The bracket had burned all the way down to two players standing at Foo Fighters, and the Monday-night crowd at Free Play Richardson knew exactly what it was looking at. On one side, Greg Gibson — twenty-seven years into a competitive career that once crested at IFPA #67 back in 1998 — and on the other, Lora Tennison, who’d fought her way up the bracket all night to reach the final pairing. One machine left to settle it all. When the Stern playfield finally went quiet, it was Gibson left holding the night, the last man standing in a format built to leave exactly one.
But to understand how the qualifier’s top seed ended up hoisting the trophy, you have to rewind a few hours — back to a Group Match Play opener where a completely different name owned the marquee, played out on a sticky 105-degree Texas evening with twenty-six competitors packed shoulder to shoulder under the arcade glow.
Chase Clinton’s Breakthrough Night
The qualifier ran the familiar weekly shape: Group Match Play, five rounds, four to a machine, points handed out by finishing order. Twenty-six players signed in — fourteen of them IFPA-ranked, a dozen walk-ups still building a record — for the kind of honest local turnout that keeps these Monday nights humming.
Out of that crowd, Chase Clinton went on an absolute tear. One year into ranked play with thirty-five events already behind him and a packed calendar of eight tournaments in six months, Clinton put up the top score on four of the five machines he touched, stacking round wins in the first, second, third, and fifth frames. The reward was the sweetest line on any scoresheet: his first tournament victory, period. We don’t get to write that sentence often, and when we do, it’s worth pausing on — a competitor who’s been grinding the circuit finally breaking through to the top step.
Behind him, Faulkner Turner stayed steady all night to claim second, while the field’s heaviest resume had to settle. Greg Gibson, the top seed and the strongest player in the building at IFPA #296, landed third in the qualifier — including a Round 5 dogfight on the Monster Bash remake where Chris Delp shaded both Turner and Gibson in a thirty-three-minute four-player marathon. The lineup itself spanned the whole museum, from a 1995 Bally Theatre of Magic to a Stern Transformers fresh off the line this spring, and not a single one of those machines played anything less than dialed-in — a credit to a venue that’s earned its 4.7-star reputation for keeping every cabinet, old and new, in fighting shape.
Colin Wood Wrecks the Arena — and Still Finishes Fourth
The field narrowed to a nine-player finals, and here’s where the format flipped the script. The finals ran as an Amazing Race: everyone plays the same machine each round, the lowest score goes home, and you keep grinding until one player is left. No groups, nowhere to hide, eight rounds of pure attrition.
Nobody hit the playfield harder than Colin Wood. He posted the top score on all five machines he played, headlined by a staggering 136,027,700 on the Monster Bash remake — the widest blowout of the entire finals, lapping the next-best 14 million on that same machine. And yet, in one of those cruel quirks the Amazing Race format specializes in, all that firepower added up to a fourth-place finish. Dominant on the glass, undone by the math.
Meanwhile, the deepest run of the night belonged to a familiar face behind the counter. Chris Delp — who organized the whole event and calls Richardson home — walked into the finals as the bottom seed and refused to leave quietly. He ground his way to a third-place finish from the very back of the bracket, settling a couple of long-running grudges along the route: he stepped in front of Chase Clinton in a rivalry stretching across thirteen shared tournaments, and edged Colin Wood once again in a back-and-forth that’s now spanned fifteen events between them. Not a bad night for the guy running the show.
Down to Two on Foo Fighters
As the eliminations stacked up — a tight Iron Maiden round here, a Black Knight: Sword of Rage scramble there — the race narrowed to its final pairing: Gibson and Lora Tennison. And Tennison’s climb deserves its own headline. She’d finished eighth back in the qualifier, then surged to runner-up in the finals, the kind of bracket-day turnaround that separates a good night from a great one. Ranked #106 in the state with twenty events logged this season, she also chipped into Athena Coplin’s edge in their seven-tournament rivalry by finishing ahead this time out.
Across the flippers stood the steadiest hand in the room. Gibson sits eighth in the Texas NACS standings, his rating climbing year over year back up to #296 nationally, with twenty-one wins over the last three years across a 244-tournament career. He didn’t need to dominate the scoreboard the way Wood did; he just needed to outlast, and outlasting is a veteran’s art form. With only the two of them left on Foo Fighters, Gibson held his line and let the silver ball do the rest.
Last Ball, Lasting Impression
There’s something fitting about a player nearly three decades into the hobby still finding new gears on a Monday night — top seed to champion, patient where it counted, sharp when it mattered. Gibson’s win won’t make national headlines, but it’s the kind of result that defines a local scene: the steady veteran closing the door, the first-time winner from the qualifier earning his name in the record book, the organizer grinding to the podium in his own house. That’s a full night of pinball, and Free Play Richardson delivered every minute of it.
Here’s where the finals shook out:
- 1st — Greg Gibson (IFPA #296)
- 2nd — Lora Tennison
- 3rd — Chris Delp (IFPA #5491)
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