Morales Shakes Off a Diner Loss to Run the Table in Cedar Park
Jonathon Morales walked into The Brewtique on Thursday as the favorite — the Austin regular ranked IFPA #592, the only top-1,000 player in the room — and for one machine he looked like anything but. He lost the opener. Then he corrected, hard: three round wins in a row, the top score on three of the four machines he touched, and first place by the time the last ball drained.
The night gave him cover to work. Light rain kept falling on Cedar Park — about half an inch, on an evening that felt closer to 90 than the 81 the thermometer showed — which made the tournament’s title, “A Pinball A Day Keeps The Rain At Bay,” read less like a pun than a public service. Twelve players filed in to wait out the weather over four rounds of group match play, and by 9 p.m. the strongest name in the room had turned a shaky start into a clean win.
A Diner Loss to Open
Morales drew Diner to start, and it did not go his way. Brandon Venes — a first-year player with 14 events to his name, ranked well down the list at IFPA #19,566 — posted the best score in the group for the full 7 points, with Morales second on 5, Christopher Welch third, and Adam Barnett fourth.
Diner is worth lingering on. Mark Ritchie designed it for Williams in 1990, with art by Mark Sprenger and a production run of 3,552, and it still owns one of the friendliest backboxes on any floor: a working clock ticks off the minutes while a row of spring-mounted diners bobbles every time someone leans on the machine. It rewards patience on the ramps — the right ramp spells D-I-N-E-R and lifts the left one for a lock, and the road into its two-ball multiball runs through the inner right loop before you cash the Rush shots back up the ramp. Venes simply outscored the group there and handed the favorite an early deficit.
Elsewhere in the opening round, organizer Jason Newman got his night going with a win on Pokémon, and Joey Demple took Godzilla. Nobody yet looked like they were pulling away.
Morales Takes Command
In a 12-player field there is nowhere to hide — everybody meets everybody soon enough — and Morales spent the middle rounds making that work in his favor. He won Radical!, the Bally title that saw the most action on the night, then drew the game that would decide the tournament: Round 3 on Popeye Saves the Earth, in a group that included Newman.
Morales took it. He finished first, Welch second, and Newman third — the only round all night the organizer failed to win. That group is where the whole thing turned — Morales’s 7 points against Newman’s 3 swung four points between them, and the final margin was just two, 26 to 24. Across the three games they shared, Morales finished ahead of Welch every time.
Newman’s own night was a good one. Ranked IFPA #2,284 and running the event himself, he topped three of his four machines — Pokémon, King Kong, and a Round 4 turn on Radical! — with that Popeye group the lone exception, and he finished well ahead of Christopher Welch, a familiar opponent he’s been evenly matched with across 23 shared tournaments.
Banzai Run and the Final Word
The last round stacked the top of the standings onto one machine. Morales, Demple, and Venes shared Banzai Run in the closing group, and Morales settled it the way he’d settled everything since Diner — first, 7 points, Demple second and Venes third.
Banzai Run makes a fitting stage for a finish. Pat Lawlor and Larry DeMar built it for Williams in 1988, art again by Sprenger, software co-written by DeMar and Ed Boon — yes, the same Ed Boon who would go on to co-create Mortal Kombat a few years later. Only 1,751 were made, and its signature trick still stops newcomers cold: a magnet rides a track up into the backbox and carries the ball onto a second, vertical playfield you actually play on the backglass. The machine pays off aggression up the hill — cliff jumps are worth 50,000 plus 25,000 apiece, stacking toward 200,000, and clearing A-B-C doubles the haul.
That was the tournament. Morales had opened second and never finished a round lower than first again.
The Favorite, Confirmed
Strip away the Diner wobble and the evening read the way the seeding suggested it might: the highest-ranked player in the room, Texas’s 26th-ranked competitor, played like it once the machines stopped surprising him. Venes turned a debut-season profile into a podium spot; Newman turned a rough recent stretch into a runner-up on a night he was also running the room. For a rainy Thursday at a locally owned beer shop with pool tables in the back and a chalkboard of stouts up front, that is a full evening’s worth of pinball.
Final podium — A Pinball A Day Keeps The Rain At Bay (7/16/26):
- 1st: Jonathon Morales (IFPA #592)
- 2nd: Jason Newman (IFPA #2,284)
- 3rd: Brandon Venes (IFPA #19,566)
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