The ball came screaming down a fifty-year-old Bally, and Fran Irwin was ready for it. Night Rider — a 1976 machine older than most of the silverball in the room — drew first blood in the finals bracket, and while the rest of the four-player group felt out its worn-in flippers and lazy pop bumpers, Irwin worked the lit spinner and the top saucer and simply refused to hand the ball back. Twelve minutes later the oldest game on the floor had gone quiet, Irwin had taken it outright over Andy Desposito, Dennis Eichhorn and Brian Diaz, and the shortest game of the whole afternoon had quietly set the tone for everything that followed.
That’s the part the qualifier never saw coming. The player who’d only scraped third out of the bank round was about to run away with the title — and the two men who’d shared the top of that qualifier were about to watch it happen from the wrong side of the podium.
Sharing the Top of the Bank
The June stop of Hyper Beer Co.’s Third (4th) Saturday series ran as a Best Game qualifier: six players, one shared bank of machines, only your top score on each counts. It’s a format that rewards peaks over consistency, and on the day it produced a rare thing — a two-way tie at the summit. Dennis Eichhorn, the clear rating favorite of the field at IFPA #350 and California’s #39-ranked player, and Brian Diaz, a newer name still building his sheet at just 15 career events, finished the bank round dead even, each claiming the top score on seven of the nineteen machines they played.
Eichhorn’s afternoon had a signature moment. On King Kong: Myth of Terror Island — Stern’s 2025 monster — he posted 604,840,150, and the next-best anyone managed on that playfield was David Green’s 96,586,560. That’s not a lead; that’s a different area code. Diaz answered with range instead of a single haymaker, topping the bank on everything from World Cup Soccer to Star Wars: Fall of the Empire, the kind of spread that quietly stacks qualifying points. Irwin, for his part, banked five outright machine wins of his own — Mousin’ Around!, the boutique King of Diamonds, Ninja Eclipse, a tidy 643,522,900 on the brand-new Pokémon Pro, and Cactus Canyon — but a stack of third-place finishes elsewhere left him third in the standings and looking up at the two co-leaders heading into the bracket.
Twenty-Five Years of Austin Powers
One machine in the bank was quietly celebrating a birthday. Stern’s Austin Powers turned twenty-five this month — it rolled off the line in June 2001 — and a quarter-century on it was still pulling competitors up to its flippers. Designed by Lonnie D. Ropp around the licensed spy theme, it remains one of the loudest, busiest cabinets Stern ever built: a Laser Cannon gun mounted on the playfield, a Dr. Evil who rises up out of the deck, a vertical spinning Time Machine magnet, and a “dancing” Austin that never really stopped being a crowd-pleaser. At 260 pounds and over six feet tall, it’s a genuine piece of turn-of-the-millennium arcade furniture.
It also played its part in the qualifier. Diaz put up the top Austin Powers score of the night, 81,638,350, edging Irwin on the anniversary machine on his way to that shared first-place finish. If you’re chasing the same, the shortest road to points here is the multiball — the Toilet and Center shots are what light the fuse, and once the Time Machine magnet is spitting balls back at you, that’s where the crooked-number scores live. Twenty-five years in, the strategy hasn’t aged a day.
Irwin’s Finals Runaway
The bracket re-seeded the field, and Eichhorn walked in as the manual top seed — exactly the player you’d expect to close it out. Instead, the finals belonged entirely to Irwin. After stealing Night Rider on that vintage Bally, he took Jaws — Stern’s 50th-anniversary tribute to the shark — outright as well, and two wins from three games was all the math he needed. Nine points, first place, title over.
Behind him it turned into a genuine scramble. Diaz salvaged second by winning the day’s marathon: an eighty-one-minute grind on Pulp Fiction that ran longer than some entire tournaments, where he outlasted Desposito, Irwin and Eichhorn to bank the game’s four points. But the top seed simply never got going. Eichhorn — the King Kong destroyer, the qualifier co-leader, the highest-rated player in the building — could only manage a second on Jaws and never won a finals game, sliding all the way to fourth and out of the money. In a four-player room, one flat round is all it takes, and this one cost the favorite the whole afternoon. It also extended a familiar back-and-forth: across nineteen shared tournaments, Irwin and Eichhorn have traded the lead more times than either would care to count, and tonight Irwin kept the narrow edge.
Desposito’s Climb From the Four-Seed
Andy Desposito walked into the bracket as the bottom seed of four and refused to play like it. A second on Night Rider, a second on Pulp Fiction’s marathon — he was in the mix on nearly every ball, and a third-place finish out of the four-seed is exactly the kind of overachievement that moves a rating in the right direction. Desposito’s IFPA number has been climbing all year, now sitting at #5,593, and a podium at a field this tight is more evidence the arrow’s still pointing up. He’d been a co-fourth in the qualifier alongside David Green; only one of them advanced, and he made the most of the ticket.
All of it played out in one of Anaheim’s better-kept secrets. Hyper Beer Co., tucked along the Center Street Promenade, has earned its near-perfect rating the honest way — cold, interesting taps and a bank of machines that patrons keep pointing to as genuinely well-maintained. On a mild 77-degree Saturday, it made for exactly the kind of room where every game visibly nudges the standings and the host still has to earn his own trophy.
What the Title Means Heading Into July
For Irwin, this is more than a home-field win. Running the event and then winning it outright — from a third-place qualifier, no less — is the sort of result that reframes a season, turning a steady local into a player the rest of the Third (4th) Saturday regulars will now be seeding against. Eichhorn will be back, and that rivalry will get its next chapter soon enough; Diaz leaves with proof that his qualifier run was no fluke; and Desposito carries momentum a lot of higher-ranked players would trade for. But the June night belonged to the man behind the machines.
Here’s how it finished:
- 1st — Fran Irwin
- 2nd — Brian Diaz
- 3rd — Andy Desposito
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