The Super Bowl of competitive pinball is coming up faster than a quick flipper shot, and the only U.S. state not sending a competitor to the North American Championship is Wyoming.
“It's criminal,” said Josh Sharpe, president of the International Flipper Pinball Association, lamenting Wyoming’s absence from the upcoming championship in Rochester, New York, on March 6.
From 2019 to 2021, Cheyenne was home to a budding competitive pinball scene. That’s when Joel Basta moved to town from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“Pittsburgh is like the epicenter of competitive pinball,” said Basta. “The World Championships were held in Pittsburgh every year for almost two decades.”
“I was living in Cheyenne and found that there was zero competitive scene,” remembered Basta. “But there was a really heavy competitive scene in Colorado.”
Basta has since moved back to Pennsylvania, and his departure apparently left a void in Wyoming’s competitive pinball scene.
Back in 2019, Basta built a pinball community at the Cheyenne Ice and Events Center,
“That was the best place to play pinball in Cheyenne,” Basta told Cowboy State Daily. “There was another place called Flippers. But they didn't take care of their games and if you're playing competitive pinball, it is essential that the games are in perfect working order.”
Basta helped organize events like the Cowboy Classic, which attracted good players from Wyoming, but as Basta explained, Cheyenne became a place where good players from Colorado came to prove themselves.
That’s because Longmont, Colorado, is home to the best player in the world.
Border Hope For Wyo Bumpers
At the Cheyenne Ice and Events Center, said Basta, “The guy that ran it, he operated the games there, he really cares about pinball and his games were immaculate.”
But that’s not the only reason players from Colorado flocked to Cheyenne to compete. Turns out, some of the best players in Colorado made the trip across the state line in order to avoid one of the world’s true pinball wizards: Escher Kefkoff.
"Out here in Longmont you would drive past a lot of barns and never realize this barn is filled with pinball machines. Not farm animals, the barn is for pinball. It catches a lot of people off guard," Lefkoff, then a student at Colorado State University, told CBS News Colorado in 2023. A pinball ranking website currently lists him as living in Australia.
When unfortunate competitors face Lefkoff, said Basta, “You better have a six-pack of beer or a book to read, because you're going to be there for a long time. The dude has just complete control of the flippers and the machine at all times, knew every single rule, had great hand-eye coordination, great timing. He's been playing competitive pinball since he was probably 6 years old.”
Looking to avoid playing Lefkoff — the Bobby Fisher of pinball — and other Colorado greats, some Colorado players headed to Cheyenne.
“We had a lot of players coming up from Colorado that were sick of getting beat up by some of the best players in the world coming out of there and coming up to Wyoming to try and get into the nationals that way,” said Basta.
Unfortunately, Wyoming’s pinball scene didn’t last. It began to fade after Basta started a family and moved back to Pennsylvania.
But this year, there is a new Rocky Mountain underdog to cheer for: A dark horse phenom from Billings, Montana, who is headed to Rochester as the reigning Montana state champion.
Jerry Valentine, Montana’s Cinderella pinball wizard, headed to the North American Championships after only 18 months of competitive pinball. (Zak Jokela) 
Competitors in the 2021 Cowboy Classic at the Cheyenne Ice and Events Center: Casey Intlekofer, Walt Wood and Levi Fels. (Joel Basta) 
The 2019-2020 Wyoming state champion, Dave Andersen. (Joel Basta) 
Jerry Valentine’s former coworkers at the Monte Carlo bar in Billings, Montana, raised money to pay for Valentine’s trip to Rochester, New York, to represent his native state and compete in the IFPA North American Championship. (Zak Jokela) 
Awards for the 2021 Cowboy Classic at the Cheyenne Ice and Events Center. (Joel Basta)
Cinderella Story, Out of Nowhere
“Here's somebody who's a bartender at the Monte bar and casino in Billings. There happened to be pinball machines there, so that's how he started playing. He was new to it,” said Alison LeFever, a manager at the Monte Carlo, who watched her employee Jerry Valentine rise from a pinball nobody to state champion.
“They created a pinball league and figured out what they need to do to qualify for state and national tournaments and Jerry was a part of that crew that kind of made it official,” said LeFever.
Valentine, who grew up outside Billings in Lockwood where he excelled on the track team as a javelin thrower, started working at “the Monte” with no real pinball experience. When he began playing competitively just 18 months ago, Valentine was ranked around 39,000th in the world.
He’s now ranked 3,859th in the world, according to the International Flipper Pinball Association, having jumped up more than 30,000 spots in less than two years.
Valentine’s winning ways started on St. Patrick’s Day, 2024, when he claimed first in the Luck of the Irish Tournament at the Monte.
Less than a year later, Valentine is set to compete against the best players in North America.
“I'm 55th out of 58th as far as the seeding goes, so I'm definitely like one of the lowest ranks,” said Valentine, who recently moved to be with his girlfriend in Fort Collins, Colorado.
At a place in Fort Collins called Pinball Jones with 40-something machines, Valentine is prepping himself to make a dark horse run at the North American championship.
To do that, Valentine needs to achieve “wizard mode.”
This is something Valentine learned to do playing a pinball machine designed as a tribute to the Canadian band Rush and the legendary drum solos by Neal Peart. One feature of the game includes scoring enough points to trigger a drum solo from the game’s sound effects.
A player achieves wizard mode on the Rush game and others by completing a series of scoring opportunities.
When you hit wizard mode, that means you’ve made it “through the entire story of a game,” according to pinside.com.
Valentine said a friend watched him achieve wizard mode on the Rush game at the Monte.
“Great game, one of my favorites,” said Valentine. “I beat the game and got to a wizard mode in one ball.”
It took Valentine around an hour of playing a single ball to hit wizard mode. But that was on a game Valentine played all the time at the bar where he worked.
That’s why Valentine is thinking about showing up to the Rochester Pinball Collective a couple days before competition begins on March 6.
The Collective is home to 75 different machines, and Valentine has a lot to learn about many of them.
There’s Abra Ca Dabra, Flipper Fair, Sittin’ Pretty, Spanish Eyes, Cheetah, Dracula, Hotdoggin', Surf 'N Safari, Attack From Mars, Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast, The Who's Tommy Pinball Wizard and Rush, among many others.
To succeed, Valentine will need to acquire the intricate skill of a player accustomed to competing at the national and international level.
He’ll need to “biff” — an extra hard hit with the flipper — and not “panic flip,” which is prematurely triggering a flipper before the ball is within reach.
And given Valentine is a newcomer to the sport, he’ll be hoping for “a Lazarus ball,” which is a ball that miraculously returns to life. It appears to pass between the flippers, but then somehow bounces back into play—bringing a player’s game back from the dead, like the Biblical character.
Pinball Revival
When Valentine arrives at the Rochester Pinball Collective for the North American Championship, put on by the International Flipper Pinball Association, he will meet Sharpe.
As president of the IFPA, Sharpe greets the competitors and manages the tournament. This work comes to him naturally, as his father is known as the man who saved pinball.
Back in the mid-1970s, Roger Sharpe was writing for GQ magazine when he decided to reverse New York City’s pinball ban. The city viewed pinball as an illegal game of chance. Sharpe set out to prove it was a game of skill.
“Pinball, banned by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1941 as youth-corrupting filth, hid in back rooms in New York City,” reported the Washington Post in a 2023 profile of Roger Sharpe.
During a one-of-a-kind hearing before the New York City Council, Sharpe performed, “a live demonstration that, if not for his dexterity with the silver ball, could have gone very differently.”
Sharpe successfully called his shots as he played and showed off enough skill to convince council members to lift the pinball ban.
Now Roger’s sons, Sharpe and his brother Zach, continue to expand the pinball universe. Zach is ranked 44th in the world and is the director of marketing at Stern Pinball, which for a time was the only pinball manufacturer on the planet.
Nowadays, pinball is enjoying a “hipstery” revival, as Sharpe puts it.
Valentine, Montana’s dark horse to win a North American Championship this year, is young and hip and totally focused on his upcoming trip to Rochester. Former coworkers at the Monte Carlo in Billings raised money to pay for his trip, and Valentine is playing non-stop in preparation.
Sharpe said Valentine is at a disadvantage because he’s young and inexperienced.
“The experience of having played all these games versus figuring it out on the fly,” is a big deal, said Sharpe, adding, “Jerry is a lot better off being a new player in 2025, because you can go read a rule sheet or watch online tutorials. When I started playing in the 90s, it was figuring it out yourself, or knowing someone that can tell you what to do.”
“You got to like catch the ball and aim your shot and figuring out how to get it from one flipper to the other, like super safe and just setting up your shots, dude. It's very precise,” Valentine told Cowboy State Daily before heading off for more pinball practice. “And you wouldn't quite expect that from two buttons on a table.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
