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Posted 23 September 2018

Bowling tips – How to Slow Down Your Bowling Ball Speed

This post presents an advanced bowling technique designed, to better match your bowling ball speed with your bowling rpm (revolutions per minute) or rev rate and ultimately to increase your bowling scoring. As an advanced bowling technique, it is one that you should discuss and work with your coach to perfect and/or incorporate into your practice regiment if you have no formal coach.

I am a speed dominant player, that is I tend to roll the bowling ball fast. This works well on a typical house shot (THS) condition or where the outside is fairly dry and you have a weak ball that will basically ignore the friction in the heads and crush the 1-3 pocket due to the extreme entry angle. However, today’s modern bowling is a game of adjustments and matching up your bowling technique to the bowling lane conditions. These conditions change from house to house. If you are a tournament bowler, then you know all too well and understand the precarious position being locked into one single bowling technique can put you in. I had my taste of this a few years ago when I went to the USBC Open event back when it was held in Reno. I was averaging around 210 at the time and had a couple 300s under my belt so figured I was hot stuff. USBC put out a shot then that called for play around the 9 board but with controlled speed. Due to a combination of the weakness of my equipment and overly fast bowling ball speed (which was my regular speed), I did not have a good matchup of lane condition to bowling ball to bowling ball speed. The predominant of this being lack of ability to adjust bowling ball speed.

This is No!!!

I immediately signed up for a 2-hour bowling lesson right there in the Reno bowling stadium and found out that my issue was lack of ability to effectively adjust speed. I think you get the picture here.

So, if you are in this position you’re probably saying yeah that’s me so what do I do.

There are a couple two or three adjustments you can make to slow down your bowling ball speed:

• Eliminate pulling the bowling ball down from the top on your last step before delivery
• Adjust the bowling ball starting position in your stance
• Adjust your starting position on the bowling lane to be closer to the foul line

Adjustments one and two are linked so I’ll describe them both together. Eliminating pulling the bowling ball down from the top simply means letting gravity control the rate of descent. That is eliminating muscling the ball from the top of the swing thru delivery. This is a tricky adjustment because It can feel unnatural if you are locked into doing it. One quick way to feel the difference between muscling and letting the ball fall naturally is by doing the one-step approach drill. You stand a step and a half away from the foul line, hold the bowling ball around waist high, start the bowling ball delivery motion letting gravity control the rate at which you drop the ball from the waist into your backswing. You take your delivery step or sliding step and then allow the ball weight and gravity to control the bowling ball returning from the backswing thru release.

This does two things;

One it gives you different starting positions to begin to control speed. Say waist high for medium speed, chest high for faster speed or at the thigh for slower speeds.

Two it syncs your ball speed with your bowling ball starting position. That is if you start the bowling ball swing at waist level, the backswing should go back to waist level or slightly higher. If you start the bowling ball delivery at thigh height the backswing should be no higher than waist high and likewise, if you start the backswing above the waist say chest high, then you would expect the backswing to be above the waist but certainly not above the shoulders. Each position should produce a noticeable difference in bowling ball speed on the lane. So, in reality, the two techniques are linked as they incorporate the speed adjustment with bowling ball starting position in your stance and bowling ball weight and gravity control of the bowling ball descent speed thru delivery.

The third technique for adjusting your bowling ball speed is probably more of further refinement, meaning you would expect smaller impacts on speed by performing this adjustment. It is to Move forward or backward on the approach. Perhaps obviously, moving closer to the foul line will cause you to take smaller steps than you normally would if you were standing further away. This will subconsciously cause you to slow down the tempo at which you approach the line for fear of fouling. The slower tempo, i.e. slowing of your feet going to the line will cause you to roll the ball slower. Similarly stepping back on the approach will tend to cause you to take larger steps and move at a quicker pace to get to the foul line, this would subconsciously cause you to roll the bowling ball a bit faster. This is a tricky adjustment for speed control because this technique of moving forward and backward on the approach also controls how short or long the ball gets down the lane, i.e. the bowling ball reaction. That bowling technique and tip is for another day.

As you are practicing, hopefully, you have access to a center that records bowling ball speed. If so be sure to use your plastic ball or one of your weakest balls for the drill. That way as much as possible you are taking the lane condition out of the equation. As you will see in the YouTube video I reference below you will want to develop a 3 mile per hour (mph) bowling ball speed window, mine is about 14.5 to 16.5 mph.

Ok, go ahead and check out this bowling video from the USBC Bowling Academy. If you successfully add this advanced bowling technique to your game you will create greater diversity in your game, be able to play different areas of the bowling lane and ultimately increase your bowling scoring.

Checkout other bowling tips and recommendations on my Pinterest page and be sure to share this post on Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook or other social networks.

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Posted 25 June 2018

Bowling Tips / Bowling Techniques – Bowling Scoring by hand

Scoring (Now posted on Pinterest)

Hey, folks, I’m a little late with this post about bowling scoring so apologies; however as I alluded to in my post about single pin spare shooting, I’ve put together a write-up and bowling scoring visual aid. Open the visual aid in a separate window so you can refer to it once I get into the details of bowling scoring.

I wrote out 8 games on the bowling scoring visual aid but only highlighted 5 as the last three are special cases of exceptional games designed to show the impact of the first 9 spare in an all strike game and bowling scoring for a perfect or 300 game.

 How to Score Bowling:

So let’s get to it and start with games 1 & 2.

Game 1 -

is a no mark (no strike or spare) game. In this case, the bowling scoring is simply the number of pins knocked down each frame added together from frames 1 – 10.

For instance, 8 total pins were knocked down in frame 1, 8 in frame 2 and 8 in frame 3. Added together the total pins knocked down thru 3 frames was 24. The 24 is recorded in the frame 3 box.

The process continues as such thru the remaining 7 frames of the game. And for game 1 the total score ends up being 79. Very simple scoring and a very poor game.

Let me back up and cover the rules real quickly, in bowling you have two opportunities to knock down all the pins on the pin deck per frame. There is an exception in the 10^th frame, which we will cover with game 2’s scoring.

Game 2 -

is a four-mark game (there were 3 spares and 1 strike). We can see the impact of the spare early on in frame 2. (How much is a spare in bowling you might ask?) Glad you asked.  A spare in any frame is worth 10 points plus the very next ball thrown. So, in game two the very next ball thrown was the first ball in the 3^rd frame, where 9 pins were knocked down. So the scoring value for frame 2 is the 10 pins plus 9 pins from the first ball in frame 3 for a total of 19 pins. This 19 pins are then added to the 7 pins from frame 1 for a total of 26 which is recorded in the frame 2 box.

What’s the score for frame 3 you ask? Well in frame three only 9 total pins were knocked down so the 9 is added to the 26 for a total of 35 points in frame 3.

Now take a close look at the difference in scores thru 3 frames between the 1^st and 2^nd games. The spare added an additional 11 pins to the overall total.

That’s the importance of spare shooting in the game of bowling.

Okay, let’s move on to frames 6 & 7 where a spare was recorded in frame 6 followed by a strike in frame 7. Again a spare is worth 10 points plus the very next ball thrown. A strike’s value, on the other hand, is 10 points plus the next two balls thrown.

Let’s diagnose the bowling scoring for frame 6; 10 points for the spare plus 10 points for the strike in frame 7 equals 20 points. These 20 points are then added to the score in frame 5 (49) for a total of 69 points, which are then recorded in frame 6.

Frame 7, we have 10 points for the strike plus the next two balls thrown which were a 2 & 6 recorded in frame 8. So the total is 10 + 2 + 6 or 18. The 18 points are added to the 69 points from frame 6 for a total of 87 points recorded in frame 7.

Now on to the 10^th frame. This is arguably the most important frame in bowling as you have the opportunity to make up for lots of missed opportunities earlier in the game. The 10^th frame if scored to its maximum potential offers one the opportunity to throw 3 balls and record a max score of 30 points for the frame. That’s not the case in this game (the 30 points) but the bowler did throw 3 balls. So a 4 – spare was recorded in frames 10. Since the spare was made the bowler is still afforded an opportunity to record the next ball scoring (recall a spare is 10 points plus the next ball thrown). In this case, the bowler knocked down 7 pins. So 10 + 7 is 17 points added to the frame 9 score of 103 = 120 points recorded in frame 10 and 120 points for the game.

Notice the impact on scoring for a four-mark game from 79 to 120, a 41 point increase in score.

Game 3 –

We will move thru game 3 a little more quickly and this game is presented to show the beneficial impact of multiple strikes and the negative impact of lack of spares once we compare game 3 to game 4.

Again a strike is 10 points plus the next two balls thrown. So the bowler started out hot, throwing two strikes in a row (or a double in bowling lingo) followed by an 8 in the first ball of frame 3. The scoring is 10 + 10 + 8 for a total of 28, which is recorded in frame 1.

Frame 2’s scoring is as follows, 10 points for the strike + 8 for the first ball in in frame 3 + 0 since the remaining two pins were not knocked down with the second ball in frame 3.

This, not recording a spare, by the way, is called a (miss).

So the scoring is 10 + 8 + 0 for 18 points added to the total from 28 points from frame 1 equals a total of 46 recorded in frame 2.

Frame 3 is the 8 points added to the 46 from frame 2 for a total of 54 points recorded in frame 3.

Let’s move on to frames 6 – 9 where four strikes in a row are recorded (called a four-bagger; three strikes in a row is called a turkey). For frame 6 we have 10 points for the strike plus another 10 points for the strike in frame 7 plus another 10 points for the strike in frame 8 for a total of 30 points. This 30 points are then added to the score from frame 5 (71) and recorded in frame 6 as 101.

Note, 30 points is the maximum score total that a bowler can achieve in any frame.

Frame 7 scoring is the same as frame 6, 10 points for frame 7 plus 10 points for frame 8 plus 10 points for frame 9 for a total of 30 points. The 30 points are added to the score from frame 6 (101) and recorded in frame 7 as 131.

Note the significant increasing in scoring multiple strikes has, 60 additional points have been recorded from frame 5 to frame 7.

Frame 8 marks the end of the strike streak as the first ball in the 10^th frame was a 6. So 10 + 10 + 6 for 26 points, added to frame 7’s (131) equals 157 recorded in frame 8.

Frame 9 is 10 + 6 + 3 (where 6 & 3 were recorded in 10^th frame) for a total of 19 pins added to the 157 from frame 8 for a total of 176 in frame 9. Frame 10 is simply 9 plus the 176 from frame 9 for a 10^th frame total of 185 and a game score of 185.

Game 4 –

Game 4 shows the addition of two spares in frames 4 & 8, which are intended to point out the value of making spares versus recording a miss. Game 4 has two sets of doubles recorded and one triple from the 9^th – 10^th frame. There are more strikes in game 4 than 3 so the score should be higher but there are also fewer misses (two versus four in game 3). And notice the 10^th frame where two strikes are initially recorded followed by an 8. I mentioned that the 10^th frame presents the opportunity to roll three balls and achieve a max score of 30. In this case, the strike-strike-eight resulted in a score of 28 for the 10^th frame which was added to the 9^th frame score of 182 for a 10^th frame point total and game of 210.

The strike rules end after the first strike in the 10^th frame.

Game 5 –

Game 5 shows the first ‘clean’ game no misses, an all strike and spare game. As you are now familiar with the scoring I’ll only note that this game actually has fewer strikes than game 4 and only shows one double and one triple. The point here is the value of making spares and closing out frames (i.e. not missing). The score of 236 is 26 points higher than game 4 and 51 points higher than game 3. This is a good game for any level bowler.

Special cases…

Games 6 – 8 are special cases, exceptional games for any level bowler. They are shown to indicate the impact on bowling scoring of the first 9 count recorded in a long string of string of strikes.

Game 6 –

A wonderful 10 strike game with the first 9 strikes being thrown consecutively for a 9-bagger. The 9 in the 10^th frame reduces the score by 1 pin in the 8^th frame (compared to the scoring in game 7) and an additional 10 pins in the 9^th frame (compared to the scoring in game 8). The 9-spare-strike in the 10^th indicates a total point value of 20 points for the 10^th frame (versus 30 points if 3 consecutive strikes were thrown) for a further reduction of 10 points. Thus the final score is 20 points plus 259 from frame 9 for 279 recorded in the 10^th and for the game. The 279 game is 21 points short of a perfect game of 300.

Game 7 –

Another wonderful game; this time featuring 10 consecutive strikes thrown or a 10-bagger. Since the 9 came on the 2^nd shot of the 10^th frame, 1 pin is lost in scoring compared to game 8’s score of 270 in the 9^th and 10 pins (20 points total in the 10^th) compared to game 8’s total of 300 in the 10^th.

Game 8 –

Ahhh bowling perfection, I have 3 myself… Anyway as you can see with 12 consecutive strikes rolled the maximum score is achieved per frame (30 points) for a total of 300 recorded for the game.

That’s it folks bowling scoring. Back in my early years of bowling, we kept score manually with special wax paper and grease pencils. It made you quite adept at math.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

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