Jason Zahler – World’s Greatest Pinball Player for 2024!

The IFPA is proud to announce that Jason Zahler has finished at #1 on the World Pinball Player Rankings, thus earning IFPA’s top honor as the 2024 “World’s Greatest Pinball Player”. No single tournament victory will ever secure this title for a given year. Only consistent play at the highest level over the course of multiple years leads to players reaching the pinnacle of the World Pinball Player Rankings. This is the first time that Jason has been crowned the World’s Greatest Pinball Player and one of seven players in history to receive this award (Keith Elwin (7), Jorian Engelbrektsson (3), Raymond Davidson (3), Zach Sharpe (2), Johannes Ostermeier (1) and Escher Lefkoff (2) being the other six).

Jason played in 21 IFPA sanctioned events during the 2024 season. His greatest achievements of 2024 were winning TWO Major Championships in the same season, both the IFPA World Pinball Championship and the Pinburgh Match-Play Championship, earning him 714.56 WPPR points for just those two events. Overall, Jason won 33% of the 21 events he played in, while placing in the top 4 at 71% of his 2024 events, a truly remarkable achievement.

We’ve seen a few two-player races develop over the past 18 years that we’ve crowned the “World’s Greatest Pinball Player” title, with the difference between Jason and Escher Lefkoff being only 10.09 WPPR points. This difference was even tighter going into the last month of the season with both players finding themselves in the #1 position. This represents the 3rd closest race in history (although you can easily argue with the current WPPR inflation values compared to previous seasons, this was the closest race of all time). The 2013 season had a 7.92 WPPR point difference with Zach Sharpe finishing just ahead of Keith Elwin. The closest race ever was in 2014 when Jorian Engelbrektsson finished ahead of Keith Elwin by 7.58 WPPR points.

Congratulations to Jason, and best of luck to everyone on the upcoming 2025 season in the race for #1. Jason will receive his WGPP trophy at the IFPA20 World Pinball Championship in Austria in June.