couldn’t crack the top eight in qualifying came out of the back of the room and never lost a game. By the time the silver ball stopped rolling, Austin Kemp had run the entire Amazing Race table to take the title — exactly as he’d done a week earlier across the metroplex, when GobbleHole watched him win the Amazing Race finals at Free Play Dallas. Two Mondays, two perfect closing runs. The man has found a gear.
A Three-Way Logjam at the Top — and the Favorite Buried at Ninth
The night’s first act was the group-play qualifier: 23 players, five rounds, 27 games spread across a murderer’s row of machines from a 1992 Scared Stiff to brand-new 2026 Stern iron. Four-player groups, points by finishing position, most points advances. And it produced not a champion but a traffic jam — Chris Delp, Ken Kemp, and Phil Robertson all crossed the line knotted in a three-way tie for first, with no outright winner to crown.
Ken Kemp was the engine of that group. The Collinsville veteran — eighteen years and 565 career tournaments deep, and the highest state-ranked player in the room at TX NACS #13 — posted the top score on three of the five machines he played, the kind of quietly dominant qualifier that wins most nights. Delp, the event’s own organizer, did his closing in the back half, reeling off three straight round wins to climb into the logjam and, in the process, nudge ahead of Phil Robertson in a rivalry that’s run dead-even across 31 shared events. Robertson, riding two wins in his last five and a rising IFPA line, answered every time the group threatened to leave him — but the tiebreak fell Delp’s way.
And the favorite? Austin Kemp spent the qualifier spinning his wheels, finishing third, third, second, third before finally taking a round in the fifth. The low point came in Round 4 on Stern’s 2026 Pokémon (Pro), where Denton local Tye Nezat — a roughly one-in-four shot on paper — drained the table and finished ahead of him outright. Kemp’s reward for ninth place was the worst seed in the finals. He’d need a different format to fix it.
The Amazing Race Resets the Board
He got one. The finals ran as an Amazing Race: eleven players, everybody on the same machine each round, lowest score sent home until one survivor remains. It is pinball’s version of sudden death, and it has no mercy for a cold streak — one bad ball and your night is over. The manual seeding slotted qualifier co-leader Phil Robertson at the very top and dropped Austin Kemp all the way to eleventh of eleven, the literal back of the bracket.
The format flattens reputation, and that turned out to be exactly what Kemp needed. Freed from the points math of group play, he simply outscored the room — round after round, machine after machine. There was an extra edge to it, too: somewhere in that gauntlet sat Ken Kemp, the fellow Collinsville competitor and the man Austin has traded results with across 33 shared tournaments. That long back-and-forth has stayed razor-tight, but the margin shrank Austin’s way on this night. When the two finally shared a game in Round 8 on Stern’s The Mandalorian (Premium), Austin’s 88.7 million buried Ken’s 66.5 million and Bryan McLaren’s 13.2 million in the same swoop.
Eight Machines, Eight Scalps — and a Pokémon Rematch
The run wasn’t close, and the scoreboard says so in rude numbers. On Stern’s James Bond 007 (Pro), Kemp posted a frankly cartoonish 326,652,970; the next-best score anyone managed all round was Christine Sablone’s 2,618,110, which means he won the table by very nearly 125 to one. Godzilla (Pro) told the same story — 435 million for Kemp, chaining ramps into the scoop to keep the Kaiju Battles stacking, against 92 million for runner-up Tye Nezat. Jurassic Park (Premium) went 172 million to Chris Noah’s 20, and even on the comparatively stingy John Wick (Pro), his 11.3 million still cleared Nezat’s 6.5.
The one machine that gave him a genuine race was the Attack From Mars (Remake), where Kemp uncorked the night’s only ten-figure score — a cool 1,083,246,060 — but Sablone hung tough for 696 million, the best non-Kemp number posted on any table all evening. It was the closest anyone came to him all night, and “closest” still meant roughly 387 million points of daylight.
The sweetest of the eight, though, was Pokémon (Pro) — the very table where Tye Nezat had embarrassed the favorite hours earlier in qualifying. Working the main four shots three times over to light the modes, Kemp put up 204 million, about five times what anyone else in the round could reach and a clean leap past Bryan McLaren’s 40 million. Redemption on the same playfield that buried him — and for good measure, he finished ahead of Nezat in both games the two shared on the night. You couldn’t script it tighter.
Closing It Out on NBA Fastbreak
Everything funneled down to the oldest machine in the finals lineup: NBA Fastbreak, Bally’s 1997 cult favorite and the rare table that keeps its tally the way the sport does — no millions, no billions, just buckets ticking up on the backglass, with the left-scoop modes swinging a game the way a hot quarter swings a real one. It’s where the finals had opened, James Kelley edging Jackie Kegley 32 to 22 in a tidy first-round duel, and it’s where the night came back to finish. Austin Kemp stood across the glass from Denton’s own Michael Hew in the final elimination round — Hew, the hometown player and TX #31, having clawed all the way to the last two. The runaway didn’t cool off. Kemp closed him out for the championship.
So the frame holds: this was a dominant performance, plain and simple — a top-ranked player who shrugged off a flat qualifier, drew the worst seed in the house, and responded by never losing a game on the way to the trophy. Free Play’s two-floor arcade-bar, with a drink rail on each level and a wall of machines that runs from Bally classics to the newest Sterns, has become a comfortable killing ground for him. After Dallas and now Denton, the question for the rest of the DFW Monday circuit isn’t whether Austin Kemp is hot. It’s who’s going to cool him off.
Final podium —
Free Play Denton Pinball Monday (6/15/26):
- 1st — Austin Kemp
- 2nd — Michael Hew
- 3rd — Ken Kemp
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