Roland Nadeau Runs a Perfect Card at the Emporium
Five rounds, five groups, five wins. Roland Nadeau did not drop a game at Emporium Pinball League Season 8 #4 on July 21 — not a shared first, not a second-place scramble, just a clean sweep of every foursome he was drawn into. In a format where one soft round is usually enough to cost you the night, he never handed the rest of the room an opening.
He also runs the thing. Nadeau organizes the Emporium league, and on an 89-degree New Orleans evening that felt closer to 101, he spent a little over two hours demonstrating why he is the only player in the building ranked inside Louisiana’s top ten.
The Streak Reaches Six
Nadeau arrived on the best run of his recent career: five straight top-three finishes going back to April, four of them outright wins. Tonight made it six. At IFPA #151, with a career peak of #35 in 2024, he sits a long way clear of a field whose average national rank is around #26,400 — the kind of gap that ought to make an evening like this routine, except that group match play has a habit of punishing favorites who coast.
He didn’t coast. Nadeau opened on The Mandalorian and won it, came back to the same machine in round two and won that, then took Avengers: Infinity Quest in rounds three and four. Across 379 career tournaments and eight years of competition he has 34 wins in the last three years alone. This was the fourth in his last five events, and comfortably the tidiest.
LaSalle’s Three-Round Head Start
Mike LaSalle made him earn it anyway. Fifteen career events into a season that is his first, LaSalle matched Nadeau stride for stride through the opening half, winning three straight rounds outright — Pokémon twice, then The Mandalorian. Through three rounds the top of the standings was a two-man conversation.
Round four turned it. LaSalle drew World Poker Tour and finished second behind Grant Barras while Nadeau was busy taking Avengers again, and that single swing was the whole margin. A third place in the final round settled the rest. Second is still far and away the best night of a career barely a year old, and it nudged him ahead of Roby Arensman in a rivalry the two have built across ten shared tournaments — a pairing that had been sitting dead level until tonight.
Arensman’s Four Seconds and Robertson’s Second Night
Arensman’s card was its own peculiar achievement: second, second, second, third, second. He never won a group and never finished worse than third, which over five rounds is enough to reach the podium without ever leading a game. Twenty-one career events in, carrying a career average finish of eighth, he is quietly one of the steadiest hands in the room.
He shares third place with Sasha Robertson, who came in with exactly one tournament on record. Robertson won two groups outright — Avengers in round two, then Godzilla in round four — and walked out tied for third in only their second competitive appearance. A fourth place in the closing round was the one blemish on the card, but for a player with a single prior event to their name, sharing a podium with the league’s organizer is a genuine result.
Elsewhere the room belonged to players finding their feet. Bernard M, whose only two previous outings both ended in fourteenth, closed the night by taking the round-five game on Godzilla, with Grant Barras second and Chris Vazquez third — a fourteen-minute scrap and a considerable step up from where his season had been sitting.
The Machines Did Their Part
Nine machines were in play, spanning 1989 to 2026 across four manufacturers, but the night kept circling back to three of them. The Mandalorian took the heaviest traffic with five games, Godzilla matched it, and World Poker Tour hosted three.
Godzilla is Keith Elwin’s 2021 Stern, with art by Jeremy Packer and code by Rick Naegele — three flippers, a magnet, a captive ball and multiball that scales from two balls to six. There is a secret skill shot buried in it for anyone willing to plunge behind the upper paddle and then find the scoop, worth eleven million doubled, and it is exactly the kind of swing that decides a fourteen-minute group.
World Poker Tour is the older and stranger machine of the two — a 2006 Steve Ritchie and Keith P. Johnson design with Brian Rood art and a Chris Granner soundtrack. It rewards a specific kind of nerve: with the ball saver lit, deliberately draining to send the ball back up to the upper playfield is a legitimate strategy rather than a mistake.
All of it played out at Emporium Arcade Bar on St. Claude Avenue, a room that regulars describe as the sort of place you wander into off the street and stay in — cold drinks, a friendly bar, pool tables, and a wall of old-school pinball sitting alongside the arcade cabinets. It carries a 4.4-star rating across 182 reviews, and on a July night in New Orleans the air conditioning is not the least of its attractions.
One Last Group on World Poker Tour
The final round put the two players at the top of the standings in the same four-player group, on World Poker Tour, for eighteen minutes. It was the only time all night that Nadeau and LaSalle shared a machine, and it ended the way the rest of the evening had: Nadeau first, LaSalle third, the gap between them settled in the one game where it could have closed.
Jane Madden took second in that group — a small, satisfying footnote for a player who finished twelfth overall but got the better of the runner-up when it counted. That is the pleasure of group match play. The standings say one thing and the individual games keep saying another, and on a night when the league’s organizer went five-for-five, the room still found a dozen smaller arguments worth having.
Final podium:
- 1st:** Roland Nadeau
- 2nd:** Mike LaSalle
- 3rd (tie):** Roby Arensman and Sasha Robertson
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