60-Deep Field on a 1978 Machine
The air outside District 82 was doing its worst — 88 degrees that felt like 101, humidity clinging at 72 percent — but inside the De Pere arcade the only heat that mattered was rolling off a single 1978 Bally Lost World. Sixty players packed in for the June 30th Tilt’n Tuesday side tournament, a Best Game shootout where the whole field lived and died by one machine and one number: their top score.
It’s the format that makes these Tuesdays hum. A room this deep — 57 of the 60 entrants carrying IFPA rank, an average draw around #2813, seven inside the national top 500 — usually needs a bank of machines to sort itself out. Instead, everybody funneled through the same four-decade-old solid-state cabinet, and by night’s end it was Michael Reiman standing atop the list with a clean million.
A Deep Wisconsin Draw Squeezed Onto One Cabinet
This was no casual weeknight turnout. Six of Wisconsin’s top-10 NACS players made the trip, part of a state contingent 57 strong that averaged a #110 ranking within the region. Tom Graf, the room’s highest-rated player at national #116, headlined the marquee names, with organizer Erik Thoren (#243) and state No. 1 Nathan Zalewski (IFPA #200) both in the mix.
That kind of pedigree usually dictates the finish. Lost World had other ideas. The single-machine Best Game format is a great leveler — a 1978 layout doesn’t care about your career peak, and one drained ball can bury a score for good. Graf, for all his ranking, could only coax 49,390 out of the machine, good for 21st. Trae Vance, who has racked up 10 wins across 20 events this season, landed 30th on 42,000. When the whole field shoots the same board, the margins get cruel, and the usual hierarchy scrambled fast.
The Podium Was a Three-Way Rivalry Renewed
If the format flattened the top of the rankings, it also set the stage for three familiar combatants to sort themselves out. Reiman, McCarty and Cappaert have been trading positions for years, and all three converged near the top of the Lost World leaderboard.
Reiman and Jordan Cappaert have now shared 42 tournaments, a rivalry in which Cappaert has generally held a slim edge — but Reiman chipped into that lead tonight, finishing ahead. Reiman and Matt McCarty go back even further, 48 events deep and rarely far apart; Reiman clawed back here too, tightening an already-close ledger. And McCarty, who has faced Cappaert across a remarkable 88 shared tournaments, nudged that rivalry a little further his own way with a runner-up night. Three names, three long-running contests, all resolved on the same machine within a couple hundred thousand points of one another.
Reiman’s Million Held the Line
Michael Reiman knows what a peak looks like — he sat at national #122 back in 2022, and 350 career tournaments have given him the range to find a score on almost anything. On this night the Green Bay veteran found the ceiling, posting a full 1,000,000 on Lost World to take the top of the board outright.
It was the kind of number nobody in the room could answer. Reiman has been on a warm stretch, banking a win among his last five outings and two top-three results, and this result slotted right in. His million left a hundred thousand of daylight to second and stood as the single best game of the night across all 60 players.
Matt McCarty, the Neenah standout and one of the event’s tournament directors, pushed him closest with 900,000. It extended a strong run of form — three top-three finishes in his last five events — from a player who has piled up 36 wins over the past three years and sits ninth in the state. On any other night that 900,000 wins comfortably; on this one it was the odd score out at the very top.
Cappaert Anchors the Bottom Step
Jordan Cappaert rounded out the podium with 800,000, a tidy descending staircase from Reiman’s million through McCarty’s nine to his eight. Just three years into his competitive run, the Wisconsin player has already logged 406 tournaments and 31 top-three finishes over the last three years, and this bronze added to a season that has him 29th in the state despite still chasing his first win of the campaign.
Behind the podium trio, Jon Bruinooge of Green Bay took fourth and West Fargo’s Mike Moberg claimed fifth, with Fort Wayne’s Ethan Sloboda in sixth showing the four-state spread the field pulled in. Eric Strangeway, a 15-year veteran carrying deep local form, managed 138,680 for 14th — a reminder that even seasoned hands had to grind for every point on the old Bally.
What the Million Means Going Forward
For Reiman, this is the kind of result that reminds everyone what the ceiling looks like. He’s some distance now from that 2022 peak, sitting 49th in the Wisconsin standings with 110 points from 20 events this season, but a clean win over a 60-deep field — with McCarty and Cappaert both in the rearview — is exactly the sort of building block that turns a rebuilding season into a climbing one. The rivalries he tightened tonight will only get closer.
McCarty, meanwhile, keeps stacking podiums, and with the Tilt’n Tuesday series rolling on there’s no shortage of chances for the trio to run it back on the next machine District 82 rolls out. On a night when the top-ranked names got humbled by a 48-year-old cabinet, the story was less about who was favored and more about who found the number when it counted — and this time, that was Reiman.
Final Podium
- – 1st: Michael Reiman
- – 2nd: Matt McCarty
- – 3rd: Jordan Cappaert
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