Outlanes Pinball Lounge Woman’s League Recap

Two Names on the Top Step: Baker and Rabold Share First at Outlanes

Liz Baker walked into Outlanes Pinball Lounge on Wednesday night as the highest-rated player in the room, and for four of the five machines she touched, she played exactly like it — top score, every time. IFPA #4771, the strongest state rank in the field at CO NACS #35, and a card that read like a favorite protecting a lead.

The catch is that she didn’t win alone. When the 25 games of the Spring/Summer Woman’s League #5 were tallied, Baker sat on 18 points — and so did Haley Rabold, who had started the night seeded near the very bottom of the 21-player field. Two players, two four-player groups, one identical total. The top step held both of them.

Baker’s Near-Sweep, and the KISS That Got Away

Group match play doesn’t leave much room to hide: four players to a machine, four points for a win on down to one for last, and your night is the sum of it. Baker’s group paired her with Brittani Silchia, Nicki Moser, and Lily Weybright, and she went to work early — a 13-minute win on The Walking Dead to start, then firsts on Deadpool, Pokémon, and the long haul of Cactus Canyon. Four machines, four top scores.

The one that slipped was KISS. Stern’s 2015 music table is a John Borg design dressed up with Kevin O’Connor art, an animated Paul Stanley bent over his guitar, and a magnet that quietly ferries a captured ball behind the backpanel from the right ramp up to an elevated stage. It also rewards patience at the plunger — feather a mode-lit orbit softly enough that the ball just crawls around, and the machine will count the shot. On this one, Nicki Moser got there first, Silchia landed second, and Baker had to settle for third. It was the only blemish on her scorecard, and it doubled as a small chapter in a longer story: Moser and Silchia have shared 13 tournaments and stayed stubbornly close, and tonight it was Silchia who came out the other side a nose ahead.

Rabold’s Run From the Back of the Seed List

If Baker’s night was the favorite doing favorite things, Rabold’s was the opposite kind of story — and just as convincing on the scoreboard. Five events into her competitive life, ranked IFPA #42678, she had never won anything. She drew a group with Candace Putnam, Tracy Rudhe, and Hope Brown, and she cleared it.

Rabold opened with a win on Metallica, backed it up on High Speed, and grabbed a third first on the Jurassic Park 30th Anniversary. Twice, Putnam beat her — on KISS and again on the James Bond 007 LE — and those two seconds were the whole margin between a runaway and the tie she ended up with. That Putnam pushed her at all is its own footnote: she came in as the bottom seed and climbed to fifth, twice topping the player who would go on to share the tournament. Across every game they shared, Rabold finished ahead of both Rudhe and Brown, and the three firsts were enough. A maiden win, from the back of the bracket, on 18 points.

A 96-Minute Rush and a Two-Way Tie for Third

The longest single game of the night ran an hour and thirty-six minutes on Rush — another Borg cabinet, this one built around a motorized clock whose minute hand actually turns, a see-through insert that lets you watch balls stack in the subway below the playfield, and a menu of 16 Rush songs you pick from at the start of every ball. The song mode itself turns on which color of records you light most, so shooting the flashing ones to lock a color solid is how you steer the ball into the mode you want. Missy Lechuga came out on top of that marathon, ahead of Jane Wiater, with Stacie Benjamin third and Tammy Lawton fourth.

That third-place finish for Benjamin mattered more than it looked in the moment. She and Beth Smith each closed the night on 15 points, knotted for third overall from separate groups. Benjamin got there by winning JAWS and Jurassic Park in her four; Smith, a Littleton regular with 160 tournaments behind her and a rating on the upswing this season, anchored her group with back-to-back firsts on Godzilla and the new King Kong. Smith and Baker have their own 11-event history, tight enough that neither has ever pulled far clear — and while both landed on the podium here, it was Baker who nudged the series a little further her way.

Eighteen Points, Twice Over

The number that tells the story is 18, and the fact that it belongs to two people. Baker earned hers as the top seed and the top rating, dropping only a single game all night. Rabold earned the same figure from near the bottom of the seeding, in her fifth event, with three group wins and a pair of narrow seconds. Same total, opposite directions — and at a weeknight league in Littleton, where the machines are kept sharp and the room stays friendly enough to talk between balls, that’s a fine way for a night to end.

Final podium:

• 1st (tie): Liz Baker (IFPA #4771) and Haley Rabold (IFPA #42678)
• 3rd (tie): Beth Smith (IFPA #5651) and Stacie Benjamin