Deanna Scalf Wins A Second-Round Sweep at Westy Colfax Queens #6
Deanna Scalf spent Thursday night running the Westy Colfax Queens — she organized the sixth stop of the 2026 summer season, seated 15 players across the machines at The 1up Arcade Bar in Westminster, and kept the group games moving under an overcast Colorado sky. Then she went out and won it, posting the top score on 4 of the 6 machines she played.
The win had been a while coming. Across her five most recent recorded events Scalf hadn’t finished in the top three — a stretch of teens results and one night as far back as 49th, with her best a fifth just last month — and her IFPA number had drifted from a 2025 peak of #2577 to #3675. It wasn’t wire-to-wire, either: she opened the night unevenly, and for one full round the tournament belonged to somebody else.
A Split First Round, and Kyri Baker Running Clean
Scalf’s first three games told three different stories. She took her opener on Foo Fighters, then ran into Judy Strathearn on Twilight Zone and settled for second in a tight four-player game that stretched to 39 minutes. Then came the long one: 61 minutes on Star Wars: Fall of the Empire, one of the newer tables on the floor, where Scalf finished last while Hayley Mitrano closed it out on top.
That Twilight Zone is one of the oldest tables on the floor and still one of its most interesting — a 1993 Bally widebody from Pat Lawlor’s shop, built around a real gumball machine that spits out the next ball and a magnetized mini-playfield. It rewards patience with its extra balls: light them freely, but collect one before you’ve claimed the door prize and the prize slips away, so the door comes first. Star Wars: Fall of the Empire sits at the opposite end of the timeline, a 2025 Stern designed by John Borg with art from Zombie Yeti. On default settings the first Falcon feature opens up to anyone willing to keep looping the middle ramp — a fast route in, when the round it decides runs an hour.
While Scalf traded results, Kyri Baker did not trade anything. Baker won all three of her first-round games — Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Batman 66, and Stranger Things — and led the field after one round with Scalf sitting second in her group. If the night had ended at intermission, this recap would carry a different name in the headline.
Three Straight, Starting on Medieval Madness
The second round flipped it. Scalf won all three of her games in a row, and the first of them dropped her into a group with the player she’d have to beat. On Medieval Madness she and Baker shared a table, and the game went to Scalf in a brisk 16 minutes — a tidy contrast to the hour she’d spent losing on Star Wars earlier — while Baker came fourth on it.
Medieval Madness is worth a pause. Brian Eddy designed it for Williams in 1997, only a little over 4,000 were built, and its centerpiece is a castle that blows apart when you finally storm it. The machine pays off a specific plan: clear the ramps and orbits first, leave the trolls standing, then fire off the multiball and knock the trolls down inside it for the re-light. It’s a table that rewards order, and order was the theme of Scalf’s second round.
From there she closed it out on Guardians of the Galaxy and Pokémon, taking first on both to finish the round in front. The head-to-head math underlines how complete the run was: Scalf finished ahead of Baker in all three of the games they shared, ahead of Mitrano in five of their six, and ahead of Kira Wulf in all three of theirs. Baker swept the first round; Scalf swept the second. The second sweep is the one that decides tournaments.
Baker’s Runner-Up and a Three-Way Knot for Third
Baker’s early dominance still held up for second place — a strong first round can carry a lot of weight in a two-round format, even when the back half goes sideways. Behind her, third place ended in a genuine tie, with Rach Duran, Whitney Lockhart, and Julia Johnson all finishing level. Each earned it a different way. Duran stacked wins on Metallica Remastered and Jurassic Park in the first round and added Twilight Zone in the second; Lockhart closed strong with first-place games on King Kong and Monster Bash after the break; Johnson took Elvira’s House of Horrors early and Star Wars Pro late.
In a 15-player field there’s nowhere to disappear — 7 ranked players, 8 unranked, everyone crossing paths soon enough that a bad game finds you back. The room itself makes that easy to sit through. The 1up in Westminster runs family-friendly into the early evening before it turns into a proper bar, keeps a clean floor of machines that still take coins, and pours a cocktail list that patrons keep bringing up alongside the pinball. Just mind your basket of fries when you leave the table for a game.
Sixteen Minutes on the Exploding Castle
If you want the one image that holds the whole night, it’s Scalf at Medieval Madness in the second round — 16 minutes, the castle in pieces, the tournament’s eventual runner-up standing next to her in fourth. She’d lost an hour on Star Wars, dropped a close one to Strathearn on Twilight Zone, and still turned the second half into a clean run of three. For a player who ran the event and hadn’t seen a podium in her last five, the DMS initials meant a little more going up on the board this time.
Final podium, Westy Colfax Queens: 2026 Summer Season #6:
- 1st — Deanna Scalf (IFPA #3675)
- 2nd — Kyri Baker
- 3rd (tie) — Rach Duran (IFPA #60052), Whitney Lockhart (IFPA #18371), Julia Johnson
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