Round 3, and the silver ball is loose on Indianapolis 500 — Bally’s 1995 brick of a racer, the one where the smart money never taps the lit standups on purpose because those targets feed the drain like nothing else. Casey Compton, all of seven career tournaments deep and ranked nowhere near the front of this room, ignored the noise, kept the ball alive through the chaos, and posted the top score in a group that included two players with decades of competitive flips between them. Seven points to the newcomer. It was the kind of small upset that makes a weekly worth showing up for.
That’s the texture of a 49-player Tilt’n Tuesday at District 82 in De Pere: a deep, friendly, occasionally merciless grind across 104 games where a walk-up can top a veteran on any given machine, and where the players who win the night are the ones who refuse to post a bad round. On June 16, under a clear 64-degree sky, that player was Matt McCarty.
Forty-Nine Deep, and Loaded at the Top
Forty-nine flippers signed in for organizer Erik Thoren’s four-round group match-play marathon, and this was no soft draw. Forty-one of them carried IFPA rankings, eight of those inside the national top 500, and the field’s career ledgers added up to more than 13,000 combined events of experience. When a room is that seasoned, qualifying isn’t about flashes of brilliance — it’s about who can keep finishing first or second while everyone around them takes turns blowing up.
The name at the very top of the strength chart belonged to Tom Graf, Wisconsin’s number-two ranked player and a national #115, a 15-year veteran who knows District 82’s lineup cold. Right behind him on paper sat Nathan Zalewski, the reigning Wisconsin #1, owner of 53 tournament wins over the last three seasons. On a normal night either could run the table. On this one, both got tangled in the format’s great equalizer — the three- and four-player group draw — and finished 21st and 11th respectively, proof that a weekly’s randomized pods don’t care about your WPPR total.
District 82 itself does a lot of the heavy lifting here. The room runs roughly 90 machines spanning 1964 to 2024, kept in tournament-tight shape under low light and a steady wash of flashing inserts, and the regulars rave about little touches like free coffee and the freedom to wander out and come back. Open only Friday through Sunday, it packs a week’s worth of pinball into a few precious days — which is exactly why a Tuesday qualify draws a crowd this size and this strong.
McCarty, Schmidt, and Van Schyndle Pull Clear
McCarty, the Neenah man whose rating has climbed steadily over the past year, set the tone early and never let it slip. His round-by-round line read second, first, second, second — not a single finish below runner-up across four rounds, the very definition of a points machine in a format that rewards floor over ceiling. Three wins in his last five events had already marked him as the man to beat, and he played like it.
His Neenah neighbor Tom Schmidt was every bit as steady, in fact even steadier in a way: Schmidt finished second in all four rounds, a flawless four-for-four podium streak that any group-play strategist would frame and hang on the wall. A 12-year competitor sitting at Wisconsin #11, Schmidt has the patience to grind a tight machine to its knees, and it kept them within a whisker of the lead all night.
The story of the chasing pack, though, was Andy Van Schyndle. The Algoma player opened with a Round 1 win and never drifted far, riding a year of quiet rating gains into the thick of the fight. Around them, the room’s long-running rivalries kept simmering — Andy clawed back ground on Gerald Morrison in a recent events the two have now shared across two dozen tournaments, while Greg Hein and Mike Schlumpf, 50 events into a coin-flip of a rivalry, traded the upper hand yet again. None of it touched the top three, but all of it gave the floor its hum.
The Getaway Settles the Top Two
It came down, fittingly, to Round 4 and a cop-chase classic. The Getaway: High Speed II — Williams, 1992, the machine where the real money lives in the Supercharger ramp and the Red Line Mania super jackpot — put McCarty and Schmidt in the same pod for the night’s decisive game, with Ryan Eggers and Schlumpf along for the ride. Schmidt found another gear, shifting up the playfield’s rev counter and taking the win outright, seven points to McCarty’s five.
But this is where consistency cashes its check. Schmidt’s Getaway victory was sweet, yet McCarty had banked just enough across the earlier rounds — including his own Round 2 group win and a stack of runner-up finishes — to keep the runner-up from running him down. When the final tallies settled, the margin held: McCarty first, Schmidt second, the two Neenah men separated by the thinnest of consistency edges after four hours of flips.
It’s worth pausing on what Schmidt pulled off even in defeat. Second in every round, a win on the marquee final machine, and a No Good Gofers takedown in Round 3 to boot — a runner-up performance that on most weeks would have been more than enough to top the heap.
Five Machines, One Bronze, and a Final Tally
The most quietly remarkable line of the night, though, belonged to the man on the third step. Across the eight machines Andy Van Schyndle played, he posted the top score on five of them — a stretch that ran through Aerosmith, Paragon, No Good Gofers, and a Round 4 Flash Gordon win on a 46-year-old Bally where the bonus multipliers hide in the drop-target banks. That’s a 62-percent ownership rate of the games he touched, and it carried a player ranked outside Wisconsin’s top 90 all the way onto the podium against a field stacked with higher pedigrees. On a night that rewarded the relentless, Van Schyndle was the field’s purest example of seizing the arenas in front of you.
When the inserts finally went quiet at District 82, the order at the top stood as a testament to the long, grinding virtue of never posting a bad round:
The Final Podium
- 1st — Matt McCarty (IFPA #519)
- 2nd — Tom Schmidt (IFPA #589)
- 3rd — Andy Van Schyndle (IFPA #2251)
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