Don Werth Runs the Table in Malvern
Some nights a player is simply untouchable, and July 2 at the Pinball Gallery belonged entirely to Don Werth. Across the five machines his group played in the third week of the Southeastern PA Pinball League’s summer season, Werth posted the top score on every single one — Funhouse, Spider-Man, Mousin’ Around!, Mata Hari and Guardians of the Galaxy — and turned a 42-player field into a chase for second place before the night was half done.
Seeded 31st and carrying no headlines into the room, Werth left it as the man who did the one thing nobody else could claim: a flawless card. It was the kind of performance that makes a manual seeding look quaint and reminds a strong local field that form on paper counts for very little once the ball is in play.
Werth’s Flawless Card
Werth shared his group with Todd Reinmiller and Bill Lorenz, and the three-player format gave him nowhere to hide — every game was a direct comparison, and every comparison went his way. He opened on the Funhouse remake, closed out Rudy, and never looked back, stacking first-place finishes on the newer Guardians of the Galaxy and the 1978 Mata Hari alike. Old or new, wide or narrow, the machine didn’t matter.
That range is what makes the run so complete. Werth has been trending upward for a while now, with three podium finishes across his last five events and a career that already stretches to 100 tournaments in just two active years. He sits fourth in Pennsylvania’s NACS rankings with four wins on the season, and this was the clearest statement he’s made yet — a top score on five of five, converted into first overall.
A Deep Local Field Gives Chase
The turnout was a healthy weekly draw: 42 players, 37 of them IFPA-ranked, with three of Pennsylvania’s top-ten NACS competitors in the room. The strongest name on the sheet was Matt Strzelecki, ranked #379 nationally and the state’s number-one player, who arrived with 11 wins already banked this season and a genuine claim to favorite.
Strzelecki did his part — he took Deadpool, Black Knight and Pokémon in his group — but Taxi and a grueling Paragon game slipped away, and he settled for a share of sixth. His long-running rivalry with Stefano Pinti tilted Pinti’s way this time, keeping two players who have crossed paths in 30 tournaments dead level over the long haul. Tony Makowski, another PA fixture, edged ahead of Geoff Warke in their own recurring duel, finishing 15th to Warke’s tie for 28th.
Frank Egitto, meanwhile, was quietly assembling the second-best card in the building. A veteran of 15 years whose ranking once peaked at #655 back in 2011, Egitto won four of his five games — Sinbad, Fish Tales, Foo Fighters and Star Wars: Fall of the Empire — dropping only a Star Trek game to Dom Carr. He finished ahead of Michael Reimer, Adam Keyes and Carr in nearly every game they shared, and that consistency carried him to second overall.
Aztec at Fifty and a Paragon Marathon
The Pinball Gallery’s floor is a museum in motion — a Malvern institution stuffed with something like a hundred machines you can walk up and play by the hour — and this month it hosted a genuine birthday. Williams’ Aztec turned 50 in July, having first shipped in 1976 as a Gordon Horlick design with a production run of 10,150. Half a century on, it was still earning competition scores: Jamme Thomas took the Aztec game in her group, milking the spinner exactly the way the old hands still recommend.
If Aztec supplied the history, Paragon supplied the endurance test. Bally’s 1979 widebody — a Greg Kmiec design dressed in Paul Faris art, 9,120 built — produced the single longest game of the tournament, a 162-minute epic. In that marathon it was Keith Saroka who outlasted the group, taking first ahead of Strzelecki, Makowski and Warke, a rare bright spot in a night that otherwise saw the top seeds shuffled well down the standings.
The oldest machine on hand, the 1975 Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, was also the most-played, appearing in three separate groups. On one of them Ken Baum edged out Craig Powell in a brisk four-player game, the kind of quick-turnover flip-off that keeps a big field moving.
Strobel’s Climb From the Back
The most improbable line on the final sheet belonged to Ryan Strobel. Seeded near the very bottom of the draw — 36th of the ranked field — Strobel put together a four-win group of his own, sweeping Bride of Pinbot, The Getaway: High Speed II, Iron Maiden and Terminator 2 before World Cup Soccer denied him the clean sheet. He finished ahead of both JD Foltz and Rob Podbielski across the board, and that haul was enough to land him in a three-way tie for third — a genuine deep run from the bottom of the bracket for a player whose rating has been climbing year over year.
He shared that podium step with two familiar contenders. Stefano Pinti, an eight-year veteran of 282 tournaments, won his group games on Batman ’66, Mata Hari and Roller Disco and stayed ahead of Matt Zwitkowits and Erich Claussen in every game they shared. Tessa Morton, of nearby Malvern, matched him beat for beat — first place on Count-Down, KISS and Elton John — and cleared Micah Goldbaum and Nathan Claussen throughout, extending a strong run at a venue where she’s become a regular presence.
The Sweep That Settled It
Strip the night down to a single number and it’s this: five machines played, five top scores, zero games conceded. Werth’s card was the rare thing in group match play — a performance with no soft spot, no game where the room got a look at him. Frank Egitto pushed him hardest with a four-win night of his own, and the fight for the final podium step went all the way to a three-way tie, but the winner was never really in doubt once the pattern held game after game.
On a floor celebrating fifty years of Aztec and grinding through a near-three-hour Paragon slog, the story stayed simple. The seeding said 31st; the scoreboard said first, and nothing in between argued otherwise.
- – 1st: Don Werth
- – 2nd: Frank Egitto
- – 3rd (tie): Stefano Pinti · Ryan Strobel · Tessa Morton
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