Best Score on 5 of 8 Machines: Mike Carlson Wins Flippin’ Friday Qualify
Mike Carlson walked into De Pere on the hottest kind of July evening — 91 degrees on the sign, feeling more like 103 with the humidity pressing down — and turned in the calmest night of his recent run. Across four rounds of group match play at District 82 Pinball Arcade, the Sobieski man put up the best score on five of the eight machines he touched and never once dropped out of the top three. On July 17th, that was more than enough to win.
It’s the kind of result that had been building. Carlson’s IFPA number sits at 704, up from where it was a year ago, and after a stretch of middling finishes at this very venue, he found the floor at the right time.
A Round One That Set the Tone
Carlson opened in a three-player group and made short work of it. He took the top spot on Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye and did the same on Supersonic, the 1979 Bally that would turn out to be the busiest machine of the night. Two games, two wins, and Carlson sat first in the standings before the field had fully warmed up.
The drama in that first round was happening one bank over. On Tales from the Crypt — the 1993 Data East machine built around a gravestone that rises and sinks in the middle of the playfield, John Borg’s mechanics under Kurt Andersen’s dot animation — Kelly Krabbe-Schramm came out ahead of Greg Hein in a full four-player game that ran 27 minutes. Krabbe-Schramm, only a handful of tournaments into her career, took seven points off a group that included Hein and eventual runner-up territory. The machine rewards a player who can chain the right ramp into multiball; whoever manages that on Tales from the Crypt tends to walk away with the game, and on this night it was Krabbe-Schramm.
The One Game That Got Away
If there was a wobble in Carlson’s evening, it came in Round 2. He kept the top of the standings, winning Indianapolis 500 outright, but on Skateball he slipped to third — the only time all night he finished worse than second. In a 10-player field playing close quarters, that’s exactly the sort of result that can unravel an afternoon: one soft game against a small group and the math turns quickly.
It didn’t turn. Carlson’s answer was to simply not let it happen again. His round-by-round finishing line reads 1-2-2-2, an average finishing position of 1.75, and a top-three streak that ran the full four rounds without a break. Where others traded good games for bad ones, he kept posting high results, and that is what wins these tournaments.
Holding Off Schmidt, Moberg, and Hein
The Round 4 draw put the night’s heaviest hitters on one machine. Carlson, Mike Moberg, Greg Hein, and Tom Schmidt — the top of the standings — all shared Star Wars, the 1992 Data East cabinet that swaps the plunger for an up/down shifter bolted to the front of the cabinet and hides a Tri-Ball behind a Death Star you have to bash open. Borg designed this one too, a year before Tales from the Crypt, and it remains a favorite for the way it rewards a clean Death Star-into-ramp rhythm.
Carlson won it, seven points clear of the group over 28 minutes, with Moberg second and Hein third. Schmidt — the strongest-ranked player in the building at IFPA #591 and Wisconsin’s tenth-best NACS competitor — took the four in that group and would finish the night in fourth. For Carlson, the game closed a circle: he had finished ahead of Schmidt in five of the six games they shared on the floor, nudging their long rivalry, 82 tournaments deep, a little further his way.
What the Numbers Say About the Field
This was a small, evenly matched room — 10 players, every one of them IFPA-ranked, three inside the world’s top 1,000. The average national rank sat around #6,357, but the state picture told the real story: all 10 were ranked within Wisconsin, with an average state rank near #175 and one player, Schmidt, inside the state’s top 10. Nights like this reward consistency over fireworks, because there’s nowhere to hide across 24 games and four rounds.
Carlson also settled two shorter rivalries in passing. He finished ahead of Moberg in both of their shared games, edging in front of the West Fargo veteran across their 15 tournaments together for the first time after running even. Moberg had his own good night — a first-place turn on Spider-Man in Round 2, back-to-back wins on No Good Gofers and Supersonic in Round 3 — and stayed a step ahead of Schmidt to lock down second overall.
A Win Worth the Drive
There’s a particular satisfaction to a night like Carlson’s, and District 82 is built to deliver it. The room runs every machine on free play, hands out water and coffee at no charge, and packs a lineup that stretches from late-’70s electromechanicals to the newest Sterns, all of it kept in working order by a staff that fixes trouble fast. It’s open only Friday through Sunday, closed much of the summer, which makes a good Friday there feel earned. Carlson earned this one — a rising player who found his best form on a night the field gave him no room to coast, and took the top score everywhere it mattered.
Final podium
- 1st: Mike Carlson (IFPA #704)
- 2nd: Mike Moberg (IFPA #770)
- 3rd: Greg Hein (IFPA #1172)
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