Coming into the fifth leg of The Pinball Lounge’s summer Bonanza, Justin Derazza had been wandering the wrong end of the leaderboard for months — a 13th, a 7th, then a pair of 15ths and a 17th stacked up behind him like drained balls. None of that follows you onto a fresh playfield, though, and on a sticky Tuesday night in Oviedo — broken clouds, 83 degrees, the kind of Central Florida humidity that makes a cold soda taste like a trophy — the Lake Mary regular finally flipped the script.
By the time organizer Kurt van Zyl tallied the last round, Derazza had topped his group on three of the six machines he touched and stood alone at the front of a 29-player field. It was his first win in recent memory, and he earned it the hard way: by beating the very players he’d have to outlast for the title, head-to-head, on the games that mattered most.
Derazza Opens Hot While Bernard Lights the Fuse
The night ran the classic Bonanza shape — six rounds, eighteen group games, four-player pods squeezed down to threes when the math didn’t divide cleanly. Derazza set his tone immediately, taking the long Round 1 slugfest on Metallica Remastered, a 38-minute marathon where the Premium’s “Resurrect” ball-save can quietly hand a careful player a second life right when the outlanes start hungering. He came off it with the round’s full seven points and a target on his back.
The early story, though, belonged to Doug Bernard. The Orlando veteran — eleven years and 165 tournaments deep — opened with back-to-back wins on Godzilla and Pinbot, the kind of start that announces a man is dialed in. Bernard had been trending up all spring, with three top-three finishes in his recent ledger, and through two rounds he looked like the one to chase. Behind both of them, the room hummed the way regulars rave about it: tight flippers, nothing tilting unfairly, machines kept in genuine tournament shape and a bar that keeps the doors open until midnight for anyone willing to feed it one more credit.
Brayden’s Three-Round Tear and a Taxi Curveball
If Round 1 was a stumble for Brayden Derazza — dead last on Godzilla, a single point in the bank — it was also a head fake. The higher-ranked of the two Lake Mary Derazzas (IFPA #982 to Justin’s #1877) promptly ripped off three straight group wins: High Speed, then Fathom, then Monster Bash, climbing from the basement into podium position on pure momentum. It’s the sort of mid-event surge that turns a recap into a race.
Round 5 is where the field tightened and the night threw its sharpest curve. On Taxi — the 1988 Williams classic where the trick is to grab a passenger the instant multiball ends, relight that right saucer, and never actually leave multiball — Sierra Lieffort drove past a stacked group to take it outright, with veteran Jeffrey Lepine second and state #12 Nick Smith stuck in third. Smith’s evening became its own subplot: across a tight, long-running rivalry, he found himself edged out by all three eventual podium finishers, with Bernard finally tipping a 21-tournament deadlock their own way. The state’s higher-ranked names were in the building; the scoreboard simply refused to defer to them.
Meanwhile, Justin Derazza took the same Round 5 — Big Guns, where a lit skill shot hands you a free lock and the multiball starts up the center — and won it clean, with Brayden second and Bernard a costly fourth. That single result reshuffled the top three and set up exactly the showdown the night deserved.
Rush Settles It in Round Six
The Bonanza handed its three leading men a final-round group together on Rush (LE), Stern’s 2022 tribute machine, and you couldn’t have drawn it up better. Rush rewards a player who reads the table — punch the action button and the strobing flasher tells you which side your next ramp shot gets diverted to, turning a guess into a plan. Derazza played it like he’d built it, posting the top score with Bernard second and Brayden third in the very game that decided the podium.
That win gave Justin three group-topping results on the night and the points cushion he needed at the line. Brayden’s earlier tear held just enough to nose out Bernard for second on a tiebreak, the two of them finishing in a dead heat on points after eighteen games — the margin between silver and bronze thinner than a tilt warning.
The Diverter, the Drought, and a Lake Mary 1-2
Strip the night down and it lives in that Round 6 action button on Rush — one player calmly steering the ball where he wanted it while two strong rivals chased the bounce. Justin Derazza spent the spring drifting through mid-pack finishes, then walked into the deciding pod and out-flipped the field on the games that paid the most. For a player whose career peak (#1242, back in 2024) had felt like a while ago, this was the kind of result that resets the conversation.
It also turned into a Lake Mary statement: two Derazzas, first and second, with a seasoned Orlando hand rounding out the box. The summer series rolls on, the machines stay waxed and ready, and the Bonanza’s fifth chapter goes in the books to a guy who needed it most.
Final podium — 5 TPL Bonanza #5, The Pinball Lounge, Oviedo, FL:
- 1st — Justin Derazza (Lake Mary, FL)
- 2nd — Brayden Derazza (Lake Mary, FL)
- 3rd — Doug Bernard (Orlando, FL)
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