If you’re a competitive pinball player, Nick Schademann is the type of guy you might have to beat these days. He started playing competitively in Minneapolis in 2016, and after moving to Albuquerque in 2018, he jumped onto the local scene, playing in tournaments at the arcade run by Mezel Mods in Rio Rancho. After meeting Zeus, the pinball guru at Sister Bar in Downtown Albuquerque, he got involved in their small pinball league, which has grown substantially along with the statewide tournament circuit over the past two years or so. He’s currently ranked sixth in the state but says he’s more focused on getting folks involved in the community these days, and organizing the tournaments cuts into his competition time. He still gets to practice on his machine at home, though.
“People have started to get really good. I don’t really play competitive pinball for the rankings, but it’s a fun thing to chase and to see how you’re doing against other people,” he says. “With so many tournaments in the state now, I really can’t be everywhere, so I kind of home base myself at Sister. It’s a lot harder running an event and playing an event and organizing events all at the same time. So I’ll use that as my excuse for why I’m not first in the state.”
State of Play
The website newmexicopinball.com lists all of the tournaments happening across the state. In Farmington, you can hit the machines at Lauter Haus Brewing (1806 E. 20th St.) or go south and battle the pinball sharks at Rad Retrocade (201 N. Main St.) in Las Cruces. The next monthly tournament at Sister Bar (407 Central Ave. NW) is April 19, and they have them every third Sunday of the month. Ten bucks will get you into the tournament — five bucks to enter, five bucks worth of quarters to play — and along with cheap beer specials, you can party every week without breaking the bank. Sister also has recreational tournaments every Tuesday starting at 7 p.m. with a new machine on freeplay each week. And It’s probably not a coincidence that they do it on the day they have cheap tacos.
“Hanging out all day playing pinball is an easy sell for a lot of people,” Schademan says. “The better you get at pinball, the cheaper it becomes, because you get free games. That’s where my passion started as well. My frugality shines through when I can go to a bar, grab a beer, put two bucks in and occupy myself for three hours. You know, there’s not much you can do these days that gives you that kind of value.”
Schademann says his main goal was to make it cheap and accessible for people, because pinball can be an expensive hobby if you buy the machines yourself. So, naturally, playing in public is the way to jump into the game. Now his goal is cultivating a welcoming and accepting community. One beloved member of that community made Schademann a shirt emblazoned with a phrase he uses at the beginning of tournaments to ensure people feel welcome. It says: “Number one rule is don’t be a dick.” He says he hopes setting that example has helped them grow, and there’s no such thing as a stereotypical pinball player, they come from all walks of life and “all spectrums of everything.”
“You don’t have to fall into any mold to be accepted into it,” he says. “There’s punk rockers, there’s school teachers, there’s doctors. The thing I enjoy about it is you don’t necessarily need to know what anybody does, right? Sometimes you don’t even talk. You just exist together, and I think sometimes that’s enough. You don’t have to come and explain yourself. You just come and play, say hello and go back to doing what you’re doing.”
Although pinball is inherently a solo experience, the game attracts introverts and extroverts alike, and Schademann says the scene works well for both personality types. For those who like to socialize and remain incognito, there is an underground community and some alternative leagues people might want to check out. The Duke City Pinball League is a local item that introduced Schademann to the community. There are more home collectors across the state than you might think, with private collections at undisclosed locations. “Friend of a friend”-type stuff, as Schademann says. The New Mexico Pinball website has a list of every bar, arcade, or bowling alley in the state with a pinball machine, so do some exploring on your own. A pro tip: if you’re out of state, you can find the nearest machine anywhere in the country at pinballmap.com.
Schademann digs the social aspect more, and Sister is still his main haunt as the machines are always open to the public. Along with Zeus, he continues to build the community, sometimes literally piece by piece. Variety is always good, and Sister tries to rotate in a new machine every month. Schademann says a lot of times he’ll take the glass off the game and do a tutorial, showing people what each switch does to “usher people in.”
“There’s a reason behind why you do everything in a pinball machine — which was a real light bulb moment when somebody showed me. It’s not just random. You can actually plan what you’re doing and really explore the code of a game. There’s a way to play every machine if you want to get the highest score. It may not be the funnest way, but you can definitely do it. Sometimes just ripping shots is more fun, right?”
Ladies Night
Ruth Dove has watched several of Schademann’s “glass off” demonstrations and says it’s a crash course on the machine, a shortcut to memorizing ways to achieve high scores. Once you absorb that info and memorize the timing with your fingers, you literally have the rules in the palm of your hand, but it can be addicting.
“It’s a fun way to worship gravity and pay attention to physics and then the better,” she says. “The more you get used to the rules and the format and what does what, and what goes where, and softeners and poppers and swings and all that good stuff, eventually, inevitably, you end up buying a machine. When I bought my first machine they told me, ‘Careful, you know they reproduce, right?’”
Dove is the main organizer for the Albuquerque chapter of Belles and Chimes, a pinball club “for women, by women” which provides a space for women, nonbinary, and trans femme players, especially those who aren’t old enough to attend events held at bars. She says anyone who considers themselves a woman is absolutely welcome with Belles and Chimes. Dove sets up monthly tournaments, with the next one scheduled at noon on April 12 at Boxing Bear Bridges (12501 Candelaria Road NE) open to players of all ages with a legal guardian.
She says the Albuquerque Belles and Chimes league has more than one player who is under 21 – and Lauren, one of their best players, is 12 years old. Lauren’s mom and Ruth are pinball friends, so they’ve held tournaments at Lauren’s mom’s house — parties, pinball hangouts, etc. — ensuring players of all ages get the chance to compete with the best of the best in Burque. Dove echoes Schademann’s attitude that the sense of community created by clubs like Bells and Chimes is more important to her than the glory of winning a tournament, but she still doesn’t like losing to a 12-year-old.
“The way that I put it for the ladies — seeing as we’re generally a dickless group — is ‘Be nice to the machines and to each other. Don’t break the machines and don’t break each other’s spirits,’” Dove says.
Dove attends the events at Sister regularly, but Boxing Bear Bridges is her main stomping ground. She knows the scene well and can point you to machines tucked into all the “nooks and crannies” around town — Revel Entertainment (4270 Alexander NE), Bosque Brewing Nob Hill (106 Girard Blvd. SE), Silva Lanes (3010 Eubank Blvd. NE) just to name a few — but she says some of the most fun you can have is playing at friends’ houses. She has more contacts in her phone with the last name “Pinball” than any other name, and she says they become more than just your pinball friends. You can learn a lot about a person during a road trip to Farmington for a tournament, or heading over to someone’s house to see their secret collection of machines after a meetup or tournament.
“I didn’t think I was going to make new friends after 40,” Dove says. “I just assumed that the people that I’ve known for as long as I’ve known them were going to be the people I was going to know forever. And then I started coming regularly to the meetups, showing up to the tournaments, and I have so many good friends that I’ve made over the last couple of years just from this common interest in pinball.”
Love of the Game
What it all boils down to is a true love for the game, and if you ask Schademann what the best machine in town is, he’ll tell you it’s the Walking Dead machine he’s played a million times at home, the only machine he owns. He doesn’t care much about the show, but he loves the way it plays and it never gets old.
“I’ve always wanted to share that feeling and that experience that I had with other people: showing people how to play, watching people get better and seeing that same kind of excitement in their eyes that I‘m sure I had when I was starting out,” he says. “Now more and more people have pinball machines in their house because they got the bug. It’s a slippery slope.”
Everything you want to know including a pinball events calendar, machine locations across the state and more can be found at newmexicopinball.com.
Check out Bells and Chimes on Instagram for up-to-date info about events, tournaments and more.