PINBURGH IS A match-play tournament. In the early rounds, unranked players can find themselves in a bank of machines against the world's elite. Pinburgh is where a young player will see Elwin up close. "I've never seen anyone play in a way like that," Robert says. "Controlling balls. Having multiball abilities. It's like Keith Elwin can read the ball five seconds ahead of time. He knows exactly how its behavior is." After they played the first time, Elwin told Robert: "You have good aim. The thing you have to understand is that certain combinations open things up."

To properly learn the game, Robert sifted through the jumble of manuals online, watching video tutorials, piecing together strategies off pinball discussion forums. This is how he conquered small talk and ordering food at a restaurant and his 12th-grade departmental exams. He learned about players who take the glass off machines and practice dropping and catching with each flipper. He repeated these acts, dropping and catching, dropping and catching.

Those on the circuit have not always known what to make of Robert's game. In the 2014 final, Twitch.tv commentators puzzled over some of his decisions yet marveled at his feel for the game. "Robert likes control so much, he is willing to give up opportunity in order to maintain control," one said, and then moments later: "The little flicks that he's doing on the flippers ... there's another triple! My god!"

Robert claps behind his back while keeping the ball up on triple jackpot. He bounces on his toes, vibrating. When something is about to blow up, Robert likes to take one hand off the flippers, stand on his toes, raise his eyebrows and point at where you just might want to look. This is what he calls charm. More than his wanting to be the world's best pinball player, Robert wants to be its most charming. Alone in the garage, between the drop catches and target shooting, he diligently practices charm. Unlocking wizard mode on "World Cup Soccer," he lets his jacket fall down his back like Michael Jackson, imagining his fans are watching in chat rooms online. "I like feeling charming with them," he says.

It can be a challenge for Robert to talk to more than one person at once. In January, around 400 people sat in an old movie theater in East Vancouver to watch Robert play pinball. The host of the event asked what Robert listens to when his headphones are up. The audience shouted guesses as Robert did a number on the "Walking Dead" game, shaking his head in delight with each incorrect guess.

"Pinball Wizard!"

"Eminem!"

"Classical music!"

Robert liked this last answer but just whispered, "How many walkers you kill today?" then looked back down at the game. The crowd fell silent.

A few nights before Pinburgh in the summer of 2015, I ask whether he has invented any shots, as some of the other greats have. "No," he says. The realization seems to unsettle him. He looks down at Metallica and begins to address the machine -- or more specifically, the ghoulish character in the electric chair between the two ramps. "Hey, Sparky, can you do a backflip?" he asks. He nudges the machine sharply, the way he would to keep the ball from draining. Sparky's head shakes in different directions, then settles into a horizontal movement. Robert asks more questions. And Sparky answers with similar head gestures. Some yes. Some no. "Sparky, do you know what a schipperke is?" "Sparky, am I going to win Pinburgh?" Sparky indicates in the affirmative.

"How do you know Sparky's telling the truth?" (I ask.

"Hey, Sparky, do you always tell the truth?"

Sparky nods again. Robert looks me dead in the eye. He once told his mom that looking in someone's eyes hurts his head. It's unclear in this moment whether the shot he has invented is to solicit truth from a pinball machine -- to reveal its true soul -- or whether, more than revealing the soul of the machine, he is controlling it with such precision that it will give him the answers he wants.

Pinball Wizards These pinball fanatics explain what fuels their obsession with the game they love.

MAURIZIO ALWAYS THOUGHT it was because the umbilical cord strangled Robert when he was born, cutting off oxygen to his brain. What else could it be? They would spend years asking: What does he have? It is difficult to answer precisely, even today, because autism falls on a spectrum.

Robert remembers his trip to the Mayo Clinic: "It was so cool getting an MRI just because you go inside this machine and you hear noises around you that sound like jackhammers. It sounds like jackhammers are going above you, below you, next to you, it's like there's jackhammers all over the place." He remembers hearing an Anne Murray song for the first time inside the chamber too, how pretty she sounded. He was 22, and for the first time he heard the word "savant."

"He doesn't see the world like you and I see the world," says Dr. Andrew Reeves, the neurologist at Mayo. "He just can't. I can't see where the ball's going to be like two bounces down the road. I don't know about you, but I don't do that. But he does that."

When Robert looks at a pinball machine, one part of his brain that lights up is the fusiform gyrus. It's the part that glows when the rest of us see a face. Not the individual components -- eyes, mouth, nose -- but the sum that is someone we know. When Robert sees the playing field on a pinball machine, to him it has a familiar face. "It's the difference between seeing something and recognizing something," Reeves says.

Reeves believes this has consequences: "If he's going to have all this horsepower going to visual spatial analysis and focusing on pinball, he may not have enough horsepower to do everything else normally." There is only so much horsepower.

YOU CAN SOMETIMES tell when things begin to go awry. His smile will grow so big you can see the roots of his gums. "If Robert tells you he's OK," Maurizio explains, "it doesn't always mean he's OK." It happens in the Minneapolis airport when the boarding gate is switched from C24 to C15 with no explanation. And 15 minutes before he's supposed to board, they switch the gate again. "OK," Robert says, grin widening, determined to be outwardly cool. "You have to admit this is unusual. Don't you think it's unusual to switch three times?" His stomach hurts. He downgrades his review of the airport food court. "I think the chicken was a mistake."

But when Delta switches the gate to C10, he finds a hint of flow. Robert is always rallying. Ten is a good number. He won betting 10 at a roulette table after he won nationals. Ten is a perfect score in gymnastics. It's how many minutes you get for being a major pest in a hockey game. "Do you know one thing about schipperkes?" he asks. "They're very rare."

He's sitting on the plane beside an otherwise sweet woman, who is looking at her phone during the safety presentation. The airplane picks up speed down the runway. And like a silver ball racing up the long left ramp on "Tales From the Crypt," it's off up into the night. He lets himself think of the burger he's going to eat when he arrives in Pittsburgh.

And then the pilot says something that nobody quite hears.

"Did the pilot just say 'air bleed'?"

Robert sees the flight attendant sprint to the end of the plane, which is now turning back to Minneapolis. Nobody around him quite understands what is happening here. And then he's back at another departure gate. Headphones up. A grin like Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight." "It's kind of amazing that we're back in Minnesota," he says, as they're all ushered off the plane.

The anxiety he has felt all day is written on the faces of everyone waiting at Gate C11. Right now they're all burdened with the hyperawareness of seeing five shots ahead.

Robert thinks back to that third ball on "FunHouse," which bounced down the left outlane. Rudy cackled. He shook the machine, trying to jar the ball back into play. He heard himself scream, "F---er!" He put his hand to his face in shock. Nobody had ever seen him lose his temper. "I didn't know I could get so angry," he says. "I was feeling pressure building in my head." Deep down, though, it also felt pretty good. "It was kind of unexpected!" he says, giggling.

Robert pulls four juggling balls out of his backpack. His rhythm is haphazard at first, but eventually all eyes are on him. "Did you expect to see someone juggling in an airport?" Robert asks the woman closest to him. He's wearing a pinball T-shirt and crinkled cargo shorts, which he'll wear again tomorrow and the next day. Her eyes light up. She can't help herself. "Who exactly are you?" she asks.

He doesn't see the world like you and I see the world. - Dr. Andrew Reeves, neurologist at the Mayo Clinic

ALL WEEK, ROBERT has thought about what he's going to say when he sees Penni Epstein's longtime partner, Lyman Sheats, a revered pinball machine programmer who for years was considered the best player in the world. When he spots Robert in the lobby of the Pittsburgh Westin, Sheats leaps to his feet. "Hey, Lyman," Robert says, "do you like exploding stuff?" Lyman pulls up a video on his phone of a screecher coming out of a beer bottle. They talk excitedly about Roman candles. About squealers. About Texas Hold 'em and pinball strategies.

It can take 20 years to master the 200-plus machines you might draw in any given bank at Pinburgh. There are 10 rounds just to qualify for the final day, and in the early rounds, a top player could easily lose on a game from the 1960s to someone outside the top 100. "The skill of the game is controlling your luck," Elwin says. But it's hard not to feel singled out by the universe when three balls drain quickly down the outlane without an opportunity to even swing a flipper.

"How'd you do in the first round, Robert?" a player asks him a few hours into the tournament.

"Five points," Robert answers, his gaze locked on a game called "Frank Thomas' Big Hurt."

"That's all?"

"Yeah."

"You still have four rounds today."

His ball ricochets sharply down the left outlane. "A schipperke has really good reflexes," he says.

Robert draws "Avatar," "Fireball," "Taxi" and "Cleopatra" in the second round. He doesn't quite trust his touch this morning and right away must fight the urge to tilt too hard to keep a ball in play. He steps back abruptly after the first ball drains. "I think I did the right thing." He repeats this assessment to the other players until it begins to sound like a question.

The Wi-Fi at the convention center is overloaded; the 2,500 miles between Robert and Maurizio is now more than geographic. He begins to nudge the machine more aggressively, which leads to a series of tilts. He mumbles about the outlanes -- "They're haunting me ... they're hungry" -- before daring to address one of them directly. "I'll make sure it gets its dinner!" He tries to explain this new strategy to one of his opponents. "I figured if I asked for the outlane, it would give it to me."

Who are you asking?

"The pinball gods."

Where do they live?

"In hell."

In the fourth round, he encounters a player he knows from other tournaments, Steve Daniels. As Robert builds up points, Daniels can't help but cheer him on. "He's really accurate. He does almost nothing wrong." Deep in the crowd, a woman whispers: "I've seen this game before, I've just never seen a score like that." Robert inches up to a tie for 27th in the standings; the top 40 make the finals.

As a fifth-round opponent, Sean Grant, battles a ball, Robert wanders aimlessly between banks of games. Natural light from the convention center windows disappears, and the cavern beneath pulses with a glow from the games. It can be hard to tell when Robert feels something for real and when he is acting as he has seen others act in a situation. He remembers one Christmas. "My dad was videotaping me opening presents, but every single time I opened one, I did not react to the gift," he confides. "I just sat there stone-faced. When I open gifts now, though, I try to fake being excited."

Robert stops now to watch Elwin. When he returns to play "Quicksilver," he has his first good ball of the round. But he can't sustain the momentum. Larry Scott from Cincinnati stands nearby and watches Robert's last ball disappear. It's almost 10 p.m., and the other banks have cleared out. Robert is now in 58th place. He trembles, crestfallen. "For a moment I looked like I was in a little bit of shock there," he says to Scott. "Like I didn't know how to react?"

A few hours later, on the bed in his hotel room, Robert lies motionless. Headphones down, glasses at his side. "I. Feel. Like. Nothing. Is. Going. To. Go. Right. Again." Maurizio sends a text, telling him it's really not that bad. And then they're talking on the phone. "Today was not that bad," Maurizio says. "The thing you need to be concerned about is getting a good sleep tonight. Get some rest."

Robert will never admit how good it is to hear his dad's gentle voice. "You're only going to get 'A' players tomorrow," Maurizio says. "You're an 'A' player. You play against the best." Robert knows this pep talk. "If you're really close," Maurizio continues, "go for ramps and loops, whatever is safer. If you're behind, go for the multiball. Your first round is 10 a.m. Round 6. You may want to get up at 9. If you have breakfast and a shower, you look good, you feel good and play good."

Robert asks what Lupo has been doing.

"It's getting late for you," Maurizio says. "I'll watch on the iPad tomorrow."

Something heavy has disappeared from the room. "Good night," Maurizio says. Robert hangs up the phone. He springs up from bed and puts his glasses back on. His appetite is back. "If you want to risk bar food, I'm up for that," he says. "I'm up for that risk!"