Rivera Edges Gronnevik on Diner to Win Belles & Chimes SATX B Final
Four players, one 1990 Williams Diner, and about sixteen minutes to settle it. That was the entire shape of the B Final at Belles & Chimes SATX on the evening of June 28 — Sona Rivera, Tricia Gronnevik, Evelyn Cheeka, and Drew Mata crowded around one machine, points awarded by finishing order, no second game to fix a bad ball. When the last ball drained, Rivera had the top spot and the 7 points that came with it. Gronnevik landed at 5, Cheeka at 3, and Mata closed out the four with 1.
It’s a format that leaves nowhere to hide. In a group match-play final run to a single game, the game is the tournament — every shot is the whole night. San Antonio sat under a clear 94-degree sky that Sunday evening, and inside the coffee roaster’s back rooms the finish came down to one lit ramp and one well-timed multiball.
The Diner That Decided It
Williams’ Diner is a friendly-looking machine hiding a specific demand. Mark Ritchie designed it, Mark Sprenger did the art, and Chris Granner scored both its music and sound; it shipped in January 1990 with a cheerful Americana theme and one of the era’s best backbox gags. Clock hands tick off the time up top, and a row of spring-mounted diner patrons bobble whenever somebody nudges the machine a little too hard. Only 3,552 were built, and decades later it still holds an 8.0 player rating across 85 votes.
Under the cartoon front sits a real puzzle. Diner’s signature rule keeps the word D-I-N-E-R lit until you cash a Cup Bonus on the right ramp — which means anyone willing to leave that bonus alone is never more than three shots from the two-ball multiball. On a night decided by a single game, that choice is the whole margin: the difference between building a lead and watching someone else stack points while you clean up a bonus you didn’t need.
A Small Room, Ranked and Unranked
The competitive story here is scale. Four players, none of them ranked nationally by the IFPA, but two carrying real standing in their state. Gronnevik came in as the strongest name on paper — #141 in the Texas NACS standings out of 1,098 ranked players — with Rivera a few rungs back at #159. The other two filled out a genuinely mixed table: Cheeka, a San Antonio player in her first season of tracked competition, and Mata, in from Port Orchard, Washington, the only entrant from outside Texas.
Rivera and Gronnevik are hardly strangers. The two have shared a table in ten tournaments across this stretch of the calendar, most recently at TNT Strikeout five days earlier, where Rivera finished ahead. In all that history they’ve never once tied a finish — one has always come out in front of the other — and on this night it was Rivera again, by a single placement and two points.
The seeding, set by hand, held from top to bottom. Rivera entered as the top seed and left with the win; Mata, seeded last of the four, finished last. A one-game final is exactly where chalk tends to break, and here it didn’t.
Rivera Cashes In
For Rivera, the result closes a quiet stretch. Across her previous five events she hadn’t cracked a top-three finish, with placements ranging from a 5th at National Eyewear Day down to a 37th at the APC Anniversary party. Her Texas season lists twenty events and, until this one, nothing at the very top of a bracket. A single game on a thirty-five-year-old machine doesn’t rewrite a season — but it ends a drought, and it does so with the field’s highest-ranked player standing right beside her.
Cheeka’s third deserves its own line. In her first tracked season, she finished ahead of a three-year competitor in a live final — a solid marker to build on. Mata, the lone traveler, took fourth in a room whose machines she’d had no local reps on, in a format where a single soft ball is the difference between the podium and the bottom.
The Podium at What’s Brewing
What’s Brewing Coffee Roasters is a family-run roaster that happens to keep several rooms of pinball tucked behind the espresso bar, and the regulars tend to praise the same things: warm staff, a room that genuinely wants you there, and a wall of machines that can make the coffee feel like the afterthought. A 4.8 rating across more than 800 reviews suggests the formula holds up. It’s a fitting home for a Belles & Chimes night — modest stakes, real competition, and four players who each treated the one game that counted like it counted.
Rivera walked out of the B Final having done the single thing the format asked of her: win the game in front of her. On an evening when nothing carried over and nobody got a mulligan, that was the whole job — and she finished it.
Final podium — B Finals, Belles & Chimes SATX Summer 2026 #2
- 1st: Sona Rivera
- 2nd: Tricia Gronnevik
- 3rd: Evelyn Cheeka
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