Nick Gunn Tops the Field on Four of Five at Hotrods
Nick Gunn came to the seventh stop of the Tucson Pinball Novice League on July 16 and left almost nothing behind him. Over five rounds of group match play, he posted the top score on four of the five machines he drew, and the one he didn’t win he still finished second on. In a ten-player field at Hotrods Old Vail, a night like that doesn’t leave much room to argue.
What it did leave, oddly enough, was a one-point margin at the top — the quiet surprise buried inside an otherwise lopsided evening.
An Iron Maiden Opener and a Familiar Guest List
Gunn set the tone in Round 1, taking Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast ahead of Jim Keating and Jacob Saeger for the full seven points. It was the first entry on what would become a very short list of machines that got away from him all night.
The room he did it in is part of the draw. Hotrods Old Vail is a bar built around a working auto shop, with a wall of glass that lets you watch full restorations take shape while you eat; the burgers and fries earn the kind of loyalty that keeps a 4-star, 1,141-review reputation intact, and on league nights the pinball is the other reason regulars turn up.
The guest list read like a neighborhood. Of the ten entrants, only two carried an IFPA ranking, and the floor leaned on a couple of local surnames — four Saegers playing, two Gunns, and organizer Wayne Saeger running the show. The format kept everyone moving: five rounds of four-player groups, with three-player groups filling in when the count didn’t divide evenly, points scaled to finishing spot, most points wins. In a field that small, one cold game can sink an evening and one hot one can decide it, which is exactly the kind of margin Gunn spent the night refusing to give anyone.
Bob Bodman, the Field’s Ranked Man, Stays in the Hunt
If anyone arrived with a paper edge, it was Bob Bodman. The Tucson veteran sits at IFPA #12676 — up from #14324 a year ago, and working back toward the career peak of #6008 he set in 2021 — with 155 tournaments and six years of play behind him. His recent stretch had been lean, five straight finishes outside the top three, which made this one a step forward.
Bodman answered by being the steadiest man in the building: a top-three result in all five rounds, capped by the tournament’s tightest game. On Doodle Bug, a 1971 Williams electromechanical and the oldest machine in a lineup that stretches all the way to 2026, he edged Xavier Cuevas 37,000 to 36,180 — a few thousand points of daylight on a table with no ramps or modes to hide behind.
Whenever Bodman shared a group with Gunn, though, the result held. Across the three games the two played together, Gunn finished ahead every time. And with Keating quietly winning everything in front of him — first place in Rounds 2 through 5 — the standings settled into a two-man shape that Bodman couldn’t quite pry open.
A Pokémon Finale and a One-Point Verdict
The last round gathered the top of the leaderboard in one place. On Pokémon (Pro), Gunn drew a three-way group with Bodman and Bob Casetta and closed the way he’d played all night, taking the 20-minute game ahead of both.
It was a fitting machine to end on. Pokémon (Pro) is the newest table in the room — a February 2026 Stern designed by George Gomez and Jack Danger, with art from Jeremy Packer’s Zombie Yeti studio — and it plays like it wants to punish shortcuts. Newcomers learn quickly not to cradle the left flipper waiting on the skill shot; on an outlane that hasn’t been rebuilt, that habit turns a plunge into a drain.
The verdict itself came down to a single point: 33 for Gunn, 32 for Keating. The gap traces all the way back to the first two rounds, the only ones the two men shared. Gunn beat Keating on Iron Maiden in Round 1; Keating returned the favor on Old Chicago in Round 2. They split those two groups — each finished ahead once — but Gunn’s Round 1 cushion was the wider of the two, and once the pairings sent them their separate ways, both simply kept winning. Keating took four rounds outright and still came up a point short, which says as much about his night as it does about Gunn’s. Further down the sheet, Joan Saeger got her own moment, closing the evening with a Round 5 win on Godzilla.
The Night in Full
Strip away the close finish and the shape is plain. On four of the five machines he touched, nobody outscored Nick Gunn, and the fifth he lost by a single spot. In a small field where one bad game undoes an evening, he never had one — and against the night’s only real ranked threat, he came out ahead in every group they shared. It added up to a clean first place, a point clear of a player who won four rounds of his own.
Final podium:
- 1st — Nick Gunn
- 2nd — Jim Keating
- 3rd — Bob Bodman (IFPA #12676)
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