District 82 Pinball: Fifth Seed Takes Flippin’ Friday Over the Qualifier Leader
Seven rounds into the knockout, three players stood around Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines — Steve Ritchie’s 2003 build, the one with the gun handle bolted to the front of the cabinet and a backbox cannon that flings a Delrin ball sideways at a row of targets while the whole playfield floods red. Tom Schmidt won the game, Ripley Walters-Giblin took second, Eddie Smith third. Those are the exact three names that would end up on the podium at District 82 Pinball Arcade in De Pere — just not in that order.
By the time the last ball drained, it was Walters-Giblin holding the title, having come out of the qualifier as the fifth seed and outlasted a knockout field that included players ranked hundreds of spots higher. It was the kind of win that starts quietly and only looks inevitable in hindsight.
Schmidt’s Runaway Qualifier
The night began with 18 players and 40 games of Group Match Play across four rounds, four to a group where the numbers allowed and three where they didn’t. Tom Schmidt (IFPA #595, WI #10) turned in the performance of the qualifier, posting the top score on 5 of the 8 machines they played and opening with a Round 1 sweep on Deadpool and Sky Kings. Schmidt finished first, Matt McCarty second, Eddie Smith third — the order that seeded the bracket.
The strongest résumé in the room didn’t cash it in. Tom Graf, ranked #116 nationally and third in all of Wisconsin, came in as the field’s headliner and finished 11th, tripped up in Round 2 when Rachel Johnson took Tales from the Crypt out from under him. The Round 4 marquee group put Schmidt, McCarty and Smith on Disney TRON: Legacy together, and none of them won it — Chuck Blohm did, with Schmidt settling for third.
For Walters-Giblin, the qualifier was steady rather than spectacular: a fourth on the opening machine, then three straight runner-up finishes to slide into fifth and, with it, one of the nine spots that carried over into the finals. Nothing about it announced what came next.
Nine Players, Down to Two
The finals shifted the rules entirely. Group Knockout is an elimination format — finish low in your group, collect a strike, and you’re gone once the strikes pile up. With only nine players left, all of them IFPA-ranked, the individual groups mattered more than any season-long statistic, and the field thinned fast.
Alex phelps went first, out after three rounds. Blohm followed a round later. The night’s clearest upset came on Mata Hari — Bally’s 1977 Jim Patla design, 16,260 of them built, still a lovely thing to look at under District 82’s low lights — where Rachel Johnson beat both Brian Klinger and phelps in a game the ratings gave her roughly a one-in-four shot to win. Johnson pushed on to sixth before bowing out; Klinger and Rowan Walters-Giblin, Ripley’s fellow Manitowoc entrant, went out in seventh and fifth.
That left the seeds to sort themselves out. Matt McCarty — the finals’ top-ranked player at IFPA #519 and Wisconsin’s ninth — couldn’t find traction and was eliminated in fourth, the highest-rated name to fall short. In their long-running rivalry across 85 shared tournaments, Schmidt finished ahead of McCarty this time, chipping into an edge that has stayed slim for years. Eddie Smith hung on to third, trading first-place finishes with Schmidt and Walters-Giblin deep into the bracket before the last group knocked him out in Round 9.
The Duel on Meteor, Metallica, and Barracora
That set the final: Ripley Walters-Giblin against Tom Schmidt, the qualifier’s runaway leader, head to head with the title on the line. Schmidt had already shown they could beat Walters-Giblin one-on-one — the Terminator 3 group was proof — but the knockout gives you no cushion, and this went the distance.
They split the opening two. Walters-Giblin took Meteor, a Stern Electronics game that lasted all of five minutes. Schmidt answered on Metallica, forcing a decider. Then came Barracora, a four-minute finish that ended with Walters-Giblin’s ball outlasting Schmidt’s and the title going to the fifth seed. Across the twelve rounds of the knockout, Walters-Giblin had put up the top score on 5 of the 12 machines they played — the same kind of floor-wide consistency Schmidt had used to run away with the qualifier, turned back on the qualifier’s winner.
It’s worth remembering who this was. Walters-Giblin has been at this barely a year, 101 tournaments in, ranked #2756 with a rating that has climbed steadily over the past twelve months. On a Friday night in De Pere, that climb reached a title.
Where It Landed
The whole night compressed into that last four-minute game on Barracora, one drained ball settling nine players’ worth of pinball. Schmidt had the better rank, the better qualifier, and the earlier head-to-head win; Walters-Giblin had the game that counted. That’s knockout pinball — the strikes don’t care what you did an hour ago.
Here’s how the finals finished:
- 1st — Ripley Walters-Giblin (IFPA #2756)
- 2nd — Tom Schmidt (IFPA #595)
- 3rd — Eddie Smith (IFPA #1479)
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