Greg Gibson Wins Free Play Dallas on a 313-Million Game of Rush
Two names were left on Rush (Pro) in the fourth round of Monday’s finals, and the gap between them turned out to be the whole night. Greg Gibson put up 313,765,520. Rick Miller answered with 26,684,200. Twenty-two minutes on John Borg’s 2022 machine — the one that lets you pick from 16 Rush songs at the start of every ball — and the tournament was over, because in an Amazing Race bracket down to two players, the winner of that game wins the title.
Gibson got there the long way. He came out of the 11-player qualifier in third, behind two players who never reached the last pair, then won both of his bracket games. When the final round came up on Star Trek (Pro), his was the only name on it.
Chris Delp’s Four Straight Rounds Set the Bracket
The qualifier ran Group Match Play: 11 entrants, five rounds, 15 games, 139 minutes from the 7 p.m. start. Chris Delp opened it about as poorly as a night can open, finishing fourth in his group on Pokémon (Premium) behind Abel Cardona, Kyler Raines and Matt McCaskill. Then he won Round 2, Round 3, Round 4 and Round 5 in order, topping the field on 4 of the 5 machines he played.
The best view of him came last. In Round 5, the three players who would finish 1-2-3 in the qualifier landed in the same three-player group on James Bond 007 (Pro), a game that took 29 minutes — the longest of the qualifier. Delp took it, Gibson second, John Richardson third. That result also settled something with a longer history: across the 31 tournaments Delp and Phil Robertson have both entered, the two had been dead even, and Delp finished ahead this time to edge in front.
Richardson’s qualifier was Delp’s in reverse — wins in the first three rounds on Ghostbusters (Pro), Led Zeppelin (Pro) and The Mandalorian (Pro), then second and third to close, enough for 2nd place. Gibson took Round 1 on John Wick (Pro) and never won another, but he also never finished worse than third all night, which put him in the bracket in third. Rick Miller and Phil Robertson tied for 4th; Brian Perlick, who went from a fourth-place round to back-to-back round wins in the middle of the night, finished 6th.
Terminator 2 Turns 35, and It’s Still on the Floor
Williams shipped Terminator 2: Judgment Day in July 1991, which makes this month its 35th anniversary. Steve Ritchie designed it, Doug Watson did the art, and 15,202 of them went out the door — a production run that explains why so many of us learned pinball on one. Its signature is the thing bolted to the right side of the cabinet where a plunger belongs: a gun, with a trigger that fires the playfield cannon.
It rewards a specific sequence. Put the ball in the skull, hit the flashing target with the gun, and multiball starts; from there, lock at the flashing shots and pull the trigger again. Thirty-five years and an 8.0 rating from 225 raters later, it holds its own in a lineup that runs from a 1979 Gorgar to a Pokémon (Premium) that shipped in February.
That lineup is 20 machines from three manufacturers, and it’s part of why this event lands where it does. Free Play on Gulden Lane charges once at the door and turns you loose, which is a different proposition than feeding a machine one game at a time; the food is good enough that people mention it, the staff will sort out your parking on the way in, and 529 raters have settled the place at 4.6. Doors open at 3 on Mondays, and on an overcast, muggy July evening there are worse rooms in Dallas to spend four hours in.
Star Wars, Godzilla and Ghostbusters Cut Five Down to Two
The finals took the top five into an Amazing Race: everyone plays the same machine, lowest score goes home, repeat. Manual seeding put John Richardson at the top of it, and Richardson was the first one out. Abel Cardona’s 152,830,820 on Star Wars (Pro) in Round 1 more than doubled Richardson’s 61,210,890 across 19 minutes, and the qualifier’s runner-up finished 5th of 5.
Cardona went next. Phil Robertson’s 140,652,960 on Godzilla (Pro) in Round 2 was the widest scoring margin posted on any machine all night — Cardona’s 19,730,830 was the next-best number anyone put on that playfield. Cardona finished 4th, which is a solid result out of a bracket where he was seeded last and arrived by winning two of his five qualifier rounds.
Round 3 was the closest game of the finals and the one that set the podium. On Ghostbusters (Pro), the machine that saw the most tournament play across the whole event, Rick Miller’s 310,263,720 held off Robertson’s 237,530,640 over 21 minutes. Robertson took 3rd. That left Miller and Gibson for Rush.
Gibson’s 27th Year, and the Final Podium
Gibson has been entering tournaments for 27 years and has 250 of them behind him. His ranking peaked at #67 in 1998; he sits at #295 now, and it’s been climbing this season — 281 points and 3 wins across 20 events, good for 12th in Texas among 1,122 ranked players. He was the strongest-ranked player in the room for both halves of the night, and unlike most nights where that’s true, it finished that way.
The rivalries held their shape. Gibson stayed a step ahead of Richardson, whom he’s now shared 65 tournaments with, and kept a narrow edge over Miller across their 38. Miller‘s own résumé is worth sitting with: 33 years active, a career peak of #5 in 1994, and a night that ended one game short. Robertson, two years into this at 71 tournaments, beat both of them to the qualifier’s Round 5 win and then took third in the bracket.
What Gibson did Monday wasn’t a departure — it’s what a 27-year player does when the machines cooperate for a couple of hours. He lost every round he played after the first in the qualifier and won the tournament anyway, which is a fair description of how these formats work and why people keep showing up on Mondays.
Final podium — Free Play Dallas Pinball Monday (7/13/26)
- 1st — Greg Gibson (IFPA #295)
- 2nd — Rick Miller (IFPA #941)
- 3rd — Phil Robertson (IFPA #4517)
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