Hazel Booz Tops 19-Player Field at The Pinball Lounge

Booz Closes on Banzai Run to Win Christmas in July

Hazel Booz walked into the Pinball Lounge on a July Sunday and walked out on top of a 19-player field, winning the Belles and Chimes “Christmas in July” over six rounds of group match play. The title came down to the last machine of her day — Banzai Run, the 1988 Williams table she’d already won once — and she took it again to close the deal. It was a fitting bit of seasonal contrast: holiday branding on the marquee, broken clouds and a feels-like-103°F afternoon out in Oviedo.

What makes the win worth a second look is where Booz had been. She hadn’t finished inside the top three in any of her last five events, and a year ago her IFPA number sat outside 19,700; she came in at #7923. This was a step up, and she built it round by round rather than all at once.

Booz and Stafford Trade the Early Frames

Booz opened in control of her own group, taking seven points on Eight Ball Deluxe — a 1981 Bally solid-state that still plays as mean as it looks — before dropping the second frame to Stacey Stafford on Pulp Fiction. Stafford was the strongest name in the building, ranked IFPA #2527, and the two of them would spend the day within arm’s reach of each other, each finishing ahead in exactly four of their eight shared games.

Across the room, Shannon Parsons set the early pace. She won her Round 1 pairing outright, first on Night Rider — a 1976 electromechanical that anchors the old end of a lineup stretching nearly fifty years — and first again on Stranger Things. Booz, meanwhile, hit her one real pothole of the morning in Round 2, sliding to fourth on Cyclone before steadying herself with a win on Beetlejuice. Two rounds in, the lead belonged to Parsons, with Booz sitting a rung below and waiting.

Four Straight Wins Break It Open

Then the middle of the tournament belonged to her. Booz reeled off four consecutive game wins across Rounds 3 and 4 — Banzai Run, JAWS, Taxi, and Medieval Madness — and in the process finished ahead of Dani Pollock in every one of the four games they shared.

Banzai Run was the centerpiece, and it’s a machine worth knowing. It came out of a Williams team led by Pat Lawlor on concept and, with Larry DeMar, on design, with art by Mark Sprenger, and only 1,751 were ever built. Its trick is the second playfield standing vertically in the backbox: a magnet rides a moving track and hoists the ball up out of the main field entirely, so you’re suddenly flipping uphill. The table rewards patience over aggression — leave one opponent’s light standing and keep charging the hill instead, because cliff jumps stack toward 200,000 and hitting A-B-C doubles their value. It’s the kind of layout that turns a lead into a runaway, and it did.

The JAWS game that anchored Round 3 ran 39 minutes, one of the longer sittings of the day, and Booz came out of it first again. By the end of Round 4 she had swept a full round twice over and pushed her nose in front for good.

A Fourth-Place Wobble, Then the Banzai Run Answer

Nothing about the finish was tidy. In Round 5 Booz wobbled hard, taking fourth on High Speed behind a Michelle Kurtiak win, then settling for second on a 40-minute Creature from the Black Lagoon that Parsons closed out. The door was, briefly, ajar.

Behind the leaders, the field had its own stories. Stafford, the top-ranked entrant, never found the top gear and would settle for fifth; Breanne Abbott edged just ahead of her to fourth, nudging their even, ten-tournament rivalry right back to level. And in Round 2, Micaela French had won a tight one over Abbott on Medieval Madness — Brian Eddy’s design with the exploding castle, the ball-flinging catapult, and the pop-up trolls that reward you for clearing the ramps and orbits first and saving the trolls for the multiball.

Booz answered the wobble the way she’d built the whole day: on Banzai Run. Round 6 put the tournament’s top finishers on it together, and she won the frame clean, ahead of Kurtiak, Stafford, and Parsons in that order. A third-place result on a 45-minute JAWS to finish was academic by then. Over the full day she posted the top score on 6 of the 10 machines she played — the clearest single measure of how she won.

The Climb, and a Podium Decided Late

For Booz, the number that says the most isn’t a score but a trajectory. She came into the weekend having climbed from outside 19,700 in the rankings a year ago, and she played like someone who’d figured out how to hold a lead once she had one — top-three in every round of the six, and out front on her best table when it mattered. After a stretch of mid-pack finishes, this was the day the arrow pointed all the way up.

So it was Hazel Booz first, capping a run that turned on four straight wins and a machine she couldn’t lose on. Dani Pollock took second, storming home with three consecutive wins on Beetlejuice, Fathom, and Star Wars to get the better of Shannon Parsons by the slimmest of margins in a back-and-forth the two have carried across thirteen shared tournaments. Parsons, who led the whole thing early, held on for third. Organizer Kurt van Zyl’s Christmas-in-July night gave the Ladies of the Lounge crowd a clean story with a calm ending — the best player on the day, on the right machine, at the right time.