Pete Hendricks captures the win at Stern’s Pittsburgh AC/DC Launch Party

February 19^th, 2012 – The event was held at Ace’s Breakaway and Play, an arcade at the middle of the city on Smithfield street. In addition to the two AC/DC machines available for play there, Ace’s also features five other pinball machines among its games every day. This weekend it was Family Guy, Avatar, Tron, Batman (Stern), and Transformers. Over 60 people attended the launch party.

The tournament on AC/DC was the main feature of the night. There were 30 competitors and over 70 entries placed. After the dust from qualifying ended, four players remained at the top of the standings. [player]Jon Replogle[/player] (IFPA ranked at 135^th in the world) had the top qualifying score of 181,516,810. Second in qualifying was [player]Pete Hendricks[/player] (148) with a score of 140,711, 840 followed by [player]Cryss Stephens[/player] (234) with 89 million and [player]Al Thomka[/player] (91) with just over 70 million.

The finals were a one game playoff, winner take all. [player]Al Thomka[/player] started off the grouping strong putting up a score of over 50 million on his first ball and really putting the pressure on the rest of the group to perform. In the end [player]Pete Hendricks[/player] captured the win with a score of 92,233,320.

Along with the cash for 1^st place, each of the final four also received entries to the PAPA World Championship (www.papa.org).

Special thanks goes out to Stern Pinball, the IFPA, PAPA, Ace’s Breakaway and Play, Betson Distributing, [player]Doug Polka[/player], [player]Nick Jaquay[/player], [player]Pete Hendricks[/player] and [player]Al Thomka[/player] for their support in running the event.