Andy Stewart Tops Eight Machines to Take Hyper Beer Co.’s July Best Game
On a clear Saturday afternoon in downtown Anaheim, Andy Stewart of Santa Ana walked into Hyper Beer Co., played 13 pinball machines, and posted the best score in the room on eight of them. That is how you win a Best Game tournament, and Stewart won this one without much argument, finishing first in the July stop of the venue’s Third Saturday 888 series.
The format is simple and unforgiving. The organizer sets up a bank of machines, each player takes their cuts, and only your best score on a given game counts, ranked against everyone else who played it. Better finishes bring more points, and points pile up across the machines you play. In a four-player field, that means every game matters and there is nowhere to hide. Stewart played more machines than anyone, and he played them well.
Stewart’s Eight Toppers, From Phoenix to Pokémon
Stewart’s night ran wide. He owned the field on Deadpool (Pro), John Wick (Pro), Cactus Canyon, Star Wars: Fall of the Empire (Pro), Jurassic Park (Premium/LE), Metallica (Premium), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Pro), and Phoenix — eight different games, eight different flavors of pinball. His 206,768,050 on the Star Wars title was the kind of number that ends a conversation. His 167,898,080 on Jurassic Park held off Irwin’s 153,781,310.
The spread of machines told its own story. The 23-game lineup stretched from 1978 to 2026, and Stewart topped both ends of it. On Phoenix — a 1978 Williams table, the oldest machine on the floor — a winning score read 117,600, a plain reminder of how much scoring has inflated in the five decades since. He closed the afternoon on three straight game-topping scores, and his average finishing position across all 13 games came in at 1.38.
A Runaway on John Wick
The single widest gap of the day came on John Wick (Pro), Stern’s 2024 machine designed by Elliot Eismin with art by Randy Martinez. Stewart put up 146,912,900 there — nearly triple the next-best score on the game, Steve Asbury’s 52,430,980. On a night of close finishes, this one wasn’t close.
John Wick rewards a specific rhythm: work the left orbit, hammer the car toy again and again, then return to the left orbit to light multiball, where the real points live. Whatever route Stewart took through it, he found the machine’s ceiling and left the rest of the field looking up at it.
Irwin’s Efficient Second, Asbury’s King Kong
Fran Irwin — who also organized the event — finished 2nd, and the shape of his night is a quiet argument for how Best Game works. He played eight machines and topped six of them, including a towering 433,380,980 on The Walking Dead (Premium) and 348,285,290 on Pokémon (Pro). Of the five machines he and Stewart both played, Irwin actually came out ahead on four — JAWS, Pulp Fiction, Mousin’ Around!, and Pokémon — yielding only Jurassic Park. His average finishing position, 1.25, was the best mark in the field.
What Irwin didn’t do was cover as much ground. Stewart’s eight outright toppers, most of them on games Irwin never got to, are where the tournament was decided; efficiency on eight machines couldn’t outrun breadth across 13. Still, second place was a welcome turn for Irwin after a bumpy stretch — his previous five events had brought no top-three finishes, with results as scattered as 21st and 118th.
Steve Asbury took 3rd. The IFPA veteran has 145 tournaments over six years behind him and a career-best national rank of #1100 back in 2021; he sits at #14988 now, but the hands were still there when it counted. On King Kong: Myth of Terror Island (Pro), his 225,676,790 was the top score on the machine, ahead of Stewart himself. Jessyca Boatright rounded out the four, topping two of the three machines she played — a neat illustration that in this format the scoreboard rewards volume as much as peaks.
A Clean Afternoon’s Work
The room they played in helped. Hyper Beer Co. sits on Anaheim’s Center Street Promenade, a clean, welcoming bar that keeps its games in good shape and its taps worth lingering over — the kind of place that earns near-perfect marks from the people who keep coming back.
Stewart never needed a dramatic finish. Across a little over four hours on the floor, he built his win one machine at a time, and by the time he’d rattled off three straight toppers to close, the result was settled. On an afternoon that ranged from a 1978 Williams table to a Pokémon machine that only shipped this February, Stewart was the one who read the whole room best.
Final podium:
- 1st — Andy Stewart
- 2nd — Fran Irwin
- 3rd — Steve Asbury
No comment yet, add your voice below!