Some nights a player just refuses to give up a game, and on June 23rd at The 1up Arcade Bar on Colfax, that player was Elyza Brillantes. Across six group games, she never once let a flipper-mate finish above her. Six games played, six games won — a clean sweep through a 22-deep field that turned the fourth stop of the 2026 Summer Colfax Queens season into a one-woman demonstration.
What makes the run land even harder is where she came from. Brillantes walked in carrying a recent stat line that read like a player still searching for her footing — a 73rd here, a 100th there, a scattering of mid-pack finishes across the spring. She sits at #252 of 670 ranked players in Colorado’s NACS standings. None of that mattered once the balls started rolling. This was the night the floor finally tilted her way.
Round One: Brillantes Refuses to Drop a Game
Group match play is a grind of position points — finish first in your four-player pod, bank five, and do it again next game. Brillantes opened on Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, the David Bowie cult deep-cut, and posted the top score over Keli Schmid and Diane Minton. Then she did it again on Tales of the Arabian Nights, Williams’ 1996 Genie-and-gemstones classic and the single most-played machine of the entire tournament.
By the time she closed Round 1 on The Addams Family — Bally’s 1992 monster that still ranks among the best-selling pins ever built — the pattern was set. Brillantes finished ahead of every player she shared a glass with that round, a perfect three-for-three. On a game as combo-hungry as Addams, where the smart money cradles up and waits out the vault magnet before threading the bookcase, control is everything. She had it.
The Big Lebowski Marathon
Round 2 is where the night turned epic. Brillantes drew King Kong: Myth of Terror Island, Stern’s 2025 premium, and tamed it for another five points over Bethany Moore and Julie Juarez. She backed that up with a second win on Tales of the Arabian Nights — her fifth straight top finish without a stumble.
Then came the game that defined the evening. On The Big Lebowski — the rare Dutch Pinball cult machine, where the trick is holding the right flipper at the plunge to load the upper playfield, or catching a one-shot rug mode off the left — Brillantes, Moore, Juarez, and Eden Campbell settled in for the long haul. The game ran a staggering 86 minutes, the longest single contest of the entire tournament. When the last ball finally drained, Brillantes was on top once more. Six games, six wins, and the title sealed in the most grueling fashion possible.
Her ledger for the night tells the whole story: top score on all five machines she touched, a flawless average finish of first place, and not a single group she didn’t win.
A Field That Came to Play
Behind the headliner was a genuinely competitive local draw — 22 players, every one of them nationally unranked, with eight carrying Colorado NACS standings into the night. By state rank, organizer Deanna Scalf (#115) was the strongest name in the building, and she put together a respectable run of her own, taking the top spot on Theatre of Magic and Beetlejuice in Round 1 before settling into fifth.
The early drama belonged to Diana Miranda, who lit up Round 1 on Spooky Pinball’s brand-new Beetlejuice, edging out Kath Kittridge in a tight four-player tussle to bank the win. Miranda kept the pressure on all night and finished fourth overall, the best result among the chasing pack. Kittridge, for her part, answered that early loss by climbing onto the podium, and Cecilia Blue — remarkably, in her first year touching a tournament flipper — surged through Round 2 with wins on Elvira and the Party Monsters, Medieval Madness, and The Uncanny X-Men to claim the runner-up spot.
The lineup itself was a love letter to the hobby: 26 machines spanning 1984’s Eight Ball Deluxe all the way to this year’s newest Sterns, seven different manufacturers represented, classic Williams ramps sitting flipper-to-flipper with modern Spooky and Stern code. It’s the kind of spread that rewards a complete player — and Brillantes proved to be exactly that.
Six for Six
There’s a particular satisfaction in watching someone shake off a rough patch and put together the perfect night, and that’s what Colfax Queens #4 gave us. Brillantes didn’t back into this one or sneak through on tiebreakers. She walked into a 22-player field, drew five different machines from five different eras, and beat every single person she played, every single time. For a competitor whose last handful of events ran cold, June 23rd was the kind of breakout that resets a season.
The 1up on Colfax — that perpetually buzzing tangle of neon, pinball, and Sunday happy-hour regulars — has hosted plenty of memorable nights. This was one of the cleaner sweeps it’ll see all year.
Final Podium:
- 1st — Elyza Brillantes
- 2nd — Cecilia Blue
- 3rd — Kath Kittridge
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