Strzelecki Grinds Out the Pokémon Launch Party
Matt Strzelecki walked into the Pinball Gallery on Saturday, June 27 as Pennsylvania’s top-ranked player, and he walked out with the trophy. But the state’s NACS #1 did not have the tidy night his ranking might promise. He didn’t top qualifying, he needed a tiebreaker just to reach the final four, and he trailed deep into the last round before the title finally settled his way.
The occasion was the launch of Stern’s new Pokémon (Premium), and Bill Disney’s 28-player draw came out for it — a standard Saturday-night field at the Malvern room where you pay by the hour and leave the quarters at home. The machine that headlined the party would end up deciding the whole thing.
Czapka Sweeps Qualifying for His First Win
The qualifier ran as Max Match Play: head-to-head two-player games created on demand, no fixed rounds, everyone chasing the same target of ten games. In about two hours the format churned out 140 matches across the floor, and the player who handled it best was Joe Czapka. He topped the field on eight of the ten machines he played, and the result was the first tournament win of a career that stretches 26 events across nine years. For an IFPA #9,241 who hadn’t finished top-three since 2023, it was a night worth savoring.
Behind him, the math got crowded. Five players tied for second — Geoff Warke, Strzelecki, Jason Patterson, Eric Menzel, and Albert Zuba — and all five carried into the finals bracket alongside the top seeds. Don Werth, Pennsylvania’s #4, made his own noise: he reeled off six straight wins to open his slate before a run of runner-up finishes cooled him to a share of seventh.
The strength here was regional rather than national. Of 28 entrants, 24 carried IFPA rankings, and Strzelecki (#379) was comfortably the class of the room; the rest of the field averaged well down the list. Locally it read deeper — 26 state-ranked players, with two inside Pennsylvania’s top ten. The 87-machine lineup spanned 1975 to the brand-new Pokémon, with Bally’s Embryon quietly marking 45 years since its June 1981 release.
Pokémon (Premium) Makes Its Tournament Debut
The whole party was built around a machine the hobby had waited a long time to see. Stern put Pokémon on a real playfield for the first time this year, releasing the game on February 13 in partnership with The Pokémon Company International. It ships in three tiers — Pro, Premium, and Limited Edition — and the Gallery ran the middle one, the Premium, built on Stern’s SPIKE 3 hardware.
The license translates into a clean objective. You drop into one of four habitats — forest, water, mountain, or desert — and hunt Pokémon by shooting an illuminated, motorized Poké Ball, stacking catches toward a full team and a completed collection. Battles against rival trainers and against Team Rocket’s boss Giovanni give the modes their spine, while the backbox pulls in clips from the original animated series and the theme song to sell the nostalgia. Stern’s Insider Connected system quietly banks every Pokémon you catch to your account, so your Pokédex follows you from one machine to the next.
It’s a busy playfield with real toys. An animatronic Pikachu reacts to your game, and Team Rocket’s Meowth balloon drops down over the battle arena to make a nuisance of itself. The Premium’s headline feature — the thing that separates it from the cheaper Pro — is an interactive electromagnet buried in that arena, a magnet that grabs and slings the ball mid-battle. That is exactly the sort of controlled chaos that can turn a tournament game sideways in a hurry.
For anyone stepping up cold, the shortest path to points runs through the center: the bank of standup targets there is what cracks the Team Rocket mech and lights the multiball modes, and a ball played around them leaves most of its scoring on the table. Routing the deciding round straight onto this new table meant nobody had years of muscle memory to lean on — a leveler that put a premium on reading an unfamiliar playfield fast.
Strzelecki Survives the Semifinals
The eight qualifiers split into two groups of four, and Strzelecki drew the harder assignment of the two. His group opened on Star Trek, where Patterson took the game and Strzelecki finished dead last of the four — a poor start for the top seed. He answered on Legends of Valhalla, winning a 55-minute grind outright to claw back level with Werth. That forced a two-player tiebreaker on Black Knight 2000, and Strzelecki edged it in six minutes to advance; Werth, twice a runner-up in the group, went out in fifth, and Warke’s fourth-place group finish left him seventh.
The other semifinal group had its own turn. Zuba opened by taking Avatar: The Battle for Pandora over a four-player table, Tessa Morton answered by winning a long Harry Potter game, and the two of them advanced together. The casualty was the man who’d topped qualifying: Joe Czapka, seeded first into the bracket, couldn’t find a foothold in either game and finished eighth of eight. Pinball keeps its own accounts, and a sweep on Saturday’s qualifying floor bought no safe passage once the groups reset.
Settled on the Third Pokémon Game
That left four for the title — Strzelecki, Patterson, Zuba, and Morton — all of it on the Pokémon (Premium). Strzelecki drew first blood, winning the opening 35-minute game with Zuba second. Then came the game of the night, a marathon that stretched 87 minutes before Patterson closed it out on top, with Zuba again second and Strzelecki third. Two games in, Strzelecki and Patterson stood level at the front, and the bracket’s last question came down to a single head-to-head on the same machine. Strzelecki won it, and the launch party had its champion.
It was the kind of win the numbers say Strzelecki should collect and the night says he had to work for: beaten in qualifying, staring at a last-place game in the semis, behind after the marathon, and still standing when it ended. For the state’s #1, the trophy came not from cruising but from surviving every place the evening tried to lose him.
Final podium
- 1st — Matt Strzelecki (IFPA #379)
- 2nd — Jason Patterson (IFPA #3,399)
- 3rd — Albert Zuba (IFPA #13,994)
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