Wayne Saeger Wins His Own Tournament in a Top-Three Photo Finish
Eight minutes into one of Saturday’s quieter matchups, the oldest machine on the floor nearly rewrote the story. On Old Chicago — a 1976 Bally designed by Greg Kmiec, dressed in Dave Christensen and John Youssi art, and built just 7,155 times — Scott Fite knocked off John Finnegan, the highest-ranked player in the building. Fite sits #15,278 in the world; Finnegan sits #413. The ratings gave Fite something like a one-in-five chance, and on a game that rewards patient bonus-building on the spinner before cashing out at the center saucer, he cashed out first.
In an eight-player field, a single game like that carries real weight. There were only 48 of them all afternoon, and by the time the last flippers went quiet, the top three were separated by less than a machine’s worth of luck.
48 Games, No Fixed Rounds, One Continuous Afternoon
Max Match Play doesn’t bother with brackets or scheduled rounds. It pairs players head-to-head, feeds them a fresh opponent as soon as they finish, and works to keep anyone from facing the same person twice — the result is a steady churn of two-player games until everyone has logged the same total. Here that meant 12 games apiece, 48 in all, packed into a hair under three hours.
The room for it was Hotrods Old Vail, a Tucson bar with a working restoration garage you can watch through the glass while you eat. Regulars come for the burgers and the fries and stay for the pinball, and on a Saturday afternoon the lineup gave them plenty to work with: 15 machines spanning 1971 to 2026, six manufacturers, everything from a 1971 Williams electromechanical to a Pokémon Pro that only reached floors this February. The field was small but not soft — seven of the eight carried IFPA rankings, with Finnegan (#413 nationally, #44 in Arizona) the clear class of the room.
Dave Bell Tops Eight Machines and Still Lands Third
If the afternoon had been scored on raw firepower, the trophy would have flown home to Massachusetts. Dave Bell, a longtime player visiting from Arlington whose ranking has gone quiet during a light travel year, posted the top score on eight of the 11 machines he touched — including a 75,000 on Doodle Bug, the 1971 Williams that anchors the old end of the lineup.
But Max Match Play doesn’t reward high scores; it rewards beating the person standing next to you. Bell went 8-4 across his 12 games, a terrific line that still left him chasing on the tiebreakers. The gap between dominating a machine and winning a match is exactly the kind of thing this format exposes.
The two players who would finish above him met midway through the day on The Walking Dead, John Borg’s 2014 Stern with its bashable zombie head and magnet-fed prison, a table built to stack its Prison and Well multiballs into one loud pile of points. Wayne Saeger came out ahead of Finnegan there — the first of three times that pairing would go the same way.
Three Players, Eight Wins Each, One Trophy
The math at the top was almost uncomfortably tight. Saeger, Finnegan and Bell all finished their 12 games at 8 wins and 4 losses, an identical 1.33 average that left the standings to be settled by tiebreaker rather than by any daylight on the scoreboard. Jack Layer sat a single win back at 7-5; the whole field, top to bottom, fit inside a narrow band. In a bracket this size, that’s how it tends to go — nobody runs away, and the order comes down to who beat whom.
That’s where Saeger’s afternoon separated itself. Across the three games he and Finnegan shared, Saeger finished ahead every time — the head-to-head sweep that matters most when everything else is level. He is also, for the record, the man who runs this event; on Saturday he ran it and won it, snapping a stretch of five straight tournaments without a victory even as his recent form — three top-three finishes over that same stretch — hinted it was coming.
What Saeger Carries Into the Rest of His Season
A win reads differently depending on where a player is standing. For Saeger, it lands on an upward line: his world ranking has climbed from #2,145 a year ago to #1,443 last month to #1,355 now, and a title at his home room is the kind of result that keeps that arrow pointed the right way heading into Hotrods’ next go-round. Finnegan leaves as the field’s strongest player and its runner-up, a reminder that ranking buys respect but not immunity in a game this small. Bell heads back east with the best scores nobody else could quite match and a third-place finish that says more about the format than about the shooting.
The final podium at Max Match Play @Hotrods:
- 1st — Wayne Saeger (IFPA #1,355)
- 2nd — John Finnegan (IFPA #413)
- 3rd — Dave Bell (IFPA #36,291)
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