MLP Beer City Open (Midseason Tournament) 2025 – 6 Takeaways – Is Dallas Unbeatable?
It has been a lot of MLP over the past couple of months, but that didn’t seem to put a damper on anyone’s spirits at the annual Beer City Open in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 5 Full Days of MLP with All 24 Teams Competing in a Double-Elimination Style Tournament Bracket.
In our opinion, it was clearly the pro pickleball event of the year so far, PPA, MLP, or otherwise.
Let’s get right into the takeaways from the weekend!
1. Is Dallas Unbeatable? – The Midseason Tournament was an amazing event, but the results could not have been more predictable. The Dallas Flash took down the St. Louis Shock in a tight final. New Jersey pushed St. Louis in a close semi-final, and then ended up taking 3rd place. Halfway through the season, we are exactly where we thought we would be, except for the fact it could not have been anticipated that the Flash would still be undefeated on the season.
The question going into the second half of the regular season is whether the Flash are unbeatable. While the Flash are undoubtedly the favorites to win their second straight title, the short answer is: probably not.
Despite going through another event without a loss, Dallas did not look completely unbeatable in Beer City. Their women lost to the Columbus women, which exposed them to going down 2-0 to what was a favored Columbus men’s duo of CJ Klinger and Andrei Daescu. Thankfully for the Flash, they won a close men’s game over the relatively underperforming Klinger/Daescu duo, which spurred them to two mixed wins to take the match in regulation. The Klinger/Jansen and Black/Ge mixed match was very tight and could have gone either way.
Against the St. Louis Shock in the finals, the difference between a regulation win and a Dreambreaker was a 12-10 mixed win from Ge/Black over Tardio/Fahey. Dallas is a strong, but far from unbeatable, Dreambreaker team as well. JW Johnson is not the feared singles player he once was. Augie Ge is an average-at-best Premier singles player. Tyra and Jorja both have high ceilings in their singles games to hang with the very best, but neither are staples on the singles podium (Tyra likely would be if she played singles, to be fair).
Being unbeatable and being favored are two very different concepts. The betting odds would definitely not favor the Flash going the rest of the season without a loss. However, they are quite clearly the championship favorites, and it would be interesting to see what a proper Vegas betting line would look like on a Flash versus the field wager.
Augie Ge played some of his best pickleball of 2025 this past weekend, and the Flash have to hope this could be the start of a bump in Ge’s game for the rest of the summer, as his 2025 results have plateaued.
The Dallas Flash are really good and are going to be incredibly difficult to take down in a 2-out-of-3 playoff series. They may not be unbeatable for the rest of the season, but they are unquestionably the team to beat in MLP after Beer City.
2. Midseason Tournament a Big Hit – What can you say about Beer City? Andrea Koop and her team have done an exceptional job of creating an event that people want to be at. It’s the result of organic community building over many years that cultivated the tremendous atmosphere at Belnap Park.
Championship Court was pretty much packed from Thursday morning onwards, including for the Challenger final on Friday, and it makes such a difference when the stands are full to the energy of an event. Players feel that energy and excitement from a sold out crowd and that creates this juiced positive feedback cycle that carries through to fans watching the broadcast on Pickleball TV.
The contrast between Beer City and New York was stark—in the best possible way for Beer City. Even the atmosphere and energy for the consolation matches on the weekend was truly astounding.
MLP also made an important change to the stakes of the event by putting some standings points on the line for the Midseason Tournament, which solidified for players and fans that this isn’t a gimmicky, meaningless event.
You have to worry a little bit the MLP St. Louis event coming up this week. They’ve made big promises, but there might be some unavoidable player and fan hangover from Beer City. It’s hard to imagine that the Shock organization will be able to put on a better show than what we saw in Grand Rapids. Furthermore, the Shock are trying to create the “best pro pickleball event” without ever having hosted any sort of pickleball event like this in the city previously. We expect they’ll do a very good job, as the DC Pickleball Team did last year, but it’s a tall task for the organization starting from scratch.
Turning the Beer City Open into MLP’s Midseason Tournament is a reminder that patience and slow growth are crucial for the pro game. Andrea Koop started the Beer City Open in 2018, and they’ve grown from 400 to 1,100 amateur participants in their amateur event. Often, these MLP events are asking people to come out to random places in the city just to watch pro pickleball, or there’s a haphazardly organized amateur event with limited participation.
The PPA benefits massively from having their pro events run in conjunction with amateur events, and it’s evident that Beer City reaps many of the same rewards.
The highs of MLP events are a different level.
3. Challenger Can Be Fun! – To build on the previous takeaway of the Midseason Tournament being a hit, look no further than the Challenger Final on Friday morning between the Las Vegas Night Owls and Nashville Chefs. The two best teams in Challenger this year faced off in a match that felt like a lot more was on the line than the $7,000 for the team that won first place.
It was a 22-20 Dreambreaker win for the Las Vegas Night Owls that capped off a dramatic back-and-forth match. Michelle Esquivel and Pablo Tellez were jawing at each other before Esquivel flipped Tellez the bird at the end of their mixed game. The intensity was off the charts, and it seemed as though the packed stands really enjoyed the match.
There almost certainly won’t be a Challenger division in 2026 after a decision was made post-merger to consolidate the two divisions on the timeline that is currently playing out. Challenger has played only a bit part in these MLP events in 2024 and 2025 compared to what we saw in 2023, but the Midseason Tournament final showed that you don’t always need the very best players or teams on the court to create a good product.
Competitive and intense matches where all involved are playing with something on the line can still showcase pro pickleball in a very positive way. Unfortunately, the reality of having 22 different ownership groups that need to be treated relatively equally meant that the UPA had to make a choice in how to deal with the Challenger-Premier dilemma.
We still feel it was a mistake of the previous Steve Kuhn-led regime to aggressively expand and bring on so many new ownership groups, which has put MLP in its current predicament. There are too many ownership groups to appease, but not enough Premier-end talent to spread evenly across 22 teams (previously it was 24).
The idea behind consolidating the divisions was that there would be enough talent by the time 2026 rolled around to support one division, but it appears extremely unlikely that will be the case. Had it been implemented effectively, the original promotion-relegation system that was supposed to start in 2024 may have given the league the best chance at having a high-quality product and maximizing a winning effort from every franchise.
There isn’t much more to say, other than to lament the eventual loss of Challenger for the sickos who have spent the past 2.5 years watching far more Challenger matches than is reasonable or healthy for any normal human being.
4. Tier 3 is Not Dead Yet – While the predictability theme remained consistent for the Midseason Tournament, there were some signs of life for the potential of a postseason upset from one of the Tier 3 teams in Premier. It remains the case that there are three tiers, more or less – Dallas and St. Louis / New Jersey alone / Columbus, Brooklyn, and Texas (LA was here pre-Quang termination). From that Tier 3 grouping, Columbus is the most dangerous team based on recent results.
Yes, they lost to Texas in the consolation side of the draw in regulation, but they have a women’s team that might have a higher ceiling (and also a lower floor) than Brooklyn’s women, and they have an elite men’s doubles team on paper.
The trouble for Columbus is that Klinger and Daescu have not found their stride. They almost lost to Brooklyn’s men, then proceeded to lose to Dallas’s men and also lost to Texas’s men. One thing that doesn’t get talked about much with Columbus’s men is that neither Daescu nor Klinger has elite power. They’ve both had success in men’s doubles when paired with other players with more power (keeping in mind they did win gold in Daytona together last December), and mixed is neither player’s best doubles event.
It could be part of the reason why we are seeing Columbus struggle. But hey, they are a men’s win against the Flash away from this feeling a whole lot better than it does right now.
We are still in wait-and-see mode on Brooklyn. With a healthy Dekel Bar playing at full capacity, Brooklyn is strong across the board, but nothing feels like a sure thing either. They are good enough to beat any opponent in any given game within a matchup, but finding three wins is a tall task against the best teams in the league.
Post-trade, Texas got a very good win against Columbus and pushed New Jersey to the brink in each of their gender matches. To be fair, Columbus and New Jersey were playing Texas after tough losses, and we could see better versions of those teams in the right setting. Nevertheless, it was an encouraging weekend for Texas.
You have to feel sorry for the LA Mad Drops. No team has been unluckier the past two years—losing Thomas Wilson for all of 2024 to an unexpected health problem and then losing Quang Duong to a ridiculously bizarre termination of his UPA contract.
All in all, there were encouraging signs from the outside-shot contenders. Who knows if it is enough to provide us with an upset in the playoffs, but it is enough that we can realistically see the possibility of an upset in the making.
5. Humberg vs. Dizon – We wrote after the Mari Humberg trade that the New Jersey 5’s had become the most interesting team in MLP because of the storyline of is whether they would play Humberg or Meghan Dizon when it mattered most. We felt the trade was a clear indictment of how the 5’s viewed Dizon’s ability to get them over the hump, and the choice by New Jersey to play Humberg over Dizon in their semi-final match against the St. Louis Shock seemingly confirmed that assessment of the trade.
The revisionist history of the armchair quarterback is a tale as old as professional sports time. The issue with revisionist history is that it is often viewed through the results perspective, rather than a process point of view. The New Jersey 5’s women lost to the Shock, and the 5’s ended up losing the match with Humberg. Therefore, the move to play Humberg over Dizon was the wrong move. Easy peasy. Lemon squeezy.
It is not that straightforward, though. We have been skeptical of the 5’s ability to win a title with Meghan Dizon, but we are also skeptical of their ability to do it with Humberg. By a small margin, we see Humberg as giving the 5’s the best chance to win over Dizon, but we don’t feel absolutely convinced of that take. By trading for Humberg, the 5’s made the difficult choice that they would have to continue making very difficult choices at the most important moments of the season with the Humberg vs. Dizon question.
However, the loss to the Shock does not mean the choice to play Humberg was wrong, just as a win for the 5’s would not have necessarily made it right. Humberg/ALW had two game points and, had they converted, the narrative might be completely different.What is important for the 5’s assessment of the decision is that ALW and Humberg put themselves in a great position to win the women’s match. Humberg/Navratil, who didn’t win a high percentage of mixed matches last year, had the ball at 8-8-1 against the #1 mixed team for the Shock before falling 11-8. Those are a couple of strong scorelines for Mari Humberg in a limited sample size. Was it really such a bad decision to play Mari Humberg?
We have to expect the 5’s are going to want to see more of Mari Humberg in bigger matches in the second half of the season so they have more information to make a big playoff decision. Regardless of the loss, the early returns had to be somewhat encouraging.
6. Substitute City Open – For every team outside of the top 5, it was more like the Substitute City Open rather than the Beer City Open. Of the 11 teams outside of the top 5, there were 8 teams that required a bench or on-site alternate to fill in.
One flaw of the Midseason Tournament is that it offers little incentive to the teams that aren’t in contention, as a top 3 finish to secure money and standings points is virtually out of the question. If there are nagging injuries, personal circumstances, contractual questions, or billionaire doubles partners, a player may be less inclined to attend BCO for these bottom MLP teams. It really hurt the early round matches that some of the weaker teams did not have their full roster to put up any sort of a fight.
Here is the list of missing players: Jaume Martinez Vich (Atlanta), Etta Tuionetoa (Carolina), Dekel Bar (Brooklyn), LA (Quang Duong), Jay Devilliers (Miami), Donald Young (New York), Jack Sock and Genie Bouchard (Phoenix), and Tyler Loong* (Utah).
Some absences were obviously of the control of teams and the league, but this was not ideal from a viewership standpoint. Hopefully, this can be mitigated in future years.
*this article has been edited to correct that it was Tyler Loong, not Yates Johnson, who needed a sub
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As a 5s fan, I had no issue with them subbing in Humberg for Dizon. They were going to need their best dreambreaker team. Also, AL and Mari had AB/Kate beat last year in Salt Lake City, but blew it at the end. Unfortunately, the same thing happened this time. Mari had a good chance to win both of her games, but couldn’t close. The 5s need to be better at finishing games/matches. They have been coming up short in big moments against the Flash and Shock.
We’ll have to see if this Noe trade changes anything