Galvin Morgan Loses His First Game, Then Wins the Rest
Galvin Morgan walked into Superelectric Pinball Parlor on Wednesday as the highest-ranked player in the room — IFPA #24, a Cleveland regular whose rating has climbed steadily over the past year — and promptly dropped his opening game. On Flash Gordon, to start Round 1, he finished second behind Garrett Broters and banked 3 points while someone else took the machine. It was the last time all night anyone finished ahead of him.
Over the next four rounds, Morgan won every group he played, closing out the fifth installment of the Wednesday Wizard 2X Series against a 41-player field with the top score on four of the five machines he touched. In group match play, where one cold game can sink an otherwise strong night, that is about as clean as it gets.
A Top-Heavy Field for a Wednesday
Forty-one players, every one of them IFPA-ranked, filled the Detroit Avenue bar for a format built to reward consistency: four-player groups, three when the count won’t divide evenly, with points handed out by finishing position across five rounds and 54 games in all. Organizer John Delzoppo ran the night and played it too. The draw skewed serious for a weekly — two of Ohio’s top-10 NACS players were on hand, led by Ethan Smilg at state #7, and eight of the entrants sit inside the national top 500. On a sticky July evening with the temperature still parked near 87 degrees outside, the well-kept machines that regulars here rave about stayed busy from the 8 p.m. start.
Morgan’s second-place opener aside, the early going belonged to a scattered cast. Jon Hrobat won the longest game of the first round on White Water, outlasting Delzoppo and Mark Brown. Brent Reed took the other Flash Gordon in the round. The leaderboard, in short, did not sort itself early.
Morgan’s White Water Statement
Once he found his footing, Morgan barely gave the field a look. Bram Stoker’s Dracula in Round 2, Transformers in Round 3, and then the game that mattered most — White Water in Round 4, drawn into a four-player group with Aaron McMillin, one of the tournament’s other top finishers.
White Water is worth pausing on. Dennis Nordman’s 1993 Williams design is the one with the interactive Bigfoot who has to be coaxed away from the mouth of his cave, and a whirlpool funnel that feeds the ball back into the fray. Its scoring lives in stacking the 5X playfield with multiball, which is why these games run long, and this one did — a 40-minute grind before Morgan came out on top, with Joshua Vardous second, McMillin third, and Don Robinson fourth. It was his third straight win and the closest thing the leaders had to a head-to-head all night.
David Greene’s Twelve Minutes on Cheetah
The night’s best small story arrived in the final round, on Cheetah — the 1980 widebody Stern Electronics built to a Harry Williams design, one of just 1,223 ever made, a machine whose five-bank drop targets and horseshoe lane reward a patient upper-flipper game. There, David Greene, an occasional competitor with three career tournaments to his name, put up the top score in his group and finished ahead of Andrew Lee, a former IFPA top-40 player carrying a #130 ranking today. Ethan Smilg placed second, Lee third, Michael Trombetta fourth. Twelve minutes, one old machine, and the ranking gap between the two men counted for nothing.
Lee left with a night of near-misses. Morgan’s win, meanwhile, drew their seven-tournament rivalry level again, with Morgan the one finishing ahead this time.
A Tie for Second, and Delzoppo’s Late King Kong
The last round settled everything behind the winner. Morgan closed on Centaur, taking the game over Porter McMillin to finish four-for-four after his opener and put the title out of reach.
The race for second came down to two Cleveland players who arrived there by different roads. Jon Hrobat, ranked #1347, had banked wins on White Water, King Kong and The Addams Family across the night. Brent Reed, a seven-year veteran ranked #759 with four wins already this season, matched him with Flash Gordon, Paragon and Pokémon. When the points were tallied, the two finished level and shared the runner-up spot. Reed’s showing also nudged a long rivalry his way — he and Michael Trombetta have now crossed paths in 64 tournaments, and Reed came out ahead once more. Delzoppo, for his part, closed his own night with a Round 5 win on King Kong, the 2025 Stern that sent his group home late.
The One Game Morgan Lost
For Morgan, it was the kind of night that explains a rating on the rise: two wins in his last five events coming in, and now a third built not on a hot start but on refusing to give a single game back once he settled in. A dropped opener on Flash Gordon is the sort of thing that unravels a lesser night. He answered it by winning everything else on the board.
Final podium
- 1st — Galvin Morgan (IFPA #24)
- 2nd (tie) — Jon Hrobat (IFPA #1347)
- 2nd (tie) — Brent Reed (IFPA #759)
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