Shannon Parsons Runs the Comet at Light Up the Lounge
Round six, ten minutes on the glass of a 1985 Williams Comet, and three of the night’s best players stood shoulder to shoulder waiting to see who would blink. Shannon Parsons, Kim VanWormer and Michela Phillabaum had all clawed their way to the top of the standings, and here they were, sharing a four-player group on a forty-one-year-old carnival machine when it mattered most. When the last ball drained, Parsons had taken it — first place, VanWormer second, Phillabaum third — and the podium of a Belles and Chimes evening in Oviedo was effectively sealed.
That final game was the microcosm of the whole night. With only eleven players in the room, there was nowhere to hide at The Pinball Lounge; over six rounds and eighteen games, the contenders kept bumping into one another, and the leaderboard came down to who handled those collisions best. Parsons handled them better than anyone.
Parsons Turns Comet Into a Home Court
Parsons finished the night with an average round position of 1.33, opening with a win, closing with a win, and never once dropping out of the top two across all six rounds. The 87-degree Florida heat outside didn’t follow her indoors — she was cool where it counted. Comet in particular became her personal launchpad: she played the Barry Oursler classic twice and won both times, riding its corkscrew ramp and million-point cycle jump to a perfect record on the machine.
There’s a longer arc behind the result. Parsons is nine years and 187 tournaments into her competitive life, and her rating has been trending upward over the past year to IFPA #8,135. That climb hasn’t come with many recent trophies, but the deep-field experience showed here — a career built on grinding through Free Play Florida and Stern Army fields translated into steady, mistake-free pinball when the room was small and the pressure constant.
Comet itself deserves a nod. Barry Oursler’s design, dressed in Python Anghelo’s fairground art, was built in a run of roughly 8,100 machines back in 1985, and its blend of ramps and stand-ups rewards exactly the kind of patient shot-selection Parsons leaned on. On a night stacked with modern Sterns, it was the old Williams that decided the top of the board.
The Rivalry That Wouldn’t Settle
If there was a subplot to shadow Parsons all night, it was Michela Phillabaum. The two have crossed paths at fourteen tournaments now, a genuine neck-and-neck rivalry, and tonight Parsons pulled one back — finishing ahead of Phillabaum in three of the four games they shared. Phillabaum, the strongest player in the room at IFPA #3,794 and Florida NACS #36, is the more decorated of the pair on paper, with fourteen wins over the last three years and a career average finish inside the top twelve.
She made Parsons earn every inch. Phillabaum notched wins of her own on Comet in round three and on Pokémon (Premium) in round five, the latter a direct answer that put her right back in Parsons’s shadow. Her round positions read like a leaderboard heartbeat — 3, 2, 1, 2, 1, 3 — never letting the leader breathe. But the two round-three-and-five wins couldn’t quite close the gap, and that shared Comet game in the finale, where she landed third behind both Parsons and VanWormer, was the difference between first and second.
Between them, this was the whole story: two familiar opponents trading blows over a decade-plus of Florida pinball, with the leader narrowing tonight rather than the challenger overtaking.
VanWormer’s Slow Climb and Camila’s Venom Ambush
Kim VanWormer authored the night’s best comeback shape. She opened cold — third, third — then rebuilt, going 2, 2, 1, 2 to finish with a 2.17 average and the third podium step. Her round-five win came on Pinbot, and she edged Phillabaum in two of their three shared games, the kind of quiet consistency that turns a slow start into a trophy. She finished ahead of Camila Benavides, Kim Rowan and Paige Shaffer more often than not, steadily reeling in the players who’d led her early.
The most fun collision of the night belonged to Camila Benavides. In round two, on Stern’s 2023 Venom (Pro) — Brian Eddy’s licensed comics machine with its signature bell-tower toy and its 21-minute grind of a game — Benavides edged Phillabaum head-to-head in a four-player group, taking first over the tournament’s top seed by rank. Benavides went a strong 1.5 average on Venom across two plays and rode that energy to a fifth-place finish, the top of the unranked pack.
Not everyone’s night went to plan. Top seed Chloe Jones, hand-picked to lead the field, crashed out earlier than expected and finished tenth of eleven, a reminder that a manual seeding is only a prediction. Behind her, Kim Rowan showed flashes — round-two and round-four wins on Deadpool (Pro), where she went a perfect two-for-two — but couldn’t string them together, closing with three straight fourth-place finishes to land sixth.
Same Room, Same Faces, All Night
The middle of the pack tangled just as tightly as the top. Paige Shaffer and Dani Pollock both finished seventh on identical 2.67 averages, each opening with a round-one win before the field caught up. Sam Gwinn saved his best for last with a round-six Fathom victory to climb to ninth, having finished ahead of Jenn Marino in all three of their shared games. Marino, six years and 104 tournaments deep, anchored the field at eleventh but never stopped grinding — a 2.83 average across a night where she saw Venom (Pro) four times.
That’s what an eleven-player group match play night gives you: no soft draws, no coasting, everyone eventually staring across the glass at everyone else. Parsons met that gauntlet with the steadiest hands in the building, closing out a rivalry chapter against Phillabaum and turning a humble Williams Comet into the machine that carried her home. After nine years and nearly two hundred tournaments, a night where she never left the top two is exactly the kind of result that turns an upward rating trend into a win — and on this Thursday in Oviedo, she took it.
Final podium:
- 1st — Shannon Parsons
- 2nd — Michela Phillabaum
- 3rd — Kim VanWormer
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