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Today, Zen Studios — the leading global producer and publisher of digital pinball video games — is proud to launch Pinball FX VR. This exciting, innovative take on the digital pinball experience brings the studio’s beloved pinball tables to virtual reality for Meta Quest players with quick trigger fingers.

Watch the Pinball FX VR launch trailer here:
YouTube | Download

We are pleased to announce the PAPA 22 World Pinball Championships, the 2nd annual Memorial for Suicide Awareness in memory of Lyman F. Sheats, Jr.

The event will be held September 4-7, 2025, at Enterrium in Schaumburg, Illinois. This is a charity event that we hope will be rewarding for players, while honoring Lyman’s memory and raising money for suicide awareness.

Pre-registration is not required but is encouraged as there is a cap of 300 players. Full details are at https://lfs.papa.org/ and we encourage anyone interested to spread the link.

This past Saturday and Sunday, the 8th annual IFPA Women’s World Pinball Championship was held at Port City Pinball. A field of 32 of the world’s top women competitors based on both open and women’s-only standings traveled to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to crown a new Women’s World Pinball Champion.

After a long and exciting day of qualifying – consisting of 4-player groups competing in 8 rounds of 3-game matches – the top 16 players moved on to compete in a single-elimination best-of-7 bracket.

Congratulations to Keri Wing of St. Louis, Missouri, our 2025 IFPA Women’s World Champion! Keri is the only person to win this event multiple times, making this year a record three-peat. She and her finals opponent Kaylee Campbell both earned double byes in qualifying with a weekend of phenomenal play (with Kaylee as top qualifier), and they delivered one of the most thrilling final rounds of any high-level championship. Keri came back from a 0-3 position, including a monster ball 3 on Deadpool, and took the match to a game 7 tiebreaker where she prevailed on Iron Maiden.

Keri won a NIB pinball machine courtesy of Stern Pinball, as well as a reserved spot to compete at the IFPA20 World Pinball Championships to be held in Austria later this year. 

Elizabeth Gieske and Kassidy Milanowski placed 3rd and 4th respectively, decided in a best-of-3 bronze match where Elizabeth won 2-0.

Congrats to the top 4 finalists, who played amazingly well all weekend. Our gratitude goes out to all the competitors who came to support the event and make it a success.

Thanks as well to our hosts Brian O’Neill, Brian Yurick, and Allison O’Neill (who also participated as a competitor) at Port City Pinball, to our steadfast techs David Volansky and Ty Ueda, to Marc Patenaude at Backhand Pinball for the exceptional stream, and to Gene X Hwang at Orange Photography for helping capture this entire weekend of women’s pinball. (You can view Gene’s high-quality photos of the Women’s World Championship in this album!) 

None of this would be possible without the generous support of our sponsors, including a $1,500 contribution to the prize pool from The Pinball Company. Warm thanks as well to Stern Pinball, AtGames, Chicago Gaming Company, Marco Specialties, Replay Museum, Coastal Hemp Company – North Carolina, Builds By Bex, and Captain Crazy’s Arcade. 

We look forward to next year’s event! Location and date information to come.

This past weekend marked another milestone for women’s pinball: the 2nd annual Women’s North American Pinball Championship was held at Port City Pinball in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The IFPA Women’s Advisory Board and the team at Port City Pinball hosted 54 players from 6 Canadian provinces, 47 US states, and the District of Columbia to crown the titles of Canadian Women’s National Pinball Champion, US Women’s National Pinball Champion, and Women’s North American Pinball Champion. That included 45 first-time competitors in this championship, as well as defending champion Amy Kesting, who won the inaugural event in 2024. 

Congratulations to Gabrielle Mountenay from Quebec, who was crowned the Canadian Women’s National Pinball Champion, winning in a best-of-three final against runner-up Chantelle Mercier from British Columbia.

Congratulations as well to our 2025 Women’s North American Pinball Champion and US Women’s National Pinball Champion, Miriam Nadler from New York. Coming in as the 12th seed, she played amazingly well and prevailed across all 6 rounds in the single-elimination, best-of-7 bracket, including a 4-2 win against Kaylee Campbell in the finals. Along with the championship titles, Miriam won a NIB pinball machine from Stern Pinball.

Joining Miriam and Kaylee in the top 4 were Jane Verwys and Stacey Moritz, who took 3rd and 4th place respectively.

Our thanks to all the competitors for coming out to support the event, as well as our incredible hosts Allison O’Neill, Brian O’Neill, and Brian Yurick of Port City Pinball, streamer extraordinaire Marc Pautenaude of Backhand Pinball, and Gene X Hwang at Orange Photography. (Check out Gene’s photos from the event in this album!) 

Special thanks to Stern Pinball, Marco Specialties, Replay Museum, Coastal Hemp Company – North Carolina, Builds By Bex, Captain Crazy’s Arcade, AtGames, and Chicago Gaming Company for supporting this event with additional prizes, swag, and logistics. 

The New Hampshire Union Leader published a story in their Human Interest section on the IFPA Women’s World Championship held this past weekend at Port City Pinball. Click HERE to read the article.

Back in 2015 we made a change to the WPPR formula that introduced the concept of Tournament Grading Percentage (TGP). Prior to that metric, every tournament format was worth the same amount, whether that was a 1-ball high score contest, or a 20 round group matchplay with finals extravaganza. The idea behind the TGP metric was to use it to help judge the quality of the format used for IFPA sanctioned leagues and tournaments, so higher quality formats could be worth more WPPR points. The more meaningful games played in determining the winner of an event, the higher the quality of that event.

Over the years we’ve seen the competitive player community find ways to maximize TGP as quickly as possible, leading to events getting more WPPR points for their effort. This often leads to choices being made that lessen the quality of the event. These choices have included formats that maximize playtime and minimize downtime (1-ball games, Multi Matchplay, Flip Frenzy, Max Matchplay). These choices have also impacted the setup of machines, both physically and through software adjustments, along with impacting the titles of machines that are included or excluded from tournament play.

Rather than continue this cat and mouse game with organizers trying to answer the decade old question of “Which format gets me the most WPPR’s in the shortest amount of time?” we felt it was finally time to make an update to the TGP calculation that answers this question for good.

With respect to direct play formats, the IFPA will no longer be counting the number of games played in determining TGP. We will instead be switching to a time-based TGP metric for these events, regardless of how many games are actually played. Events will now be worth +1% TGP for every 4 minutes the tournament lasts. To help show how this will work, let’s look at the following event: https://www.ifpapinball.com/tournaments/view.php?t=82159

This was a 4-round group matchplay qualifying event, with a 3-round group matchplay final. Under the current system this event is worth 56% TGP, regardless of how long the tournament lasted.
Under the 2026 rules, this tournament would be graded as follows:
The qualifying rounds lasted 02:28:50, while the final rounds last 01:06:47, for a total tournament time of 03:35:37. These 215 minutes would equate to 53.75% TGP, which we would round up to 54%.

We’re hopeful that this will push organizers to go back to thinking about “FUN” first in their format decisions versus ways to simply optimize TGP, often at the expense of the enjoyment of their players.

April 2nd update . . .

After working through all the feedback we received today regarding this change, we’ve decided to postpone implementing this one for the time being. Happy April 1st everyone!

Carlos Delaserda was last seen driving 1908 mph down I-70, collecting an MPH bonus at 3X worth 5,724,000 points.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2417101080

timestamp: 2:00:54

Players have until the end of this month to catch him for that $100 prize . . .

LIVE Results available HERE:

IFPA Women’s North American Pinball Championship

IFPA Women’s World Pinball Championship

Streaming available HERE at Backhand Pinball on Twitch!

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