Walt Wood Loses One Game, Wins Everything Else at Outlanes’ July Pace Match
For just under five and three-quarter hours on Saturday, the only real question at Outlanes Pinball Lounge was whether anyone could hand Walt Wood a second loss. The Englewood veteran dropped a single game all afternoon — a runner-up finish on The Walking Dead in Round 3 — and answered it with a win in every other round he played. By the time the July Pace Match closed after 11 rounds and 71 games, the 41-player field had produced a champion who topped the scoreboard on 10 of the 11 machines he touched.
Wood came in as the rating favorite and left no doubt about it. Ranked IFPA #40, with a career peak of #23 back in 2022, he was the highest-rated player in a room where the average national rank sat down near #6,600. In a match-play format that kept throwing him into groups with the other contenders, he simply won the games that counted.
Qualifying: Wood Sets the Tone, the Field Sorts Itself
The Pace Match format is unforgiving in a quiet way. Players rack up points from three- and four-player group games across the rounds, but anyone who drifts below a rising progress threshold gets cut once the guaranteed rounds are done. Survive early, and you buy yourself a shot at the back half.
Wood opened on James Cameron’s Avatar and took it, then set about building the streak that would define his day. The field around him stayed busy sorting itself out. Ryan Altermatt, a 16-year veteran and the winner of 2 of his previous 5 events, finished ahead of Lewis Ritenour on Black Knight: Sword of Rage to start his own strong run. Justin Hinman — Colorado’s #2-ranked NACS player and the top state entrant in the building — banked an early second on Rush and settled in.
The opening round also gave the night its first bit of theater over on James Bond 007 (60th Anniversary LE), Keith Elwin’s 60th-anniversary Stern from 2022 with art by Kevin O’Connor. It’s a table where hitting M16 kicks off a mode and the playfield screen tells you where to shoot next — plenty to track in a three-player game. Conner Teevens read it best, finishing ahead of Marqus Lechuga and Kanin Cadam across a tidy 16 minutes.
Baywatch, and the One Round That Mattered to Wood
If any early game looked like a real test for the leader, it came in Round 2 on Baywatch, the 1995 Sega oddball designed by Joe Kaminkow and Joe Balcer. The machine is best known for the lock tower rising out of its upper left and for that game-controlled “Shark Flips” mini-flipper — a shot the table practically dares you to attempt, even though letting the ball settle to the right inlane is usually the safer read. In a four-player group, Wood came out on top, with Altermatt second and Cruz Pedregon and John Fabela filling out the card over a long 33 minutes.
The lone crack in the armor arrived a round later. On The Walking Dead, John Devore put up the top score and dropped Wood to second — the only game all afternoon Wood didn’t win. It’s the kind of result that ends some players’ momentum. Wood’s answer was to reel off 8 straight wins from there.
By the midpoint, the point targets started climbing round by round — 27, then 34, then 41 — and the names that would decide the podium kept surfacing near the top. Ritenour strung together a run of his own, finishing first on Venom, Pokémon, High Speed and Rollergames across the early and middle rounds. Hinman matched him for consistency, taking Rollergames, The Beatles, Star Wars, Fish Tales and Black Knight in a stretch where he finished top-three in every game he played.
Alien Poker and Foo Fighters: The Podium Gets Settled
The tournament tightened into its final decisions when the contenders finally landed on the same playfields. Round 10 brought Wood, Hinman, Ritenour and Altermatt together on Alien Poker, the 1980 Williams solid-state that predates most of the room’s lineup by decades. Wood took it, Hinman second, Ritenour third, Altermatt fourth — a four-man snapshot of exactly how the standings would finish.
Round 11 narrowed to the last three on Foo Fighters, and Wood closed the book the way he’d written the rest of it: first place, with Hinman just behind and Ritenour third. Across the three games he shared with Hinman all night, Wood finished ahead every time; same story against Ritenour. When you win the games that matter against the people chasing you, the math takes care of itself.
Behind Wood, the runner-up race stayed genuinely close. Ritenour (IFPA #915, and Colorado’s #4 NACS player) posted 7 round wins and an average round finish of 1.55; Hinman answered with 6 wins and a 1.64. The two have crossed paths 22 times on the circuit, and Ritenour kept a narrow edge on the night to take second. Hinman’s own long-running rivalry with Altermatt — 47 shared events between them — swung his way this time, as he finished ahead of Altermatt in both their games and edged him for the final podium step.
The Favorite Who Delivered
It’s easy to shrug at a top seed winning a weekly, but dominant-performance nights this clean are rare. Wood finished top-three in all 11 of his games, averaged a round-finish of 1.09, and was kept off the top of just one machine’s scoresheet all day. In a room stocked with 5 of Colorado’s top-10 NACS players, on tables spanning 1975 to 2026 under the low-key, retro-friendly roof that regulars keep coming back to, the highest-rated player made it look about as easy as the format allows.
That’s the honest headline: no comeback, no upset, no broken tie for the ages — just a favorite who played like one across a long afternoon and let the results speak.
Final podium — Outlanes Pinball Lounge July Pace Match
- 1st: Walt Wood (IFPA #40)
- 2nd: Lewis Ritenour (IFPA #915)
- 3rd: Justin Hinman (IFPA #946)
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