Crookham Keeps His Cool to Win Three Strike Tuesday
The DMD on Data East’s The Simpsons was flashing millions, and for a moment in Round 6 the whole tournament seemed to pass through a single four-player game. Richard Rickman poured in 3,724,780 to take the machine outright, Hayden Crookham answered with 2,453,360, and David Pollock and Nicholas Gustafson trailed behind — three of the night’s eventual top four crammed onto one playfield with strikes on the line. It was the kind of collision only a small field produces, and it told you exactly how this evening was going to be decided: not by who was hot for one ball, but by who could keep surviving these rooms.
Thirteen players filed into The Game Preserve in Spring on a 98-degree July Tuesday — a heat index of 105 outside, a wall of vintage and classic machines inside — for another edition of Space City Pinball’s Three Strike Tuesday. In a Group Knockout this size, the margins vanish. One flat game against the wrong group and your afternoon unravels; one clutch stand and you’re the last player standing. Hayden Crookham found the second path.
A Tight Thirteen Where One Bad Game Bites
This was a compact, homegrown Houston-area bracket — twelve of the thirteen entrants IFPA-ranked, all but one flying the Texas flag, with a median national rank around #2,552 and no true out-of-region ringer to hide behind. Nicholas Gustafson came in as the paper favorite at IFPA #1251 and Texas #54, the strongest number in the building, but in Group Knockout a favorite gets no bye from the format. Everyone plays their groups, and everyone accumulates strikes the same way.
The early rounds spread the pain around, exactly as this format promises. David Pollock opened by taking NBA Fastbreak and then Old Coney Island! in back-to-back rounds, the start of a run that would see him place top-three in an absurd nine straight games. Crookham, meanwhile, settled into the groove that would define his night — a second here, a Round 2 win on Trident, a steady refusal to take the fourth-place strike that ends afternoons. Through the opening stretch his finishing positions read like a metronome: 2, 1, 2, 2, 2.
The venue lent itself to the grind. The Game Preserve is a family-friendly gaming center — rows of old and new machines, a 4.6 rating across nearly a thousand reviews — the sort of comfortable, lived-in room where a 26-game marathon across a 24-title lineup feels like an evening well spent rather than an ordeal. It has hosted this series before; Gustafson [locked down the June 23 edition here], and Pollock [edged a small field at the same venue] earlier in the summer.
Rickman on a Tear, and a Maiden Duel in the Middle
If any player looked untouchable through the middle rounds, it was Rickman. The 13-year veteran out of Tennessee — 406 career events, a peak of IFPA #842 back in 2024 — turned in a machine-hunting clinic, posting the top score on five of the ten machines he touched. He won Firepower, Cyclone, Guardians of the Galaxy, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and that headline Simpsons game, and carried the tournament’s best average round finish at 1.8. Across the games he shared with Pollock and with Crookham, he came out ahead in four of seven each — the numbers of a man in control.
The strike math had its own dramas further down the sheet. In Round 5, on Stern’s 2018 Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast — Keith Elwin’s four-flipper cathedral of a machine, and the longest-running games of the night at an average of 27 minutes — Thomas Bernard edged Cameron Warren over a 23-minute slog, with Gary Turner and Caroline Guevara taking the strikes. It was a small win with outsized meaning for Bernard, who has clawed his way back into a tight, 13-tournament back-and-forth with Guevara and finished ahead of her again on the night.
Elsewhere the field’s familiar rivalries kept churning. Ben Whittington and Gustafson wrote another close chapter of a 16-event history, Whittington holding a narrow edge to finish 3rd against Gustafson’s 5th. Pollock narrowed his ongoing tussle with Warren, finishing ahead this time. And Whittington — riding a genuine hot streak with a seven-event top-three run and two wins in his last five outings, including the previous two Three Strike Tuesdays — kept himself in the deep end of the bracket all night.
Crookham’s Nerve at the Buzzer
The endgame came down to attrition among the last four. Round 8 on Ghostbusters (Pro) went to Pollock over Whittington, with Rickman and Crookham absorbing strikes — Crookham’s lone fourth of the entire tournament, and it came at the worst possible time. But he steadied immediately. Round 9 on Guardians of the Galaxy sent Rickman first and Crookham second, and the two strikes underneath eliminated both Pollock and Whittington, who settled for a shared third.
That left Crookham and Rickman alone for the decider: a heads-up NBA Fastbreak, eight minutes of basketball on a machine Crookham had already won earlier in the night. Rickman had beaten him in four of their seven shared games and owned the better average — but a final is not a season, and Crookham’s calm was the whole story. He took the game, closed the door, and finished with an average round position of 1.9 built almost entirely on second-place finishes that never became strikes. In a format that punishes one bad game, he simply never had one that mattered.
For Rickman it was a familiar shape to a strong night — top scores everywhere, the runner-up plaque again. For Whittington and Pollock, the tie for third extends steady, deep-into-the-bracket form; Pollock’s nine-game top-three streak was, in its quiet way, as impressive as anyone’s line on the sheet.
Where the Momentum Points From Here
A win like this is what a consistency player builds a season on. Crookham never posted the flashiest number in the room — Rickman owned the scoreboard — but he converted the metric that decides Group Knockout, and on a Tuesday-series calendar that rewards showing up and surviving, that’s the trait that compounds. Rickman leaves with another podium and the sense that a single closer game flips his summer; Whittington’s top-three run and Pollock’s top-three streak both carry straight into the next Three Strike Tuesday, where Gustafson will be looking to reclaim the room he owned in June. The series rolls on at The Game Preserve, and on this evidence the front of the pack is going to keep bumping elbows.
For now, the final podium in Spring:
- 1st — Hayden Crookham
- 2nd — Richard Rickman
- 3rd (tie) — Ben Whittington
- 3rd (tie) — David Pollock
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