A 1980 Widebody Nearly Wrote a Different Ending
The field’s top seed spent an uncomfortable five minutes on a 46-year-old space cabinet. On Flight 2000 — a Stern Electronics widebody from 1980, back when Harry Williams was still stamping his name on playfields — Jim Maglier went head-to-head with Michael Geiss and took the game clean. It was exactly the sort of pairing Max Match Play is built to conjure: two players, one machine, and two names the format had never thrown together before.
Geiss would lose only three games all night. But in that moment, on that machine, the man everyone had penciled in for first was staring at a loss.
Three Hours Inside the Collective
The Flour City Summer League tipped off its 2026 season on July 8 at the Rochester Pinball Collective in East Rochester, where 23 players fanned out across a floor that holds roughly 70 machines. The Collective has earned its standing among Rochester regulars by keeping a deep, well-tended lineup — games reaching from the early ’60s to this year, all clean and running, with staff close enough to coax any balky machine back to life without stalling a match. Under scattered clouds and a humid 81°F outside, the room turned over 138 games in a little over three hours, every player getting 12, the format nudging everyone toward fresh opponents instead of rematches.
On paper it was a New York field top to bottom: every entrant ranked in-state, 16 of the 23 carrying an IFPA number. Geiss sat at the head of it as the state’s #20 and IFPA #1169, with Mark Jezioro, #24 in New York, the only other player inside the state’s top 25.
Geiss Answers with Nine of Twelve
Favorites are supposed to respond to a stumble, and Geiss did. Over his 12 games he posted the top score on nine of them — a 9-3 line, an average finishing position of 1.25, and a four-game winning run through the middle of the night. He took Gamatron, Monopoly, and Star Trek (LE), turned in a win on the old solid-state curio Stars, and kept the machine top-scores piling up on WHO dunnit, Hoops, and Rack ‘Em Up.
The three blemishes tell their own small story. Beyond the Flight 2000 loss to Maglier, Geiss dropped games on Star Wars (Pro) and Bronco — and that was the whole ledger of his misses. It was the sort of night his season has been building toward: a player with a rating climbing all campaign and three top-3 finishes across his last five outings, playing like the strongest number in the room.
A Tie at the Top, and a Rivalry Renewed
What the winner’s line hides is how close the summit actually was. Steve Schaefer matched Geiss beat for beat — also 9-3, also a 1.25 average — and the gap between first and second stayed as thin as the standings allow right to the final games. For a competitor barely a year into serious play, with 13 tournaments to his name and an IFPA number of 9258, standing dead even with the field’s best entry was the quiet headline of the evening. Schaefer built his night on a clean run through the pack, handling Stephanie Guida in both games the two shared and carrying a rating that’s climbed all year into the runner-up chair.
Third belonged to Jezioro, the room’s veteran at 136 career tournaments and six years deep, already carrying four wins this season. His 8-4 night added another chapter to a long back-and-forth with Geiss: the two have now shared 25 tournaments, and Geiss held his slim edge in the pairing once again. Jezioro’s meeting with Schaefer, though, broke the usual pattern — across 11 prior fields it’s typically been Jezioro finishing higher, and this time the newcomer nosed ahead.
One of Jezioro’s four losses earned its own spotlight. On The Mandalorian (LE) — Brian Eddy’s design under Randy Martinez artwork, one of just 750 LE cabinets built, the little Grogu sculpture keeping watch over the playfield — he ran into Eli Tilly for a nine-minute two-player game and came out second. Tilly closed the night in 4th, a single spot off the podium.
What a League-Night Runaway Looks Like
The measure of Geiss’s night wasn’t any single game — it was the range of them. His nine top scores came off machines built more than five decades apart, from a 1962 Gottlieb up through a 2013 Star Trek, taking in a 1978 Stars, a 1985 Gamatron, and a 1995 WHO dunnit on the way. Era, ruleset, flipper count — none of it slowed him down. He solved Gottlieb’s mechanical simplicity and Stern’s modern layers on the same night, and the only cabinets to get the better of him were that 1980 widebody, a lone Star Wars machine, and a turn on Bronco.
That’s what a dominant performance looks like at league scale — not a rout, but a favorite winning three of every four games he stepped up to, across the full sweep of the Collective’s lineup, and making it hold against a room with real teeth. Schaefer’s matching 9-3 and the four wins veteran Mark Jezioro had already banked this season are proof of that; Geiss simply found one more good game than anyone else in the building could.
Final podium, Flour City Summer League 2026 #1:
- 1st — Michael Geiss (IFPA #1169)
- 2nd — Steve Schaefer (IFPA #9258)
- 3rd — Mark Jezioro (IFPA #1640)
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