Garrett Smoke Tops Four of Six Machines to Take TPL Bonanza #3

Round 6, and the three players who would fill the podium were all crowded around the same cabinet — a Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye Pro that Stern had only shipped in May, the newest machine on the floor. For 40 minutes, the longest game of the night, Garrett Smoke, Anton Samilian, and Jeffrey Lepine shared the group on a machine barely out of the box. When the last ball drained, Smoke had it, 7 points to Samilian’s 5 and Lepine’s 3. The order at that machine turned out to be very nearly the order on the final sheet.

That closing game was less a turning point than a signature. Across six rounds at The Pinball Lounge on July 21, Smoke topped four of the six machines he played and never finished a round worse than third — the kind of even, front-running night that decides a 14-player group match-play field before anyone quite realizes it’s decided.

Smoke Never Leaves the Top Three

Group match play doesn’t reward a single hot game; it rewards showing up in every group and refusing to hand out points. Smoke’s card was almost monotonous in the best way: firsts on JAWS, The Addams Family, High Speed, and that Transformers finale, with his only stumbles a pair of third-place finishes on Comet and Banzai Run. Four wins, two thirds, an average round finish of 1.67. In a format where the worst that can happen is a slow round, he never had one.

The Orlando player came in as the strongest name in the room by state ranking — Florida NACS #11 — and he played like it, though his season line reads as consistency rather than conquest: three top-three finishes across his last five outings and 22 wins spread over three years and 142 tournaments. The design that closed it out, Elliot Eismin’s brand-new Transformers, is a fighting-and-action table barely two months off Stern’s line — and topping the room’s freshest cabinet was a fitting cap on a night where Smoke solved whatever the draw put in front of him.

Samilian Breaks a Deadlock, Lepine Stays Perfect in the Top Three

Behind Smoke, the runner-up spot came down to two players who arrived even and left separated. Anton Samilian, also of Orlando, built his second-place finish on a balanced night — a pair of wins on Eight Ball Deluxe and Monster Bash, three second-place rounds, and a single fourth on Fathom that he never let compound. He and Lepine had shown up in nine shared tournaments dead even; this time Samilian finished ahead, and the tie is a tie no longer.

Jeffrey Lepine, in third, may have played the quietly remarkable card of the night: top three in every one of his six rounds, with wins on Night Rider and Banzai Run anchoring a card that never once dipped below third. The Casselberry veteran carries 27 years in the hobby and a career-peak IFPA rank of #96 from back in 1998 — a reminder that a modest current number can sit on top of a long, serious résumé. His own long-running back-and-forth with Michela Phillabaum, even across eight meetings, tipped his way this round; she finished fifth.

Phillabaum’s 11-Minute Upset on Space Station

The night’s genuine surprise had nothing to do with the podium. In Round 5, on Space Station, Jason Phillabaum beat Andy Sokol in a three-player group — and the ratings had given him only about a one-in-four chance of it. Sokol came in the hotter hand by some distance: IFPA #1002, two wins in his previous five events, a rating up markedly over the past year. Phillabaum, sitting at #7250 with a career average finish around 22nd and no tournament win in three years, simply had the better game when it counted, 7 points to Sokol’s 4, with Sydney Smoke third. Eleven minutes, start to finish.

Space Station is worth pausing on. A 1987 Williams from the Barry Oursler stable — Tim Elliott on art, Brian Schmidt on music and sound, and a young Ed Boon writing the software a few years before he’d go co-create Mortal Kombat — it’s a 3,804-unit machine built around its signature turning space-station model. It’s also a table that rewards patience with its mini-playfield: completing those lanes re-lights the lock after multiball, so the points keep coming for a player who doesn’t relax once the balls stop flying. Phillabaum found enough of them to knock off the round’s favorite.

The Room in Oviedo

The Pinball Lounge sits inside a bowling center on East Broadway, a bar with pinball at its heart rather than an afterthought, and its regulars will tell you the same thing without prompting: the machines are dialed in and kept that way. That care shows up in a 4.8 rating across 483 reviews and in games like Round 6’s, where a two-month-old cabinet ran clean through a 40-minute grind without a hiccup. Organizer Kurt van Zyl ran the field of 14 through six rounds and 24 games, doors open until midnight while the Central Florida evening sat at a swampy 101 on the heat index.

Fourteen players is a small enough room that everyone crosses everyone soon enough, and rank counts for less than form — the field’s top national seed, John Moschella at IFPA #823, finished ninth. On this night the top three earned their order the honest way, table by table, until a brand-new Transformers settled it.

Final podium:

• 1st — Garrett Smoke (IFPA #1282)
• 2nd — Anton Samilian (IFPA #5165)
• 3rd — Jeffrey Lepine (IFPA #8564)