The BM Report: The Blog of Bowling Aficionados

Thank you

2010-10-31T22:09:00.003-06:00

Thank you to all who have read this blog over the last couple of years. The BM Report gave me a way to dive deeply into a subject about which I knew little. It gave me a nice distraction from other things going on in my life. It was a fun project. I think I brought a unique perspective to bowling and one that the few people who found this little corner of the internet seemed to enjoy. Over the last few months, clearly my enthusiasm for bowling and writing about bowling has waned dramatically. I'm not sure what happened, but I think by some miracle I rediscovered the joys of my job. I am an archaeologist, a job that is supposed to bring satisfaction (it sure doesn't bring in much cash).

When this season rolled around, I tried to regain my blog footing on multiple occasions, but I could not. When the passion died, so did my creativity. I could continue to write sarcastic reviews of bowling murals or mustaches. I could continue to write weekly updates of our team, or bowling puzzles. I could continue to track our statistical progress, but I'm just not feeling it. A half-ass bowling blog is no better than a nonexistent bowling blog.

The greatest thing about this blog for me has been the relationships that I have earned through it. I now have a brother in Texas and another in Virginia (in addition to my real brother in Virginia), and for them I am grateful. They will continue to carry on the S.U.C.K. torch.

With that, I will quietly sign off. I'll keep rolling the ball in Bernaski, at least until I crack the 600 mark. We'll see what happens after that. Over and out. -Todd

Bowling Related Post

2010-10-26T20:58:00.003-06:00

Last night, we faced Prairie Rose. When I saw Ev Sheffield, the most bad ass guy in the league, I started giving him all kinds of shit. The first game, we came through with a nice win, but that was the end of our good luck. For the second week in a row, we dropped three of four.

Now, to more important things. I have watched this like five times, and I can't stop laughing. I am, after all, a culturally sensitive anthropologist.

On the perception and reality of bowling prowess

2010-10-20T09:15:00.002-06:00

William Seally Gosset was a statistician who worked at the Guinness brewery in the first part of the 20th century. Gosset was interested in developing methods for comparing the quality of beer from batch to batch. Due to the lengthy nature of the brewing process, quality control methods were by necessity limited to comparisons involving relatively small sample sizes. Thus, Gosset worked to develop statistical techniques for comparing the properties of things with small samples.

Gosset recognized that the statistical methods he developed had broad applicability across the sciences, but because the work had been performed while he was employed by Guinness, the company considered his work to be the property of the corporation. Thus, Gosset published his statistical method, based on something he called the "t-statistic", under the ridiculously modest pseudonym "Student". And today, Student's t-test is still regularly used in scientific hypothesis testing. This is just one example of the good things that have been derived from fermented malt beverages.

One form of the t-test is used to explore a relatively simple kind of question. It is used to test whether the average value of some property of two groups of things is the same (or different). So, for example let's say we wanted to check whether the average stature of adult men in Texas and Wyoming is different. One way we could answer this question is to measure every man in each state and compare the averages, but obviously this would be an extremely impractical if not impossible approach to the problem.

Another tact we might take is to select 100 men from each state, measure their heights, and calculate averages. In almost every case, however, no matter which men we select, we will observe differences in those averages. For example, we might find that men in Wyoming average 69.23" in height, while men in Texas average 69.18", because, of course, everything is big in Wyoming. Given those values, however, the question will inevitably arise as to whether this difference is significant. The key word in that sentence is "significant". What does that mean?

If we assume that the average stature of adult men in each state is the same, and from each we were to draw samples of 100 , what is the probability that we would observe a difference in average stature of this magnitude? If the probability is really tiny, say less than 1%, then we could be very confident that this difference is real. If the probability is really high, say 90%, then we would have to conclude that there probably is no difference in average stature among the two populations as whole. Student's t-test allows us to calculate this probability. It is a way of telling us whether an observed difference is meaningful. It provides us with a way to quantify certainty.

So what does this have to do with bowling? Well, from week to week, month to month, and year to year, we perceive differences in our bowling ability. Last year, my bowling ability seemed to improve dramatically. Six weeks into the season this year, I feel like my bowling has been anything but good. In fact, I feel like I have been bowling a lot worse. My perception is that I am a worse bowler this year than last, but sadly perception can be a sorry judge of reality.

I did a simple t-test. I compared my average game score for 93 games last season to my average score for the first 15 games of this season. I ended last season with an average just under 164. I have begun this season with an average of just under 160. Here's what the t-test tells me. If you begin with the assumption that there has really been no change in my bowling ability, what is the probability of observing this difference in average given this number of games. According to William Sealy Gosset's method, the probability is about 53%. In science, we would say that this difference is not significant.

In other words, my bowling ability this year seems to be pretty much equivalent to my bowling ability from the prior season. Sure, my average game scores are a few pins less, but my underlying skills pretty much seem to be where they where they were when we left off last year. So, I should quit freaking out about it, and you should do the same. Why are you freaking out about my bowling ability anyway?

What about the rest of the Movements? Well, the same goes for all of us. As you can see from the graph above, two of us have averaged a few pins less and the other two a few pins more. The average of the team as a whole is remarkably constant. Last year, we averaged 149.7 pins per game. This year, it's 149.6. None of these differences are significant.

I shouldn't really be surprised by these results, except that I thought that the lack of summer bowling might negatively impact my game. That does not appear to be the case. I should also note that this finding should not be interpreted to mean that our skill at bowling is not changing. I think it is, but that change can only be detected over much longer time scales. What never ceases to amaze, though, is the human capacity for seeing causality and difference where there is none. Deep in my gut, I have felt like my bowling has been worse, but my gut reaction couldn't have been more wrong.

Bowling like the Yankees

2010-10-19T22:01:00.008-06:00

When we walked into the Lanes of Laramie last night, Game 3 of the ALCS was on the tube. Normally, I wouldn't have given this much thought. After all, our beloved Rockies did not make the playoffs this year, and I normally don't pay much attention to what's going on in the American league.

But upon seeing the Rangers battle baseball's royalty, my thoughts immediately drifted to my bowling writing brother in Texas, EB Holschuh. Despite our cleanup man being a longtime Yankee fan, I had to pull for the Rangers. Why in the hell would I root for the best team money can buy? Plus, due to my opening week actions, I feel personally responsible for the Rangers having one hell of a season.

We faced the Mighty Hucks. These guys have been killing us of late. I think the last time we had a winning night against them was last December. Last night was no different. In Game 1, both teams bowled like crap, but we came out on the bottom. In Game 2, we fought our way to a hard earned victory. As Game 2 turned to 3, the Rangers began to pull away from the Yanks. At this point, it was clear which baseball team we had decided to ape.

As Game 4 of the ALCS is coming to an end, I want to congratulate the Rangers on their 3-1 series lead. You're welcome. As for the Mighty Hucks, I would like to congratulate them on their 3-1 series victory. You're welcome.

There's always next week.

Spare Change

2010-10-12T21:50:00.012-06:00

Only a few short years ago, we first entered the Memorial Bowling League of Bernaski. In those days, we felt like strangers in a strange land. These days, we are more like old grizzled veterans. We have seen many teams interred in the great sepulchre of bowling mortality. We have also seen new men step foot on the field of Bernaski battle.

Having accrued many wounds in duels of bowling sport, we feel it is not only our right but also our duty to give new teams a hearty welcome, and by that, of course, I mean thorough ass kicking. Welcome to the league, chumps!

In reality, though, it never seems to work that way. It usually goes something like this: "Welcome to the league. You are now competing against the league's bottom feeders. Enjoy your first taste of sweet sweet victory."

Last night, we were determined to do things differently, and we did. Sorta. We started Game 1 on a tear. We were absolutely on fire. In the first frame, Johnebob converted his spare. So did I. Then, Gingy went 9-spare. JD followed that up with a split conversion: 8/. The next frame, we spared every frame as well. Then, Laughlin picked up a man spare. I struck my third. Ging followed with 9-spare, and JD with an X. We started the first game with 12 straight marks, easily a Movement record. We laughed and gave each other endless fist bumps and high fives, but those were perhaps premature.

Our opponent, known only by a name somewhat reminiscent of the days of Soviet communism, "Team 3", started very poorly but turned it on the 2nd half. By the 10th frame, it was mano a mano, and the outcome did not go our way. We lost by a single pin. One fucking pin! 895 to 894!!!!!! Damn you Team 3!!!!!

The next two games were also remarkably close. None was decided before the 10th frame. We bowled our asses off. So did they. We put up over 1900 pins. We averaged 160 pins per bowler per game. I could go on and on about the statistical oddities of this night of bowling. I could mention the four or five team records we set. Instead, I think I will just mention two.

Before I get to those, I will report that we went 2-2. On a night when we should have won all four, we came away with only two wins. I'll take them. Through five weeks of bowling, we have not had a losing night. That's a darn good start.

Ok. So, Daniele had another 500 series with a 517. He is brushing up against a 160 average. The most amazing team stat of the night goes to the Gingy, who just last year was a bumbling rookie. Last night he went 100% on single pin spares, converting all ten of his chances. This is the same guy who only converted 52.2% of his single pin tries last year.

The spare stats for the whole team were remarkable. Overall, we converted 58 spares. Our highest total prior that point was 51. As shown in the graph above, we picked up a total of 61.7% of our spares beating our old record by a large margin, approximately 7%. We went spare crazy. It was a good thing because the strikes were not falling.

So, we had one of our best nights of bowling ever, but we only won two games. Don't worry about us. We don't feel bad for ourselves. We just had a slight change in our spare game. What's that? You feel our pain? You want to help? You're feeling charitable? Well, we'd happily accept your spare change.

Bowling Puzzler IX: Axial Rotations

2010-10-08T07:07:00.002-06:00

It's time to bring back the bowling puzzler, and to inaugurate the new season, I decided to start with a relatively simple one. Let's begin with a couple of assumptions:

1) A bowling ball is characterized by the maximum legal diameter as permitted by the USBC.

2) That ball rolls across the foul line.

3) On its way to the headpin, it does not bounce or skid.

4) It strikes the headpin dead center.

Here's the question: How many rotations does the ball make from the moment it crosses the foul line to the moment it strikes the pin?

Feeling Grounded

2010-10-06T22:13:00.005-06:00

As is obvious to the twoish people who read this blog, I have had a hard finding my mojo. There are a number of reasons for this, and I don't really want to get into them. But the good news is that I finally feel like I am ready to go. There are two things (I think) that will pull me out of my blogging slump: 1) strikes and 2) statistics.

This season started without fanfare. It was suddenly upon us, and I was not ready for it. I'm pretty sure none of us were. The lanes seemed super dry. I am accustomed to seeing stripes of grease across the surface of my ball, but I was seeing none. I was having a hell of a hard time getting the ball to stay on the pocket side. I needed to regain my bowling strength. This week, I finally started to feel like it was coming back.

The other thing that has kept me from writing is record keeping. Every week, I keep score by hand. Then, I come home and enter those data into my spreadsheet. I had allowed four weeks of data to pile up leaving an onerous chore on my desk with seemingly no time to care of it. Tonight, I have done so.

The bottom line is that it finally feels like there is gas in the tank, and keys are in the ignition. I have plenty to say, and I'm ready to let it out. For the time being, I just want to make a few comments on status of the Movements.

Through four weeks, we have a winning record, and we have done so without putting up insanely high averages. In fact, of the core Movements, two of our averages have dropped since the end of last year. John's has fallen by 3 pins. Mine is down the most from a 164 to a 157. Ging is up a a pair of pins, and Daniele is up one. Except for me, we all have pretty much picked up where we left off, and given the nature of the handicapping system, I am grateful for a seven pin decline to start the season.

We have all had very strong weeks. Week 1 belonged to Johnebob. He started the season with a 500 series. Week 2 was our worst week on record (a 1587 series). I am happy to say that I was absent that day. Weeks 3 and 4 have belonged to Daniele, who averaged 169 for the two. I also had a good week this week with a 500 series and a 200 game. The Ging Man, formerly known as "The Rookie", started the season with a 420 series, and we expect him to be in that neighborhood all year long.

We have already had two subs. In Week 1, Nathan hopped on board and contributed to a new team record, when we picked up 54.3% of our spares. In Week 2, K-Terk (aka Kafka) joined us to put up an 85 in Game 2 followed by a 164 in the 3rd.

So the Movements are off and running. For the sake of an olde tyme BM Report feel, I felt it was necessary to include a graph. This bar chart above shows individual averages of the core Movements after four weeks for this season and last. Although this shows that my start to the season has not been nearly as hot as last, it finally feels good to be back.

We have won the league!.....

2010-10-05T15:38:00.003-06:00

.....That is what I hope to be saying in April/May 2011 when we finish the marathon season. For now, I'll take the 7-5, plus our possible 2-2 last night and strive for the best. Dr. Surovell deserves accolades for his 200+ game last night! A feat still cherrished by the movements and thier faithful followers. And by the way, the movement faithful now number over 4,500! Oh, wait make that 450! No wait, make that 4 or 5. Anyway to all those loyal followers- let's get another season off on the right foot!

They are risen

2010-09-28T09:33:00.003-06:00

In case you have been having thoughts to yourself that go something like this, "I wonder where dem Movements at?", it's kind of a long story. Like the Easter Bunny, we've been in a semi-hibernation state, only to arise when the bell tolls marking the start of Memorial League of Bernaski. The bell has tolled, my friends.

Plus, I have a hard time getting to the computer over the stack of fan mail that had accumulated. Well, that might be true if I was 1 mm tall, but I'm not.

Truth be told, I am having an excessively difficult time finding the motivation to get into that USBC spirit. Sure, I like to show up on Monday night, knock a few back, and attempt, albeit poorly, to knock a few pins down, but bowling has lost its cache. Maybe the "sport" will regain it's shine in near time. It probably will. But I have been BUSY. I have been distracted. I guess I remembered that I have another life... one beyond bowling... if that is believable.

But worry not, amigos, the Report shall continue. As proof of that, let me attempt to summarize the state of the Movements in about three sentences.

We are three weeks into the season. We sit with a 7-5 record. Week one, we split with the Lazers, followed by a 3-1 performance against Vacant. Last night, we split with Lounge. Personally, my bowling is suffering big time. It is in part lack of practice and part lanes that are Arid Extra Dry. We'll see how it goes... Stay tuned.

Desperado

2010-07-26T09:51:00.003-06:00

Why don't you come to your senses? You been out sniffing glue for so long now. As if I didn't have enough reasons to not go bowling this summer until this happened. Memo to bowling: associating yourself with prepubescent pop icons is not going to help the sport in the long term. This is disturbing. Really disturbing. Only one phrase adequately describes this news: What the fuck?

So, we all know that bowling has a credibility problem. Some would chalk it up to score inflation from technological advancement. Others would say it's a cultural thing. So, there has been somewhat of an effort to change the image of the sport. One approach that is commonly used by the USBC is to point out that celebrities, like Chris Paul, actually enjoy bowling. I remain dubious of the effectiveness of this tactic, but who knows, maybe there's something to it.

Anyway, somehow I came across this unfortunate news item. I really don't know how to react. Well, yes I do. I'm ashamed. Very ashamed. Why should I even bowl anymore? Well, it gets worse. I went to the website for the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame and voted for my favorite celebrity. Why? I wanted to see the vote tallies. Here is what I discovered:

It's a tight race between Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift. Swift has a 4,000 vote lead out of nearly 800,000 cast. Meanwhile my candidate, Bill Murray, comes in at 6th with 628 votes. Damn it, people!!!! Vote for Mr. Bill. So, let me get this straight. Depending on which group of screaming tween girls wins the battle, either Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber will enter the Bowling Hall of Fame? That's fucking ridiculous. Why you ask? Well, Taylor Swift "has been frequently spotted and photographed hitting the lanes with celebrity friends like Selena Gomez and Cory Monteith." OMG!!!!! You go girl!!!!! Bieber? He did this.

So, let me ask you this Bowling Hall of Fame. I once took a dump in a bowling alley, does that get me a nomination? Let me put it another way. This little stunt is not going to get more people to bowl. It makes you look desperate for attention, desperado. Coupled with the recent Palin speech, the Bieber stunt betrays the truth about bowling- it is not cool, and you so wanna be. You want people to go the lanes? Here's an idea. Why don't you replace the old run down and out of date lanes with the smoky bars and rolling hot dog concession stands in the industrial part of town with places people actually want to go. If you get a group of 13 year old girls to go bowling this summer, I guarantee you that they will figure out in about 2 seconds that they aren't likely to see Bieber shuffling his feet around the hardwood.

Bowl at your own risk

2010-07-24T11:43:00.007-06:00

I'm going to guess that most of you have never considered the dangers of bowling. Sure, you might come down with a case of bowler's thumb, or tendonitis of the wrist. Perhaps you have seen someone cross the foul line and land with a hard thud on their back as their feet slide across a greased lane. Yes, my friends, you can be hurt in the bowling alley. But did you know that bowling can lead to death?

Consider the sad case of Samuel Dickey and George Fleming who met their untimely deaths on September 14, 1870 in Memphis, Tennessee. A fight broke out between Dickey and Fleming over a game of tenpin bowling. No doubt Dickey had hustled Fleming by misrepresenting his ability. Dickey left the lanes and went to a nearby store to buy a gun to go hunting. Shortly thereafter, Fleming walked in with a double-barreled shotgun and pulled the trigger. Dickey was hit, but still managed to get off a shot of his own, killing Fleming instantly. Both men died on the scene. And that my friends is why you shouldn't cheat at bowling. Don't believe me? You can read it yourself in the New York Times:

And if you got through that, you also now know why you shouldn't discipline other people's dogs.

The Brooklyn Strike and the Optimal Pocket

2010-07-16T08:33:00.010-06:00

My paternal grandmother was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. I am well into my fourth decade, but I have only visited that borough once. Still, it seems familiar to me. You could hear Brooklyn in the way she spoke. Recently, I sat next to a woman on an airplane who reminded me so much of my grandmother that I instantly knew she was also a native of Brooklyn, although she had long since moved away. I guess I have some kind of strange cultural connection to the place. Maybe this is why my bowling ball is so happy to collide with the pins on the Brooklyn side.

A while back, I asked, "What's wrong with Brooklyn?" I find it interesting how bowlers are often apologetic about getting a Brooklyn strike because it was an unintentional and accidental good outcome. You screwed up, and yet you were rewarded. Hell, I think that's something to celebrate. Anyway, in that post, I wrote the following of the Brooklyn pocket:

What is interesting, though, is that it is my impression that if I hit the 1-2 pocket, I have a better chance of getting a strike than if I hit the 1-3 (I am right-handed). Still, I always aim for the 1-3 because that's what you're "supposed to do". Conventional wisdom is a funny thing. There are many forms of knowledge derived from many places, but conventional wisdom grows from consensus. If a large majority of people believe something to be true, many other people will simply accept it as truth without much thought. The conventional wisdom in bowling is that for right-handed folk, it is better to hit the 1-3 pocket than the 1-2. Is this true? I have no idea.

Well, during the last bowling season, I decided to investigate this question. It's not a very difficult thing to do. I simply recorded outcomes of ball that struck the 1-2 or 1-3 pockets to ask the question, "What percentage of pocket balls resulted in strikes for the normal and Brooklyn pockets?" I was simply trying to determine what is the optimal target for bowlers, or is there even a difference between the two? I should note that I considered any ball which first struck the 1 pin and then the 2 or 3 be in a "pocket". Ok, here's what I found...

I recorded a grand total of 353 balls in the pocket. Of those, 261 connected with the "normal pocket", and 92 found the Brooklyn side. Of those that hit the normal pocket, 138 resulted in strikes, or 52.9%. On the Brooklyn side, 39 resulted in strikes or 42.4%. In other words, in this case conventional wisdom appears to be correct. It is optimal to aim for the "normal" pocket because your chances of getting a strike are approximately 10% better than on the Brooklyn side.

That said, I think it is important to note that in the case of every one of these 353 balls thrown, all were intended to connect with the normal pocket. When they did connect with the Brooklyn side, it was accidental. So, it is possible that the lower percentage on the Brooklyn side could be attributed to less accurate strikes. It would be interesting to repeat this experiment with intentional targeting of the Brooklyn pocket to see if the result holds. In the meantime, just keep doin' what you're doin'.

Bowling Crime: The ATM Bandit

2010-07-13T13:57:00.006-06:00

One common method for enhancing the profitability of bowling alleys is to install privately owned ATM machines. This way, bowling alley owners can charge you fees for accessing the money you are going to pay to them anyway. Thus, it is a convenient way to turn your $20 into $22 for the lanes. It also gives incentive for the lanes to refuse credit cards, which not only establish a clear paper trail of gross proceeds (thus making tax cheating difficult), but also cost businesses a fixed percentage for every transaction made. In other words, having a cash only business with your own ATM machine has many benefits for the slimy business owner.

Well, slimy business owners, meet slimy ATM thief. David Pendergrast cleverly learned how to reprogram certain models of ATMs to dispense $20 bills while recording $1 transactions. To do so, he looked up default passwords on the internet and punched them in. By this technique, he is known to have stolen some $40,000. One of his targets was Hudsonville Lanes in Hudsonville, Michigan. Here's a tip to all you bowling alley owners charging patrons a couple of bucks to get their money: change the password on the machine before you fill it full of money.

A mild itch

2010-07-11T22:42:00.006-06:00

In Laramie, Wyoming, summer is a cherished time. It refers to the time between June 28 and July 21 when you leave the windows open in your house. Well, not wide open. You don't want to let the mosquitoes in, do you? Anyway, the 19 days of summer are the only days when you can be outside. Accordingly, on these days, the Movements take advantage of the opportunity to do other things, such as trout fishing, golf, nude speed walking, and yard work.

Still, I can't help but hear a whisper in the wind. Something calls me from the north. You see, I have not placed a 14 lbs ball into my hand in nearly two months. On the way down the mountain from slaying the trout on Saturday, I mentioned to the other two senior BM's my interest in rekindling the bowling flame. Johnebob said, "I'm not bowling again until Week 1 of the season." I replied, "You don't even want a warm up after the informational meeting?" He said, "Remember when Joe and I were out of town, and we needed you to go to the informational meeting, and you said, 'Hell no!'." I said, "Really?"

The point of that pointless dialog is that I think I need to hit the Lanes of Laramie. I think I need to let the Black Stallion out of her stable. I think I need to punish the pins once again. If my dream of dreaming about being a PBA bowler is ever to come true, I need to unleash my black and green balls from their sack. This week I will do so. The question is, what will I bowl? Only Pinnius knows.

I remember my mom bowling in 1972

2010-07-06T09:35:00.005-06:00

For those of you who missed it, Sarah gave her big speech at the Bowling Proprietors' Association of America's International Bowl Expo 2010. I'm sure the BPAA got what they paid for... a well thought out, folksy analysis of the state of the sport coupled with her views on the macro- and microeconomic context of bowling and how it relates to the changing demographics of both the country and the game.

My favorite moment was when Sarah recalled fond memories of her dad's bowling league in Idaho, memories that formed when she was an infant less than three months in age. Similarly, some of my fondest in utero memories were of my mother bowling in late 1972. Snuggled up in her womb, I recall hearing the muffled sounds of balls rolling and pins crashing down.

Of course, there was also this moment at the expo when some dude seemed way too excited to meet the quitter governor.

Now I shall retreat back to my bowling hibernation cave.

Chapter 5: The Information Age

2010-05-01T07:59:00.005-06:00

In real life, I am a scientist. Ok, I'm a social scientist, but I like to think that I'm a scientist. I study the prehistory of our species. It is my job to teach in the Fall and Spring and to excavate archaeological sites in the summer. Part of this job involves collecting, organizing, storing, and analyzing huge amounts of information. For example, at the last site at which I worked , we collected and analyzed somewhere around 75,000 artifacts.

I like big data sets. I like searching for patterns and trying to explain them. I think data analysis is probably one of my greatest skills if not my greatest. I see the potential for study and analysis in many mundane things. I'm not sure exactly when I saw the potential to study bowling, but it was around the beginning of December 2008 that I started doing so.

Here is how I remember it. One Saturday morning, I was screwing around with Microsoft Excel. This is a bad habit of mine. I decided to figure out the formulas for scoring a game of bowling. They are not simple, and I like such challenges. It took me an hour or so, but I did it. Here is an example of one:

=J4+IF(L3="X",IF(N3="X",IF(P3="X",30,20+P3),IF(O3="\",20,10+N3+O3)),IF(M3="\",IF(N3="X",20,10+N3),L3+M3))

From there, it was pretty simple to begin building the rest of my spreadsheet, which allows you to track all kinds of bowling statistics.

After a couple of weeks of entering our team's bowling scores, my eyes were opened. It is one thing to know that you are bad at bowling, but it's another to know exactly why you are bad. I took some heat early on for tracking our statistics, but in the end, I think the the other Movements were happy I did.

I cannot tell you what helped my game more, throwing a hook or tracking my stats. I started doing both around the same time. But since then, my average has been climbing steadily. I ended our 2nd season with a 128 average. By December 1, 2008, when I started tracking statistics about 12 weeks into the season, my average had only climbed three pins to a 131. From that point until the end of the season in April of 2009, I managed to add another 16 pins to finish the season with a 147.

I find it helpful to analyze my game down to its most fundamental components. Most bowlers measure their ability by one simple statistic, the average. Of course, there are many things that go into that average. Many bowlers only see it's most obvious component, strikes, and it is easy to become focused on strikes. Nothing will bring you high scores like stringing together a bunch of X's. After a couple of months, however, it was clear to me that at my skill level in the middle of last season, it would have been a miracle if I recorded more than 15 strikes in a series. Clearly, I needed to hone my spare game. But what part of it? I figured that if I could master the single pin spare, I could probably add 20 pins to my average alone.

This realization is not necessarily something that you need a spreadsheet to tell you, but it is typical of the type of realizations that derive from introspection or self study. Once you realize something like this, it is a relatively simple matter to focus on solving that problem. So, a lot of things clicked around December of 2008, and it is no coincidence that the birth of this blog dates to the same time.

By the end of the 08-09 season, my third season bowling competitively, I really felt like I was gaining ground. I was throwing a weak hook that seemed to often be around the pocket. I was picking up spares. My average was climbing, and I got my first 500 series.

One weekend in the Spring of 2009, Johnebob and I went down to the lanes to practice. We were bowling next to four young college guys. They were watching us throw with hooks, and a couple of them started trying to do the same. Eventually they started chatting with us saying that we bowled like we were pros. You must bear in mind that at the time, John averaged just over 150, and I probably averaged 145. So, it was clear to me that I was no longer one of those guys who just bowls on a Saturday night. To the average bowler, I looked like a skilled bowler. I had clearly crossed some threshold and was well on my way.

Bowling Alley Mural Reviews: La Flotilla

2010-04-29T08:03:00.015-06:00

Today we review the mural La Flotilla by Anonymous. This week's piece was submitted for review by Ken Pomeroy who had the great privilege of bowling in its shadow at Sandills Bowling Center in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Dominating the composition, a flotilla of pins carefully navigates a tightly spaced planetary system of bowling balls. The bluish purple night sky is spattered with stars and nebulae. One pin fires its rocket to adjust its course. The imaginative author of this great work of bowling space art takes a sarcastic jab at the sci-fi and stellar genres of kegel expression in which pins are often depicted as stationary while balls are on the attack. In contrast, in La Flotilla (pronounced with the soft "y" of "tortilla"), a small group of pin frigates traverses space to attack a group of unforeseen enemy pin craft. Rather than viewing the warfare of bowling as a battle of balls versus pins, Anonymous asks whether pins can be viewed as being in a constant state of internal conflict while bowling balls are little but conscientious objectors.

A bowling season in a nutshell

2010-04-27T12:24:00.009-06:00

Bowlers: 5
Games: 384
Wins: 59
Losses: 69
Expenses: $1,536
Frames: 3,840
Pins: 57,313
Strikes: 1,097
Spares: 1,215
Open Frames: 1,626
Regrets: 2,232
Cherished Memories: 0

So long, Bernaski

2010-04-27T09:05:00.006-06:00

Because we wanted absolutely no distractions, such as driving, on the last night of Bernaski bowling, we were dropped off at the lanes. This had nothing to do with the desire to down way too many pitchers of sweet golden bowling juice. This is not the first time we have attempted this trick. We rolled against the Fatties, who have dominated us all season, but last night belonged to Los Movemientos. We absolutely destroyed them. Sorry, Fatties, but it's the truth. Let our 4-0 performance haunt you all summer because when Bernaski fires up again in the Fall, odds makers are saying that the Movements are easy favorites.

Here are some brief highlights. I finished the season with another 500 series, a 516 to be precise. As far as the USBC is concerned, I have a 164 book average. I took down my first nine single pin chances. All I needed was one more to set a new record and go 10 for 10, but I missed a 3 pin by a hair. The team averaged over a 150 despite knocking back about six pitchers of bowling juice during competition. Johnebob finished the season with a nice 467 series. The Rookie, who is a rookie no more, led the team with 14 spares, and impressively converted 51.9% of his leaves. Our cleanup man contributed 11 strikes on the night. He finished the season with a 154 average, twelve pins better than last year.

It was a good night. It started when Nathan of Little Caesars showed up with pizza for the whole league, like eight or ten pies. Thanks Nathan and Little Caesars! The last night of league is a position round. We had a one game lead over the last place team, Overrated. We bowled against the Fatties, who had a four game lead over us. Overrated had a bye and could have easily put us into last place. Instead, they decided to gulp rum all night. I'm fairly certain they didn't win a single game. The funny thing was that they won the first half of league, so after getting totally sloshed, they had to bowl the championship game against Laramie Lanes Lounge. Needless to say, it was not an inspiring performance.

We made fun of the Briefcase as we made our way to the Lounge because the Lazers had no part in the championship this year. It was an off year for the dominators of Bernaski as well. We put down a few more pitchers of juice as the stools were put on tables and the carpets were vacuumed. We just about closed down the lanes. It was a good night, the kind you remember the next morning when you body just feels off.

Next week, we collect our winnings and magnets. We finished the season 10 games under .500 at 59-69, five fewer wins than last year, but it was a good year.

Maturation

2010-04-20T07:50:00.006-06:00

Yesterday was the 3rd anniversary of the birth of the first son of our anchorman JD. Accordingly, prior to bowling we convened at his house to eat some fried trout, knock back a few cold ones, and celebrate the start of Luciano's fourth year. Coincidentally, it was also the birthday of Megan Bilotte, the wife of the captain of Team Pizza Pizza, so Nathan missed Bernaski last night. Two weeks ago the Gingman, aka "The Rookie," made the mistake of taking his significant other out for drinks prior to bowling on the occasion of her birthday, after which he formed his own club, by shooting an 80.

Can you keep all of this straight? Well, these plot lines are strangely tied and a skilled writer could make them converge for some exciting conclusion, but I have no idea how to do that. In short, the veteran Movements probably had a couple too many beers prior to bowling because we were celebrating a birthday (a rookie mistake). Simultaneously, the Rookie matured as a bowler, atoning for his past sins by rolling the first 500 series ever bowled by a BM rook.

So, congrats to Luca, Megan, and Ging for having special days. As for the competition, we took the 1st game and lost the next three. We didn't bowl badly. I consider anytime we crest 1800 pins scratch a decent night, but the Wolfpack bowled even better.

On a personal note, in the 9th frame of Game 3, I lost the ball on the back swing and it dropped it behind me with a huge thud. That new trick may have cost me my fiver, but given the concentration of ethanol coursing through my veins, I was happy to average over 160. With last night's 1-3 performance, the chance of reaching the .500 mark for the 2nd half has all but evaporated. One more week to go!

Chapter 4: The Avocational Hooker

2010-04-18T22:52:00.016-06:00

[continued from Chapter 3]

With the start of Season 3, I had no more excuses. My injuries had been professionally mended with two titanium screws inhabiting the bones of each knee. As soon as NASA read that I had become more machine than man on my astronaut application, they tossed it directly into the trash. My only choice was to return to bowling.

The third year of Bernaksi began with two changes. First, we were scheduled to bowl the entire year instead of just the 2nd half. Second, we added a new four man to the lineup, Gee-Off the Canadian. Another major change had yet to come... the tracking of bowling stats and thus the evolution of the BM Report. That will come in the next chapter. In this one, I want to focus on the process of learning to throw a hook.

At some point in the prior year, both John and Joe started hooking the ball. My recollection is that they would occasionally bowl during lunch breaks in Cheyenne. On one of these trips, they witnessed someone throwing a hook with their thumb removed from the ball. By aping this technique over several weeks and months, they became somewhat proficient at it.

By contrast, I was left behind. I was the only guy of the original three Movements who was still chucking straight. With the addition of the Canadian, I noticed in comparing the two of us that there wasn't much of a difference between a two year veteran and a rookie. At one point, the guy with free health care told me, "My goal for the year is to end with a higher average than you." At the time he said it, it seemed doable. But in general principle, I would not recommend saying such things to me because I use them for motivation, serious motivation.

The first step in putting the Canuck back in his place as the lowly rookie was to learn how to throw a hook. There are a million ways learn the shot... read books, internet, take lessons, watch people, etc. I chose the last one. I had seen many people throw hook shots over the last two years, and of course I had tried it myself. When I tried to spin the ball, it would somehow move down the lane with a vertical axis of rotation. It looked like the Earth. We called this the "gyro" ball. In short, I could get the ball to spin, but I could not get it to spin in the direction needed for it to break.

I have always felt like sports have come fairly easily to me ( except for those involving skates). So, if there is a technique I want to figure out, trust me, I will spend the time to do so. After watching a number of bowlers throw hook shots, I was finally able to accomplish a shot that deviated from a straight line in the right way. The shot I was throwing was far from the "conventional technique", but it was effective. I immediately noticed that my ball was much more often in the area of the pocket.

Without getting into the fix, I will explain what I was doing wrong. In a well thrown hook shot, the hand stays behind the ball, and when it is released, the ball rotates at a 45 degree angle to the lane's axis. By contrast, I was releasing the ball with my hand on the side of the ball, and sometimes on its front. Thus its spin was either perpendicular to the lane axis or often, it even had backspin.

Still, with this one simple change, my average quickly started climbing, and I left that poor cold Canadian in the dust. With time, my hook shot was coming along nicely, and my confidence in it grew. Still, if you are going to attempt to learn this on your own, I will strongly recommend that you seek advice from someone who knows what they are doing. Approximately 8 months after I started throwing the hook, our "pro shop" guy Adam saw me bowling and mercifully gave me a lesson on how to do it correctly. It has probably taken me a year to kill all of those bad habits.

Some might say that a hooker is a hooker. I say no. If you want to master your hooking skills, you need to learn the conventional way to do it very early on. Otherwise, you can waste a lot of time trying to "unlearn" those deeply ingrained muscle movements. By whatever pathway you get there, you will find that it is a huge relief to join the ranks of hookers. It feels like a major step up in your bowling social life.

Suck it Will Shortz

2010-04-18T19:15:00.015-06:00

On Thursday, I posed to the tiny bowling world which peruses this blog a problem that I thought might lie dormant for some time. Yet, upon returning from slaying some rainbow trout this afternoon at North Crow Reservoir, I found an email awaiting me from Garrett Boni of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Garrett has proven to me that he also deserves the title of "Puzzle Master," which prior to this moment had been reserved for Will Shortz.

The problem I posed concerned the 3-9 "sleeper" leave. In essence, I asked what is the margin of error in picking up this shot if you attempt to collect the spare by driving the front pin into the back. I set it up as a problem in geometry. According to Mr. Boni, he was able to complete the solution in about 1 and 1/2 hours. Up to this point, I had not attempted a solution myself. Thanks to Garrett, I found myself in the position of having to do trigonometry on a Sunday afternoon, a misdemeanor in Wyoming. Here is Garrett's work:
Garrett used an elegant geometric solution; click on that image above if you are interested in the details. In short, he found that you could miss the center of the pin by up to 0.5496 inches to the right and still pick up the spare. In theory, you could also miss by that amount to the left. So, according to his calculation to pick up the 3-9 by driving the front pin into the back, you have to place the ball within an area approximately 1.1" in width.

I should note that if one measures the margin of error perpendicular to the long axis of the lane, it is reduced to 0.546", a difference of less than 1%. So Garrett, congratulations. In addition to having earned the much coveted title "Puzzle Master", you have also won a free subscription to the BM Report.

[And congrats to HCLC Doc, who arrived at the same solution independently.]

UPDATE: Upon further review, I wonder if we are missing part of the solution here. I think we have solved for how much margin of error there is in striking the pin, but this is not necessarily the same thing as the margin of error for the shot. In other words, I think it is possible to still pick up the spare if the center of the ball misses the center of the pin by more than 0.6". The factor left out of these solutions is the curvature of the ball.

Bowling Puzzler XIII: The Sleeper Cell

2010-04-15T07:00:00.003-06:00

As the season is winding down, I am going to start winding down the blog as well. During the off season, I don't post with much urgency. During May, June, and July of last year, for example, I only had three posts. The summer is so short up here that it cannot be wasted away on a laptop. So, I am going to make Puzzler No. 13 the last one of the season. I will bring it back in full force in the fall. For the grand finale, I thought I would put forth a real ball buster. In fact, I have yet to solve this problem myself. If anybody out there wants to give it a go, I welcome the attempt. If the answer is too onerous to post as a comment, send it to me as an attachment to an email using the address listed above and to the right. I'll post all serious attempts to solve the problem. If nobody can solve it, I'll figure out the answer in due time. Ok, here's the problem.

The 3-9 spare leave is one of those non-split leaves that behaves like a split in that it is very difficult to pick up. The 3 pin stands directly in front of the 9, with the latter usually referred to as a "sleeper" pin. Two other leaves have identical morphology, the 1-5 and and 2-8. There are two ways sleeper leaves can be picked up. One method is bring the ball into the front pin at an angle, striking it obliquely. If the ball has enough momentum and/or spin, the ball will also strike the sleeper pin. In this type of shot, the ball takes out both pins. The other way to complete this spare is to strike the center of the front pin, so that the sleeper pin is taken out by the deflected front pin. This puzzler concerns the second approach.

If you have ever missed one of these shot attempts, you know that there is very little margin for error. It seems as if the front pin must be struck dead center in order for it to take out the back pin. So, let's start with a couple of facts and a few assumptions:

Fact 1) At its widest point, a bowling pin has a diameter of 4.766".
Fact 2) The center of the 3 pin stands 20.7846" from the center of the 9 pin.

Assumption 1) When a bowling ball strikes a pin, it strikes it at its widest point
Assumption 2) When a bowling ball strikes a pin, the pin is deflected in the direction perpendicular to the tangent of the pin edge at the point at which it was struck.
Assumption 3) When a bowling pin is deflected, it does not rotate but remains standing vertically.

With these assumptions, what is the margin of error for collecting the 3-9 spare leave measured in terms of inches perpendicular to the long axis of the lane?

Here is the essence of the question. We can agree that if you hit the front pin directly on its center, it will take out the back pin. We will probably also agree that if you miss the center of the pin by a millimeter to the left or right, you will still get the spare. What if you miss by an inch? I'm not sure. So, I am asking what is the total width of the portion of the front pin that can be hit by the ball so that it still will take out the sleeper.

I told you it was a ball buster. Have a great summer!

Here's a link to the solution.

Xericity

2010-04-13T07:48:00.009-06:00

Things were not looking up for the Movements. With three weeks to go, we were sitting 12 games below .500 in sole possession of last place. For the sixth time this year, we faced the Lazers. Yet, by some twist of fate, we shut them out and took all four. I think I'll chalk this one up to climate change.

The inconvenient truth was that the lanes were on the dry side. How dry were they? When we arrived, a horned viper was slithering across Lane 14. After the 2nd frame, a sand storm delayed play for ten minutes. In Game 3, I thought I could see oases with belly dancers at the end of the lanes. If you stepped up to bowl without an ample supply of water, there was a good chance you would not make it back. On my first practice ball, I lost it to the right, it neared the gutter, and then broke all the way across the lane beyond the Brooklyn pocket. I'm telling you, it was Taklamakan dry.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that bad conditions favor bad bowlers. The Lazers had a rough night, especially the Kid Wonder. By Game 3, Cody was so dejected that I actually felt bad for him, not so bad that I stopped talking smack, but almost that bad. I have watched him bowl at least two perfect games this year, yet in Game 3, he did not crack 140. I'm certain he'll be back again to kick ass next week. So, we had a bit of good fortune in that that Lazers had an off night, but the Movements actually had a decent night.

Everybody was having a hard time finding the pocket, so we only had 30 strikes on the night as a team. On the flip side, this gave us many chances to pick up spares, and we took advantage of them. In fact, we set new team records for spares with 49 and pickup% with a 53.3% effort. Everybody was over 50% on the night except Johnebob who missed the halfway mark by one (11 for 24).

The Rookie had a very nice night with a 465 series, and I continue to be a follower of the HCLC Doc method because I don't think I've dropped below 500 in Bernaksi since I started using it. Last night was no exception. Two more weeks to go.

Bowling Puzzler XII: The Half Perfect Woman

2010-04-08T07:00:00.004-06:00

The lovely lady in the poster to the left may have gone straight to DVD, but that is not her only alluring quality. When she goes bowling, she has a perfect game exactly 50% of the time. That's right, every time she begins a game, she has a 50% chance of rolling 12 strikes in a row. Given this amazing body of bowling work, what can we infer about her strike percentage? Specifically, I would like to know:

On average, what percentage of frames does she strike?

Mad Max IV: Welcome to the Palin-Drome

2010-04-06T23:01:00.019-06:00

So, on Monday night, I look over a couple of lanes, and I see Nathan of Little Caesars kickin' it in a pi shirt. Yeah, I'm talking about 3.14159. From a distance, it was the Greek lowercase pi, so I called him out because it's just not the kind of thing I expect to see floating around Bernaski. Not only does he appreciate the dorky recognition, but he points out that the pi on his tee is built from nearly 5,000 digits of that irrational number in like 4 pt font. Furthermore, he directs me straight to the source, where I waste too much of the day browsing all kinds of stuff I don't need but desperately want.

I wonder if Nathan feels the same way I do about US Bowler magazine, which can pretty much be summarized as "WTF?" So, where was I? Well, I was born with a bizarre affliction, the kind where you can spend hours contemplating not only why the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of every damn circle in the universe is the same number, but also why it is equal to 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230... etc, or how there can be no end to that chain of integers following the decimal. For some people, that proves the existence of God. For others, it is not worth a nanosecond of thought. For others still, it puts you in awe of nature and makes you question whether pi has the same value in every universe.

So by this point, you have either stopped reading or started asking yourself where is this dude going with this Wednesday rant? Well, if you don't give a shit about issues of pi (if you are thinking apple vs. rhubarb, it is definitely time to change the channel anyway), change the channel. For quant types, patterns and numbers are just interesting beasts. For example, last time we bowled against Caesars, Nathan and Clark bowled identical games for something like five straight frames. I told Nathan that I would give him $1 million if they did it all the way to the end. All they had to do was chuck ten straight in the gutter each to call my bluff (and lose to the Movements). I could tell Nathan was engaged by the problem as I have been before, but it was obviously a fool's bet.

Numbers people are just fascinated by such patterns and symmetry. I don't know why. Also, people like me, animals who like math, enjoy unusual aspects of language. We are not the most skilled writers in the classical sense but we like grammar (did you catch that?). We tend to be exceptoinal spellers (that one?). Also, we will attest to loving little letter patterns on tattooed cattle eating cluttered lettuce (if you don't get that, you definitely don't have the curse). Thus, my interest in palindromes. Here are a few of my favorites:

He lived as a devil, eh?
Race car
Able was I ere I saw Elba
A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!

So, for the past six months or so, I have had bowling palindromes on my mind. If you have ever tried to create a palindrome, you know it is not easy once you get beyond the "wow, mom, wow" stage. If you don't know what a palindrome is by this point, I have no idea how you got this far into this post. Bowling has a fairly limited lexicon, and for the most part, when you put those words in a mirror, not much comes out. Similarly, I have been obsessed with bowling scores. Ok, maybe there's no relation, but when you're in my line of work, you are paid to try to find connections among all things.

So, I started wondering if a Bowl Movement had ever bowled a palindromic game. Consider this. In any game of bowling, you have 21 scoring opportunities. That means that in frames 1 through 9, you will roll up to two balls and in frame 10, up to three. It is theoretically possible to have the same game forward and backwards. The geometric center of a game is the first ball in the sixth frame. There are many theoretical games that could be symmetrical about that frame. Here is a hypothetical example:

Read that game from start to finish or finish to start, and it's the same thing. I have no idea how many palindrome games are possible in bowling. If I spent about eight hours on the problem, I could be the first person in the history of the world to answer that question, but I'll leave that to some kid who needs to write an MA thesis in math (or maybe the most difficult bowling puzzler ever). Instead, I just wanted to know if a Bowl Movement had ever pulled off the feat.

I wrote a little program to check the 612 games on record, and the short answer is no. The closest thing we have ever had to a palindrome game was bowled by Johnebob less than two weeks ago, when he had his high game, a 230. In that game, 15 of 21 scoring opportunities were symmetrical (those shown in yellow):

So, if you have read this far, you might be waiting for the grand philosophical conclusion, but there is none. I am impressed if you have pulled off the feat without skipping to the end. In short, my guess that is that a palindrome game is bowled about once in every 2,800 tries. As such, I propose that the USBC add it to their special achievement patches if and when they reinstate them. After all, it has "Palin" in it. Bowlers seem to like anything with those five letters in that sequence.

The Opposite of Walker Texas Ranger

2010-04-06T08:01:00.010-06:00

Back when my wife and I were poor graduate students in Tucson, we used an artifact of television reception known as "rabbit ears". Accordingly, we had only one channel, KOLD CBS 13. If you ever find yourself in this situation, and you are a TV watcher, you might become intimately familiar with programs that normally you would not touch with a ten foot pole. Here is a small sample of the shows with which we (shamefully) became very familiar: Touched By an Angel, Judging Amy, Diagnosis Murder, Yes Dear, Early Edition, Relic Hunter, and Walker Texas Ranger.

An episode of Walker goes like this. The show starts with the most awesome theme song in the world, sung by Chuck Norris himself. In the beginning, somebody wrongs Walker, Walker's girlfriend, one of Walker's acquaintances, or maybe they just commit some heinous Texas crime. Then Walker and his trusty sidekick, Trivette, do some investigation, and very likely some minor ass kicking. The episode culminates with Walker beating the crap out of the bad guy (major ass kicking) and locking him up. Here is a 40 second taste:

So, what's the point? Well, this is the inverse of what happened to us last night. We came out and dominated the first game. Then, Laramie Lanes Lounge came back for some major ass kicking. In the end, we only managed to take one of four. There are two ways to see this. Either, it was the opposite of a Walker episode, or we were the bad guys, and the Loungers were Walker and Trivette. That might make sense, except that in paying the WTSBMBC wager I was clearly a Texas Ranger:

And congrats on an opening day win! The Rox pulled out the victory yesterday as well.

So, aside from getting the Walker beatdown, the other big news of the night involved the Rookie. He made the thoughtless mistake of taking his lady friend out for dinner on her birthday, getting a few drinks in him, and then abandoning her for Bernaski. Showing up to bowling half in the tank is never a good idea, and he paid dearly for it (probably also when he got home). Back in January, I calculated that there was approximately an 80% chance that he would either join the Fightin' 88's, a club reserved for those who tie the lowest BM game score ever, or create his own club. Last night, he did the latter by shooting an 80 in the Game 2. Ouch. To add insult to injury to beatdown, this was the first BM game on record lacking a mark. Here it is:

In other news, I had a nice night. Using the HDZT (HCLC Doc Zen Technique), I bowled a solid 548 series with a high game of 218 and a low of 164. There is something magical about that method. The rest of the Movements were well below average, but it ain't no big thang. It's just bowling, right? And when you're in Texas, look behind you...

Three Personal Goals for the End of the Season

2010-04-04T22:37:00.009-06:00

Somewhere among the oaks of north central Texas, lives a man who goes by various names. Some call him Mick. Others call him Doc. He can often be recognized by the tag worn on his lapel, which reads, "Hello my name is HCLC Doc". He is the yoda, gandhi, and oracle of bowling wisdom. From others, I have received a fair amount of advice concerning positioning, feet, marks, aiming, follow through, angles, equipment, etc. But this Texan, whom I have never met, has given me what has been the most useful tip I have ever received. The Shaolin Master of bowling said unto me, "Just make your next shot a good one."

The statement is so simple that it almost seems stupid, but when one engages in battle with that string of words in a meditative state, you find that it will embrace you like a benevolent maternal anaconda. The meaning I have taken out of this utterance is this: Forget about everything. Forget about the shitty shot you just threw. Forget about the last game. Don't worry about whether you are going to get a 250 game. Don't worry if you have an 800 series in sight. Worry about nothing except making my next shot a good one. The rule applies equally to ten pins standing firm, to a solitary five pin, or to an 8-10 split. Armed with this mental dagger, I am now ready to finish the season with three goals in mind:

1) Make the next shot a good one. Words are meaningless if they are not practiced. My first goal is to free myself from the mind games that have plagued me, and the simplest way to do so is to just focus on making a good shot.

2) More strikes than opens- If I can tackle the mental aspect of the game, accomplishment should follow. The entire season, I have bowled roughly equivalent numbers of strikes, spares, and open frames. After 78 games, I have 272 strikes, 260 spares, and 273 open frames. For the majority of the season, I have bowled with more X's than -'s, but over the last few weeks, I have been flirting with equity. I currently stand with one more open frame than strike with only four weeks to go.

3)A 600 series. I have shot twice in the 590's, but I have yet to reach the promised land.

Now, before I am called out for contradicting myself, let me clarify. I am going to do my best to put on blinders to all other distractions. I fully intend to focus on making a good shot. I am not going to worry about the 600 series. I know that if I can simply achieve the first goal, the others will easily follow.

Bondage and Bowling, or Tit for Split Reciprocity?

2010-04-04T09:48:00.016-06:00

A few days ago, when I wrote the most inappropriate post ever, I had various inspirations, although I am not sure what exactly was my intent. Perhaps, as I commented to one commenter, it was a warning shot. As much as I know it would be unwise to speak of the unspeakables, after a recent news event, I decided it was time to write about bowling, sex, and politics. As Kafka says, if you want to maximize your audience, it would serve you well not to voice opinions on matters of controversy or importance, but as I have said, this is my greatest flaw. So, off we go...

Last week, Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee were in the news for using party funds to reimburse members for $2,000 spent at a bondage-themed topless nightclub in Los Angeles. What people do for fun and how they spend their money is absolutely none of my business, so I am not going to pass judgment whatsoever on GOP party workers who enjoy being entertained by half naked lesbians in black leather. After all, I like bowling by myself in the middle of the day. Who am I to judge? The humor in the story, however, is that those individuals who patronized said club felt that a reimbursement was in order. This was a "business expense" that should be covered by donors to the Republican Party.

I feel sorry for anyone who does the bookkeeping for a large organization. I am sure there are fraudulent reimbursement schemes that happen all the time, and I do not think this behavior is indicative of Republicans as a whole. Still, when mud is slung by one side, you know that there will be return fire of mud.

How did the Republicans respond? Well according to CBS news, "The RNC has responded to the latest reports by distributing a list of Democratic National Committee expenditures, such as paying one catering company at least $297,708 over the past 15 months and spending at least $13,316 at the Washington, D.C. Lucky Strike bowling alley in January of 2009." As Fox News reports, The DNC rented out the lanes for a party for Howard Dean when he vacated his position as party chairman.

Now, as humorous as this "tit for tat" or "tits for splits" finger pointing is, I find it slightly amusing that the leasing of a bowling alley for a party is viewed somehow as equivalent to going to homoerotic bondage nightclubs. Like I said, I like to bowl by myself in the middle of the day. Hope I don't go blind.

Chapter 3: The Lost Year

2010-04-04T06:00:00.006-06:00

[continued from Chapter 2]

Bowling had started again, and the Green Lady was primed for action. In our second season, we had lost our fourth team member. Z finished up is MA at the university and headed to Albuquerque to start his adult life. Likewise, our sub Jimmy Jazz went back to Tucson to finish up his PhD. We were left high and dry, and that year we had a rotating group of fourths; most consistently Woody took the spot. To compound the problem, I missed something like six weeks of bowling due to injury.

I am often an early arriver to the office. I like to get there by 8 AM if not 7:30. Where I work, there aren't many people around at that time except for janitors. One of them, like most janitors, is a really friendly, easy going, and talkative guy. During one of our conversations, he brought up his basketball team and how they needed another player. I grew up playing ball but had not done so in years. Here I saw the opportunity to play competitively at the rec center against other folks my age. It sounded like fun. I told my friend I'd be there that night.

Around six o'clock on a cold Wyoming December or January night, I showed up to the Laramie Recreation Center. It is only about 10 years old, and it is a marvelous facility. It has something like four full basketball courts, swimming pools, weight rooms, cardio fitness machines, a track, etc. In my opinion, it is an awesome expenditure of public tax revenues. Our team, named something like "Bernie's Mexican Restaurant", was facing a bunch of young and energetic early 20-somethings who all seemed like they were 6' 2". On the first possession, the ball was passed to me around the right side of the free throw line. I was unguarded. I took two dribbles, pulled up for a 12 foot jumper, and it went cleanly through the rim.

It was a minor victory, the kind I had not experienced in a long time. "I can still play," I thought. What I didn't realize was that my amazing basketball comeback would only last six minutes. About five possessions later, I went up for a rebound among the trees under the rim and came down with the ball. Going straight back up would have meant certain rejection. So, I jumped under the rim with an outstretched right arm, trying to pull off the old up and under move. I never saw where the ball went because when I came down on my right foot, I felt my knee bend the wrong way, or as the orthopedic folks say, it was "hyper-extended".

If you have ever ruptured a ligament in your knee, you know what a strange feeling it is. For one, you can feel it pop, like a rubber band breaking. If there is not a lot of other noise, you can even hear it go. Given the feeling and the sound, you would think it would be painful, but the pain is not severe. It is just uncomfortable. After about 30 seconds, I got up and tried to keep playing. The knee felt like jelly. It felt like it wanted to dislocate, like the femur was trying to twist on the tibia.

If you ever find yourself in an argument with someone who is a proponent of intelligent design, simply point out the "design" of the human knee, which if designed is an excellent example of "retarded design" (sorry, Sarah). The two distal condyles of the femur simply sit on top of the proximal condyles of the tibia with little articulation. The two bones are held together with a bunch of ligaments. It would sort of be like attaching the ends of two 2x4's with rubber bands. Contrast it to the much more dependable joints in your hips or elbows, and you will quickly realize that evolution has done its best with the raw materials with which it had to work. You must remember that our species has only been upright for about 4 or 5 million years.

I limped out of the Laramie Rec Center knowing I had just ruptured my anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL. The cold harsh wind was blowing snow into my face, and I hated life. A few years back, I had blown out the same ligament in my left knee, and the road to recovery after surgery is slow and painful. I knew that this injury would shorten my bowling season.

I managed to bowl with a braced knee in the three or four weeks leading up to surgery. Thankfully, it was my right knee. I think the left would have been much more problematic since being a righty, I plant and twist on the left. My surgery happened in February, and it put me out of commission for a while. I do remember returning to bowling well before I had the green light from my doctor and physical therapist. The guys needed me. There were nights when they were struggling to even find a 3rd man to make our team legal.

In our second season, John and Joe made huge strides. John increased his average 12 pins from a 128 to a 140. Joe added 20 pins, a 118 to a 138. By contrast, my averaged dropped seven from a 135 to a 128. I had gone from the best Movement to the worst in one season. Sure, I can blame the knee, or the awkward start to my relationship with the Green Lady, but I don't want to make excuses. In Year 2, I just plain stunk. But you know, on a trampoline, before you go up, you gotta go down. Maybe I needed this dip to get a big bounce because the next year, in the 08-09 season, things were looking up.

[Continued in chapter 4]

Bowling Puzzler XI: Equilaterality

2010-04-02T09:40:00.003-06:00

I normally reserve these posts for Thursdays, but yesterday's puzzler was a total bust. Maybe it was too difficult. Maybe folks are losing interest. Anyway, this one is a bit more tractable. At first glance, it seems pretty simple, but once you think you have it solved, spend a bit more time with it to make sure you have it down. So, here it is:

By some strange coincidence, in ten pin bowling, ten pins are used. Those ten pins are arranged in the form of an equilateral triangle, a triangle with three equal angles (60 degrees each) and sides of equal length. Each row of pins is comprised of one more pin than the previous row, beginning with one and ending with four. The 1,7, and 10 pins form the corners of the triangle, but within that largest triangle, other triangles can be formed. The question is:

How many total equilateral triangles occur within the pin deck in ten pin bowling? To qualify, the entire triangle must fit with the ten pins and each corner of the triangle must be marked by a pin.

Click on the icon to the right for the answer

The Back 5 in Bowling

2010-04-02T07:09:00.015-06:00

There's a common saying in golf, "There's always the Back 9." It is whipped out to make your buddy feel better about his awful performance on the first nine holes. Starting on the 10th tee, he has a chance to redeem the round.

The same concept applies to bowling with a couple of differences. A game of bowling last about 20 minutes. A round of golf is about four hours long. There are 10 frames in bowling versus 18 holes in golf. In bowling, the two halves of the game are not entirely independent because you may still be completing your Front five frames as you roll your first ball in the 7th. Still, the point is that even when you have an absolutely disastrous Front five in bowling, the game is far from over.

A couple of weeks ago, our sub K-Terk suggested that I look at the greatest comeback games in Bowl Movement history. Seeing as how were are in the midst of an attempt to make a massive comeback to reach a .500 record, it seemed like an apt thing to do. Keeping in mind that as many as 30 pins can be added to frames 4 and 5 while bowling in frames 6 and 7, the maximum number of pins that can be attained in the Front 5 is 120. In the Back 5, you can get as many as 180.

Here are some of the greatest comeback games of all time by bowler:

The choice of a game for John was easy. It happened last week, and it represents his personal best. He started the game with a gutter ball followed by a six. He marked every frame afterward to end with 230. He recorded 138 pins on the Back 5 vs. 92 on the Front.

My best comeback game occurred almost one year ago on April 13th of 2009. In that game, I opened up on three frames in the Front 5 and was sitting on a strike and a score of 56 as I turned the corner. I started the Back with four strikes to complete a five-bagger and end with a 203. That game was in fact my first 200 game in league, and what a comeback was required to get it.

For the Ging Man, I went back to December 14, 2009. The Rook had opened his first three frames, but finished the Front with a spare-strike combo to sit on a 55 as he turned the corner. In the Back 5, he stayed clean and put up a beefy 129 pins to finish with a 184.

For Daniele, I had numerous games from which to choose, but I decided to select the one with the greatest differential between Front and Back scores. On November 23 of 2009, he had this strange game. He opened every frame of the Front 5 except the 2nd, which oddly was a man spare. He began the 6th with a score of only 47 pins and despite badly needing a mark, he only got nine pins including only one on his first ball. Then seemingly out of nowhere, Mr. Erratic recorded a 4-bagger in frames 7 through 10, to add 106 pins to his score. JD finished with a respectable 165 after struggling the entire game.

May the end of the 09-10 Bernaski season be as inspired as the end of these games.

Bowling Puzzler X: The Dutch 200 Game

2010-04-01T06:49:00.005-06:00

Does anybody know why paying individually on a date is called "going Dutch"? Likewise, what is the etymology of the Dutch 200 game? These are interesting puzzles in and of themselves. I'm going to send EB down that path if he is interested in continuing his work on Holschuh's Etymological Dictionary of Bowling.

Anyway, today's challenge is about the Dutch 200 game. According to last year's USBC Rulebook, a Dutch 200 Game is "A game of alternating strikes and spares with a game total of 200." If you were fortunate enough to bowl one of these last year, you would have received a patch for it. However, the special achievement awards appear to have been eliminated from the most recent rulebook.

A game of alternating strikes and spares will always result in a score of 200 because 20 pins will be garnered for each frame, and it does not matter whether the first frame is a strike or a spare. This is a very rare occurrence in bowling, and today's puzzler concerns that rarity. Let's assume that we are dealing with a very skilled bowler. So, assume this:

1. The probability of getting a strike on a given frame is 50%.
2. If that bowler does not get a strike, the probability of picking up a spare is 75%.

For a single game bowled, what is the probability of this bowler getting a Dutch 200 game? Or put another way, how many games on average would have to be bowled for one of them to be a Dutch 200 game?

[Good luck. You're gonna need it!]

Click on the icon to the right for the answer.

The most inappropriate post ever

2010-03-30T22:18:00.008-06:00

I can't recall exactly when, but at some point in my life, I learned that there are certain things that should not be discussed among "polite" company. I'm not even sure what that means. My parents did not teach me this. Where I was cultivated from seed to seedling, all subjects were fair game. It may have been in college that I learned that like Carlin's seven words, these topics are considered taboo. They shall not be mentioned except in very safe, known, and well understood circumstances. Those topics include politics, religion, and money.

I find this rule odd and difficult to live by. The strangest thing about this prohibition of speech is that these are three very important things. I think in fact that this could be the list of the most important things to many people, and as such, aren't these the things we should discuss most? If so, let's also add sex to that list.

Here on the internets, you can say whatever you like. Heck, you can do this most places if you are fortunate enough to live in a nation where you are permitted to speak your mind. Still, it is considered inappropriate to be offensive. In fact, we value etiquette over honesty. This principle could be called the "No, honey" or "Of course not" principle. Why? It is a derivation of the "Do these pants make me look fat?" query. So I have occasionally refrained from saying what I really want to say. Sometimes, I want to use a word considered so vulgar that it might turn away a possible cunty reader. That's an unusual and silly example. More often, it is because I am tempted to share my view of some current event or use is it as an analogy or metaphor, but I don't want to someone reading this to think that I am an asshole on the wrong team.

I think we all tend to gravitate toward people who are similar to us with respect to the attributes that we find important, whether consciously or not. To discover that somebody is not who you thought they were politically, religiously, financially, or sexually can be quite a shock. For example, if I discovered that I had been hanging out with a closeted white supremacist, it would totally freak me out, especially if it was somebody who I admired prior to discovering it.

Here is what brings this to mind. On the internets, I think you can easily and unintentionally associate with folks who in real life you would not, except maybe in coerced contexts, such as at a place of employment. In this particular forum, I assume this is happening all the time because what unites us is not one of the taboo topics but instead bowling.

I have always been a political animal. My brother is a politician. My dad ran for office. My mother worked in the United States Congress for nearly 30 years. Politics are in my blood. They are important to me. Yet, I feel like I cannot openly express my feelings here because this forum is reserved for bowling. I feel like if I were to make it known that I am a hardcore right wing gun and god loving patriot or a pinko liberal save the earth and help the poor tree hugger that I would lose some people who seem to enjoy reading what I write about bowling.

In truth, I am neither of those things, but I am much closer to one of them. If you were to go back and read everything I have written on the BM Report, it would be obvious to which party I tend to subscribe. Does it really matter? I hope not. I like to think that I am capable of not being a bigot when it comes to political opinions. If there is one kind of bigotry that we have always considered to be appropriate in this fine land, it is the demonization of those who fall on the other side of the aisle.

It is interesting when people pop onto your blog from out there in the world. You have no idea who they are or how they found you. More than a year ago, I gained my first stranger follower. He could only stand to read my nonsense for about one month. Then I wrote this little ditty, and he vanished as quickly as he appeared. I had breached one of the unbreachable subjects. Oh well. I will probably continue to play by the rules of etiquette and avoid those danger areas. I guess I'll keep it to myself that I am also a filthy rich gay polygamist fascist scientologist who likes to bowl.

BM Report #3920492814920

2010-03-30T11:17:00.007-06:00

It is nearly April, and my focus is shifting. It is very suddenly hard to find the motivation to write about bowling. Even the Briefcase seemed a little weary of the league last night. I think we are all ready to hang up the bowling bags for the summer.

Here's a very short synopsis of last night's competition. We bowled unopposed. This is the first time we have done so since the first week of the season. We managed to win three. We choked in Game 3, but what the heck, we picked up a few more wins and a little more cash for hookers and drugs.

The highlight of the night had to be Johnebob's 2nd game. He got a new personal best with a 230 game. Strangely, he did so despite starting the game with a gutter ball - six frame. So, it is preserved for internetual perpetuity, here it is:

Only four more weeks to go. I gotta dig deep. The quest to reach .500 is still intact, but it won't be easy. We are now eight games under at 20-28. With four weeks remaining, we need to average three wins a week to get there. There's a little motivation to keep rolling my balls.

And I have to give EB credit for the pic. Different pic but same genre and mood.

Chapter 2: Who's that lady?

2010-03-28T06:00:00.012-06:00

[Continued from Chapter 1]

When I say I have been bowling for four years, it is a half truth. You see, when the Bowl Movements were formed, we entered Bernaski in the 2nd half of the 06-07 season. According to the almighty and infallible archives of the United States Bowling Congress (Bowler ID #2609-911), I only bowled 39 games that season.

As the Fall of 2007 rolled around, we were solicited by the league secretary to bowl the full year, but Joe and John opted to again only bowl the 2nd half. The reason? Bowling on Monday nights interfered with another important activity- watching Monday Night Football. Although my interest in the NFL took a hit a long time ago, I didn't really mind. So, in the 07-08 season, we bowled just half a league, so our first two "years" of bowling really just counted for one.

By the start of my second attempt at league bowling, I felt like I was getting a feel for the environment. I knew a lot of the other bowler's names, although I am fairly certain that nobody on another team knew mine. Having figured out the basic rules of operation of the system, it was time to step things up a notch. It was time to buy my own ball.

Our anchor, Daniele, was using a hand me down 14 lbs Qubica house ball, which he had somehow acquired via genetic connections. I think his uncle had once owned an alley. The "Bica" was not custom drilled for him, but he still had the air of a bowler who brings his own equipment to the lanes rather than searching the racks for three minutes for a suitable "housey". Johnebob went for a 14 lbs Brunswick Axis, which he found for peanuts on eBay, and had drilled at the Lanes of Laramie to perfectly snug his digits.

I had no idea what to look for in a ball. I just wanted to lose the stigma of the jedi who has to borrow a lightsaber before dueling Darth Pinnius. Ok, that was a really dorky thing to write, but you know what I mean. When you are the only dude going for a house ball at the start of league, it's kind of like being picked last in a game of dodgeball. It was definitely time to acquire my own weapon, but what kind? My train of thought on the matter was something like this, "I am one of the worst bowlers in league. A ball really won't change that much, but with time, I'd like to start throwing a hook. I know that some balls hook more than others, but I really don't understand why. I should get a cheap ball... maybe like one step above cheap." By this process, I settled on the Columbia-300 Scout Reactive.

Before buying this ball, I had made the switch from the 11 lbs pink house ball to a 12 lbs green housey, which reminds me of what I used to say about my first bowling love, "I like my bowling balls as I like my women- pink and fast." If you are going to use a pink house ball, you need a joke like this. So anyway, I ordered a green and silver Scout Reactive at a weight of 13 lbs. It was and remains a truly beautiful object. I named her with the first phrase that came to mind, "The Green Lady". I was very excited to drill the Green Lady, or to have her drilled. That sounds a bit voyeuristic, doesn't it?

When I entered the "pro shop" at Laramie Lanes for the first time, I again felt like a stranger in a strange land. First, who knew there was an upstairs to the place? I certainly didn't. The "pro shop" is probably about 120 square feet in area, but seems more like a closet with balls and bags strewn around everywhere. A drill press occupies the position of honor, like Athena in the Parthenon. After being carefully measured and watching the Green Lady getting drilled by some strange bowling alley guy, I started to appreciate for the first time that there was a lot more to bowling than I had realized. I was impressed not only by the process of hand measurement but also by how the holes were placed onto the ball relative to the core, methods of drilling angles, finger diameter measurements, and how hole spacing related to hand morphology . This was a big thing for me. I understood that I was unskilled at rolling bowling balls, but for the first time I truly recognized how little I actually knew about the game.

A new bowling ball can be a cruel mistress, especially when she is your first. You have high expectations, but for some reason, the first time is always awkward. Why should we expect otherwise? Neither of us really have any experience together. Still, you have waited a long time for this moment. You really want it to be great, but my first time with the Green Lady was absolutely terrible.

The problem was the grip. Sure, she fit my hand like a glove, but I was used to wearing mittens. Here's what I mean. When she was getting drilled, Shell asked me, "Do you want to throw a hook?"

I said, "I don't at the moment, but eventually I would like to learn how."

"How does a fingertip grip sound?"

"Great, I think."

So, for 35 years or so, I had been bowling by inserting my fingers deep into those holes, two knuckles deep. In fact, my fingers had always served as guides for the ball on the release, like the inverse of bullets traversing the barrel of three rifles. This fingertip grip did not feel right. Thinking back on it, it felt wrong, just plain wrong. Sure, I arrived to the lanes with a brand new, hyper-glossy, beautiful bowling ball, in a new bag. I would no longer slum around in the land of racked house balls before league. Yet, no matter how turbo charged the Green Lady looked, I could not throw her to save my life. Sadly, that was just the start of the disaster that I know as "The Lost Year".

[continued in Chapter 3]

The Fresh Shot

2010-03-26T08:34:00.007-06:00

Occasionally, people ask me,"How much is there really to write about bowling?" I tell them there is one billion. Honestly, there are times when I feel like I am running out of things to say, but then something, like a weird pin fall, sparks a long chain of thought that extends for months. I mention this for a couple of reasons. I have posted 39 things this month. This will be #40, and this month still has plenty of residual utility. It is easily my most prolific month ever with respect to bowling words. Soon, though, I will go into hibernation. When the league ends, the blog largely sleeps, only to awake as the northern hemisphere tilts back away from the star at the center of our existence.

Anyway, I don't have much time night now, but I wanted to share a few thoughts about oil. The Bernaski Memorial League has strange oil conditions. If I understand it correctly, the lanes are oiled prior to the league before ours. Then, 12 games are played on each. Then, it's our turn. By the time we get there, the oil is pretty well broken down. Last week, many of us were having trouble keeping the ball on the right side of the lane. There were a lot of brooklyn hits and splits.

I bowled last sunday on a fresh shot in the Bud Light League. In Game 1, I had a nine strike game. I don't see this as coincidental. A really good bowler about a month about said "anybody should be able to average 230 on a fresh shot". I'm not sure what he meant by "anybody", but I think i am starting to understand the point. The fresh shot seems to be extremely forgiving, truly funneling the ball toward the pocket.

Oil conditions are something of greater relevance as one progresses in ability, and I think I am finally to the point where I am capable of determining conditions quickly and reacting to them (but not as quickly). It is my experience that some people do better with slick lanes while others like 'em dry.

I do not have a set of eight bowling balls from which I can choose to match the oil, so I have to do it by feel, position, and speed. I am not very good at it. It has been an interesting dimension to add to the game.

How does a bowler know when he or she is old?

2010-03-25T10:48:00.002-06:00

I think it was about 12 years ago when I first thought to myself, "I am getting old." Those of you who have many years on me would find it amusing to learn that I am 37 years old today. When you are an adolescent, you can't wait to grow up so you can drive, move out, legally drink bowling juice, etc. Then, at some point, you wish you could be young again. I think it's when your knees start to hurt.

Being an empirical type of guy, I needed some way to determine if I was in fact old, so I developed a simple test. Every year on or near my birthday, I shoot 100 free throws. I will know I am old when my age exceeds my free throw percentage. Because of this exercise and because I don't want to be old, my ability to shoot free throws has improved markedly. At my current rate, I probably have about 30 more years before I am an old fart.

So, thinking about my current obsession, bowling, I was wondering if I could come up with some analogous bowling test for maturity. I have decided that there are two possible measures. It must be either pickup% or single pin spare%. It cannot be strike% because I would already be old. I only strike about 33% of frames. Currently my pickup% sits around 48%. If that stays put, I will be old in eleven years. That seems a bit too soon to me, so I think I'll go with single pin%. I currently collect single pin spares at a 65.7% clip. That gives me nearly 30 years and coincides with traditional retirement age.

I apologize profusely if I have labeled anyone "old" who did not already realize their obvious status. If you are obsessed with the weather report, you should have known where you stand. I am finding the weather to be more interesting every day.

Bowling Puzzler IX: The striker's dilemma

2010-03-25T07:00:00.004-06:00

On every leap day and on the third Monday of every fifth month, there is a bizarre competition at Laramie Lanes. Two bowlers face each other in a single game. The first bowler, Brett Striker, is incapable of picking up spares. Brett either strikes a frame or leaves it open. The second bowler, Cody Picksemup, is absolutely incapable of getting a strike, but given the opportunity to convert a spare, he always does so successfully. Under these conditions...

How many strikes does Brett need to guarantee victory?

Does sandbagging regularly occur in bowling?

2010-03-24T07:00:00.013-06:00

It is my contention that current methods of USBC league handicapping actually encourage sandbagging. Furthermore, the system punishes bowlers who perform well at the start of a league, while overly rewarding those who start poorly. In short, the cost-benefit structure of USBC rules provide incentives for bowlers to cheat. Why is sandbagging cheating? It is prohibited by USBC regulations. USBC Rule 17a, Part 3 defines "Establishing an average below the player's ability to gain an unfair advantage in handicap or classified competition" as an "Unfair Tactic", which is punishable by loss of games, prize winnings, league removal, suspension, or denial of USBC membership.

Here's a really simple and kind of dumb way to look at the problem:

When someone is considering the choice of whether to cheat or not, to me it really comes down to the perceived cost of cheating. If somebody truly felt like they could be shown without a doubt to have intentionally misrepresented their bowling ability, then the potential costs might outweigh the benefits of sandbagging. In other words you would choose to compete fairly. However, in the real world, those costs are pretty much meaningless because we know that it would be next to impossible to demonstrate the act of sandbagging. It is simply too difficult to distinguish between a bad day of bowling and intentionally bowling poorly.

My point is that although there are legislated costs to sandbagging, in the real world they are meaningless. The net effect is that the only repercussion of cheating by bowling poorly to establish a high handicap is that you are in the position to make a lot of money. If you contrast that to the alternative, to bowl fairly, with honor, and by the rulebook, you will lose money to those who cheat but maybe feel good about yourself in the process.

As an issue of Game Theory (think of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind), it is actually an interesting problem. Here we have two strategies. We could call them: 1) Sandbagger and 2) Rule Follower. The Sandbagger strategy can only be successful if there are also people who follow rules. If everybody sandbagged, the advantage would be eliminated. So, naturally we would expect some mix of Sandbagging and Rule Following to occur in bowling leagues.

In that light, I have added a poll to the margin. It simply asks whether or not you have done this. It is completely anonymous, and I'm looking for honesty. I am curious how common this phenomenon is within the bowling community. Because I don't get a lot of traffic to this site, I'm going to leave it there for a few months to try to get a big sample. I have my doubts about whether any sandbaggers will actually fess up to it, but we'll see.

Finally, I think there are changes that could be made to the rulebook to reduce the incentive to sandbag. I'll save those for another day, but I don't see the solution being on the punishment side of things given the difficulty of conviction and enforcement. Rather, I think it would be better approached by addressing the benefit side of the equation.

Great Hangover Cure

2010-03-23T08:25:00.015-06:00

Somehow I am able to track 42 detailed bowling statistics for five bowlers, but I am unable to keep track of our schedule. I thought we would have a bye this week, but no, we faced the men of Prairie Rose. Before I report on last night's match, I would like to note that way back in September, I remarked on the luck of our draw at the beginning of the season. Because we drew the 10-spot, we would frequently bowl unopposed. In the end, our draw turned out to be very unlucky when one team dropped out and another was added. When we finally bowl with a bye next, week, it will only be the second time all season (I think), despite having bowled against some teams now five times.

So, we did not bowl unopposed last night. Instead, we faced the only team against whom we have had any luck this season, Prairie Rose. The men of Rose work at and presumably own the Prairie Rose Cafe. If you click here, you can read a couple of reviews of the Rose, and I think they hit the nail on the head. The first is titled "Great Hangover Cure", and reads, "The prairie rose kicks ass and has become a regular sunday morning ritual of mine thanks to their delicious greasy breakfast food, coffee cups that are always being filled, and a friendly staff.‎" I agree, although I would probably omit the word "greasy". Prairie Rose is easily the best breakfast in town. Strangely, for some reason, bowling against the Rose for us this year has also been a bowling hangover cure, but this has not always been the case.

We did not bowl particularly well. Only John bested his average, and by just ten pins. The rest of us were under average, but only slightly. I would say as a team, we were barely under average. Still, it was enough to take three of four. We did so even though we fell behind nearly 60 pins after losing the first. It has been that kind of season. It seems like it doesn't really matter what we do. Our fate always seems to be determined by the other team. The graph below demonstrates this nicely. Last night, we collected 1,753 pins as a team. This season, that performance has equated to as few as zero to as many as three wins.

So, our record now improves to 17-27 or 10 games under .500. For some reason, at the end of the season, we are always trying to reach or maintain a .500 record. We have five weeks to get there. It won't be easy. If we go 3-1 every week for the next five, we will end up 32-32. According to the schedule, which I triple-checked, we have a bye next week. Let's take advantage of it.

[I have not kept up with posting box scores because it is kind of a pain in the ass to do it the old way. Instead, I'll just post the series summary stats from the spreadsheet here. Just click on it to enlarge.]

Bowling against ourselves

2010-03-22T15:38:00.004-06:00

Last week, we bowled against team HCLC A and were humiliated. Our normal Bernaski opponents did not even show up, or they would have done the same. This week, for the first time in the 2nd half (I think), we bowl unopposed.

As I understand the league rule, in order to defeat ourselves on the lanes, we must bowl over our averages minus ten pins per bowler. If that is correct, to win a game, we need to bowl 559 scratch per game or 828 handicapped.

On Sunday, I went into the Bud Light League with the HCLC Doc's words on my mind. He said to focus on making a good shot on this shot. Don't worry about what has happened or what will happen. Focus on the now. The first time I tried this, I got a 255. That may be a coincidence, or it may not, but I think it's good advice, especially on nights like tonight when our fate rests entirely in our own hands.

Please somebody remind me to do this next September

2010-03-22T07:00:00.010-06:00

So, I woke up this morning waiting for the government bureaucrats to knock on the door and ask me how I wanted to die. It didn't happen. In fact, today was pretty much like every other day that I can remember. When I opened the front door, I sheepishly looked up expecting to see the sky crashing down on my face. Nope. The sky is still holding strong. So anyway, where was I? Oh yeah...

I bowled my best game ever yesterday, and I came home feeling like shit about it. I bowled a 255. Yes, 255. I have bowled many games that are less than one half of that score. That's two hundred and mutha fuckin' 55 pins, and I'm pissed off.

So, the Rookie calls me on Sunday morning and asks me if I want to roll a few games. This is like asking a dog if he wants to eat steak with cheese and butter on top of it. I pick him up, and we go down to the lanes. In the first game, I throw down a 232. What's gotten into me lately? I don't know. Anyway, we bowl three more. Halfway through game 4, our buddy Dooley shows up and asks if we want to bowl in the Bud Light League.

Again, the dog has been asked "Would you like to eat a sausage pizza with pepperoni, hamburger, extra cheese, and bacon?" I talk Gingy into doing it with me. It is a handicapped league. It costs $12. The handicap is 100%, so we actually had a very good chance to compete. They used our averages from the end of the year. Mine was a 165; the Rook, like a 128. Anyway, by the time this league started, the Rook and I had already polished off a pitcher of bowling juice. We were rolling with strangers in strange conditions on fresh oil, something we never do in Bernaski. If you placed in the top 3 in the Bud Light League, you got paid that day. If you placed in the top 4, you qualified for a tournament at the end of the league, like six weeks from now.

So, Game 1 starts, and I just tear up some damn pins. So does Gingy. Strike after strike after strike. I ended with nine strikes, two spares, and a score of 255. Ging finished with like a 197. I tried to explain to the people around me that I have no idea what just happened. That's my best game ever by 22 pins. They don't believe me until I follow that up with like a 147. I end the day with a 585 series. This is really good for me. In fact, it's probably my 3rd best series ever. For the record, here's the two plus double nickels:

I waited for the standings to be tallied; there were like 35-40 bowlers competing. Here's the short story. The Rookie also went off. In fact, he came in 4th with his near 200 in the first. The Rook qualified for the tourney! I missed qualifying by one stupid pin!!! Now, if I want to return to that league to try to qualify again, I have to bowl with the average I established this week. Do the math. Three games. 585 pins. Yeah, now my average is a 195! WTF? This is exactly what happened to me at the beginning of this season in Bernaski. Once again, I am being punished for bowling really well. Please somebody remind me to sandbag next time I enter a bowling league. This is fucking ridiculous. To equal my performance from this week next week, I would have to bowl a 675 series!!!! Oh well, so much for Bud Light league. It was fun for a day.

And congratulations to the Rookie! He should have had a 200 game in the 1st but choked. Still, he bowled his ass off and qualified for the tourney. At least one of us had luck on our side. And also, here's a congrats to Cody Caldwell, the Kid Wonder, who had a perfect game in the 2nd. Cody, you screwed me over, too, but great game, my friend!

From awful to one standard deviation below average in bowling. Chapter I : Triple Digits

2010-03-21T07:03:00.009-06:00

One of my readers (MaddysDaddy) has prodded me into writing an autobiography of my evolution as a bowler, and this is a first attempt. It is the journey from "awful" to "one standard deviation below average" to quote myself. In other words, I still suck at bowling, but I'm a hell of a lot better than I was. That journey is the subject of this post. I think I'll write it in three or four parts, which I will try to post on successive Sundays. We'll see what comes out.

In late 2006, our anchorman, JD, suggested we join a bowling league, so we did. We were turning the corner on our mid-30's at the time, and it seemed like a nice competitive activity for middle-aged men of leisure. The league, known as the Memorial League of Bernaski, was a scene so unfamiliar that it would take many return visits before it felt like an environment to which I belonged.

I live in a small town. We have less than 30,000 inhabitants in the whole place. It is very difficult to go to the grocery store without seeing somebody you know. Yet, at Laramie Lanes on our first league night, there were nine other lanes with four bowlers on each, and I knew none of them. This was a social group with whom I had not crossed paths. You see our fair city is organized sort of like the town in the movie Breaking Away. There are the university people (my normal cohort), and then there is the rest of the community. Here was the rest of the community, and for the first time, I was interacting with them. I am really happy to have made these new friends because they are far more interesting than a bunch of snooty PhDs sipping wine at a cocktail party. For example, when my wife decided it might be fun to go the Smash-Up Derby (not at all my normal type of activity) at the Albany County Fair Grounds, it seemed like half the bowling league was there, and I mean really there. For example, Bernaski was represented both in the drivers and in the officiating crew.

The other thing that took me off guard about bowling league was the skill level of bowlers. I had never bowled seriously nor competitively. My prior experience with the game was not that different than that of most people. I bowled quite a bit when I was a kid and very occasionally after that. Bowling seemed like a fun, if not funny, thing to do on a Friday or Saturday night once every couple of years. When I visited bowling alleys on this schedule, the bowlers I saw were like me, or even worse. They threw house balls. They threw them straight. If they broke 100, it was a good game. I had no idea how different league bowling actually was.

So back in January of 2007, I was thrust into a situation that was somewhat uncomfortable. Here was an unfamiliar crowd in an unfamiliar environment with a hell of a lot of skill at rolling bowling balls. But the time comes when you must step up to the deck, grab your ball off the rack, and start your approach to the foul line. I have no idea what I bowled in that first frame nor that first game. I wish I had the foresight to track my stats from Day 1, but I did not. I seem to recall that my scores improved every game over my first six, but that's somewhat immaterial to the tale.

In those days and in that stage, there were only a few things to figure out about bowling: 1) Who the hell are these people? 2) Why do they all seem like professional bowlers? 3) How do you know which lane you are supposed to bowl on? That's it in a nutshell.

I was using a pink 11 lbs house ball because I liked the way it fit my hand. I'd probably throw it around 22 mph. I would aim for the pocket on the Brooklyn side. I was happy with any score that was comprised of three numbers, like 108. Over the subsequent 16 weeks, I started cluing in to certain aspects of the game. For example, it takes a while to learn how to pick up certain spares. It is obvious how to attack some leaves, but others are more mysterious, like the 3-9. If you don't throw hook, then there is only one way to reliably collect that bastard, right on the nose of the 3. This knowledge is not innate. You learn it from experience. You have to see leaves over and over again before you figure out how to conquer them.

I left our first season with the best average on the team, a 135. I did that chucking an 11 lbs house ball pretty damn hard. I missed the last night of league. I am not sure where I was, but the rest of the Movements, John, Joe, and Z, discovered that we actually got money back at the end of the season. We had no idea that this would happen. When I returned, I learned that my earnings had been spent at the bar that night and had been allocated toward scotch for our next meeting of the S.A.C. (Scotch Appreciation Club).

[Continued in Chapter 2]

The Clean Game

2010-03-20T16:30:00.002-06:00

Last week, our sub K-Terk drove over the mountain from Cheyenne for his sixth attempt at league bowling. He bowls like most rookies- very poorly. Games 1 and 2 were predictable. In the 1st, he finished with a 93, achieved with nine open frames and one strike. In Game 2, he had eight opens and two strikes to finish with a 100 on the dot. In those games, he converted zero spares in 17 tries. Game 3, though, was a different animal. It was clean. He left zero frames open. He finished with a 195 and collected 7 of 7 spares. It was a remarkably weird and discrete change in bowling ability. And it was an awesome thing to watch.

The subject of this post is the clean game. A clean game simply means marking every frame, or leaving none open. There are many ways to achieve this feat from 12 strikes to 10 spares to anything in between. On the surface, it shouldn't be a very difficult thing to achieve, but in practice, clean games are not common, particularly for developing bowlers like ourselves.

For one, if you are not a punisher of the pocket, you are most commonly going to get fewer than five strikes a game. The more spare leaves you leave, the greater the difficulty of bowling cleanly. If you are prone to leaving splits, the task becomes even more difficult.

I decided to check out our stats for clean games with two questions in mind. First, how often have the bowlers of the Movements pulled off the clean game, and second what scores can you expect if you do so. In theory you could score as low as 100 with a clean game (Ten -/'s) or as high as 300 (12 X's), but in practice, what kinds of scores do we get when we bowl cleanly?

The image below shows every clean game in our database. The database includes a total of 576 games, and of those in only six were no frames left open. It's a little depressing, but we have clean games about 1% of the time.

I have the highest and lowest clean game scores (188 and 226). Johnebob also has two to his name, both games well into the 200's, and Joe D. and K-Terk each have one. For these six games, the average score is 209.5. If we could bring up our strike percentage, these scores would be much higher. Still, I think these games give you a good guide for what it means to be a 200+ average bowler. It's not that you have to mark every frame because splits are unavoidable. If I ever want to reach that magical land of a 200 average, which I think I can do in about 5 years, I will need to convert the great majority of my makeable spares. At the moment, I seem to be capable of this about 1% of the time, but if K-Terk can pull it off in Week 6...

Bowling Palindrome III

2010-03-20T06:50:00.003-06:00

Ball lab

A room in the basement of a Groom Lake research facility where sequestered federal scientists investigate alien bowling technologies recovered from crashed spacecraft.

The Rules of Bowling: Tax Brackets and Bowling Awards

2010-03-19T08:10:00.003-06:00

Is it possible to get a raise and take home less money as a consequence? If this has ever happened to you, you understand why the structure of the federal income tax can be a cruel beast. This can occur if your raise pushed you into the next tax bracket. The term "bracket" in this context refers to discrete categories of income. Here is an example, if you had $33,949 of taxable income in 2009, you were taxed at a rate of 15%, or a total tax of $5,092. If you received a raise of $1,000, so you are now making $34,949. Now, you are taxed at a rate of 20%, or a tax of $6,989. When your salary was $1,000 less, you had a net income that was $897 greater.

Aside from the standard arguments about progressive taxation versus "flat" taxes, I'm not sure why rates of taxation are applied this way. If I had to guess, it is to ease the burden on analytically anxious people who prepare their own taxes. This type of bracketing penalty could easily be avoided if we simply got rid of the categorical treatment of income and instead used a smooth function that relates income to tax rate, but I'm going a little overboard here. The reason why I bring this up is because the structure of awards in USBC bowling is analogous to federal tax bracketing, and moving from one bracket to the next may mean that you are not going to receive an award for a while. It can function as a punishment.

In the 2009-2010 USBC rulebook, there were changes made to the award system. In this post, I want to focus on "Single Game Awards" in adult bowling. Here is how the rulebook reads:

There are a number of changes from the prior edition. For example, awards were granted for single games that were 75 and 100 pins over average. Those have been eliminated. Also, the categories of awards have changed. Awards used to be granted for scores of 80, 100, 120, 140, 160, 180, 200, 250, and 300. It is unclear why these award categories have changed, but from my perspective, the addition of the 225 game category is very welcome because the difference between scores of 200 and 250 is huge, particularly for bowlers with low averages.

The graph below shows the relationship between average and the number of pins above average you have to bowl in order to earn an award.

The first thing to notice is that as your average improves, it becomes "more difficult" to earn awards. For example, if your average is between 100 and 145, you need a game that is 40 to 60 pins above average to get your patch. If you average 180 to 200, you need to exceed your average by 70 to 90 pins. Although you have to exceed your average by a greater number of pins, I'm not sure that you are less likely to merit award when you are a better bowler. Bowlers with higher averages are much more likely to string together strikes which will result in the occasional very high game score. My hunch is that the upward climbing nature of the award structure takes into account this property of skill and scoring.

The other property of this graph of which to take note is its sawtooth quality. This results from the bracketed nature of averages in the award structure. When you enter a new average category, assuming you are improving, your chances of winning an award are minimized. For example, if your average climbs from 160 to 161, the minimum game award for which you are eligible is the is the "250". You remain eligible for the 250 award until your average exceeds 180. I can tell you from personal experience that bowling a 250 game with a 161 average is a herculean feat. It is much easier to do if you average 180, both because you are a better bowler and because you only have to bowl 70 pins over average in comparison to 89.

I am actually not advocating any changes to this system. Unlike my feelings about the federal tax code and rules about youth apparel, I like the USBC awards system as it is, and I like the recent revisions to it. My point is that when you are in the bottom of a bowling "tax bracket", your chances of earning an award are fairly slim. When you approach one of the thresholds in average, you should really take advantage of the opportunity to win an award because that is when your chances are best, and soon you won't even qualify. And just think of all the stuff you could stick to your fridge with that new magnet.

A lesson from Patti Labelle

2010-03-18T13:28:00.007-06:00

I am hyper-competitive. I grew up with a big brother who was only 18 months older. He's a competitive bastard, too, so much so that he became a politician. I had two cousins in the neighborhood of a similar age, and there were a bunch of kids around with whom we would play every sport imaginable. In this context, I learned to compete, and being among the youngest and smallest kids of the group, I learned quickly that to overcome size, you needed skill. So, no matter what it was, whether kicking field goals, hitting a baseball, or driving to the hoop, I would contently spend the time by myself that was needed to improve. For example, I spent countless hours teeing a football up in my shoe and kicking it through the uprights barefoot or practicing a between-the-legs dribble in my mom's driveway.

Later this drive was extended to other endeavors, like bicycle racing, rowing, education, my job, golf, and yes, now bowling. Being competitive is a bit of a mixed blessing. It usually means that you have the patience to work at something much more intensely than others do or care to, but it also means you can be perceived as kind of a dick who can't just relax and have fun. There is probably truth to both of these edges of the sword. It also means you HATE losing.

When we started bowling in Bernaski a few years ago, we did so because we thought it would be fun. We recognized that we were easily the worst bowlers in the league. We had no idea that there was a payout at the end of the season. In fact, I think it took us a month to figure out that the league was handicapped, and whether we had won a game or not. When you have zero expectations of winning, losing does not hurt at all. It is just fun to bowl.

My competitive drive didn't really kick in the next year because of injury, but I'm fairly certain that the year after, it did. For one, John and Joe started to throw a hook, and their averages were climbing nicely. I felt like I was being left behind. By the end of last season, I started tracking my stats, trying to shore up parts of my game that were not good, and bowling more outside of league. This year, I have taken that to an extreme. Nobody really knows how much I practice. I try not to talk about it much, and I'll leave it that way.

You see, that's another part of this story. I rarely ever talk about my own personal accomplishments on this blog, although the perception is probably otherwise. When I talk about myself in a positive light, I almost always temper it with a bad thing... like I got my highest score ever but I sucked at picking up spares. I really should write a post about how I have become a decent bowler over three or four years. Maybe I'll save that for another day, but I don't want to come off as some kind of cocky prick in the process. It should be abundantly clear that I understand where I fall in the larger world of bowling- somewhere between awful and one standard deviation below average.

Competitiveness is ingrained in me. I can't really shake it, and I don't want to do so. I have approached many things in life the same way once I decide that I want to become more than proficient in them, and frankly, I am unapologetic for it. I know it can be a little annoying to my friends, and for that, I am regretful. Still, I refuse to accept or be happy with personal "mediocrity," a word which everyone must define for themselves. I will not be happy until I can average 200 pins for 30 games of bowling, or until I shoot par on an 18 hole course. I feel that way as much about trying to hit the pocket as I do about trying to have the best bowling blog in the world.

This competitive drive can, however, bring unnecessary worry. It can cause friction with friends and malcontent with sub par performance. In the immortal words of the prophet Patti Labelle, "I need a new attitude." I am going to continue my personal quest for improvement, at least as long I find the sport interesting, but I am going to try to worry less about winning and losing. It's just bowling, right? I think it would make for a more peaceful existence. In that light, I am going to try to continue improving my game and accept that we will come in last place in the league. Ok. That feels better. Now, I can just go out there and have fun.

Bowling Puzzler VIII: The Bowling Cube

2010-03-18T07:00:00.001-06:00

According to USBC regulations, a legal bowling ball must have a diameter ranging between 8.5 and 8.595 inches. Overlooking the obvious problem that a cubic bowling ball cannot roll:

If the USBC allowed cubic bowling "balls" of equal volume to spherical bowling balls:

1) What would be the maximum permissible length of a side on a cubic bowling ball?

2) Could a cubic bowling ball be squeezed between two adjacent pins in the same row, such as the 9 and 10, without touching either?

Bowling Haiku X

2010-03-17T11:47:00.003-06:00

the core of the ball
or the core of the bowler
caused ten pins to fall?

Maintaining Status

2010-03-17T07:00:00.002-06:00

When the worst bowling teams in the world compete every year, beginning in 2010, in the WTSBMBC, the rules are clear. The team who wins at least two of three handicapped games is victorious. But one must ask what brings more notoriety, being the "best of the worst bowling teams in the world" or the "worst bowling team in the world". Without additional editorial, I will present our scores:

Game 1: JL:121; TS 171; MK: 93; JD 128 ::: Scratch 513, Hcdp: 271, Total: 784

Game 2: JL: 135; TS: 146; MK: 100; JD: 158 ::: Scratch 539, Hcdp: 271, Total: 810

Game 3: JL: 151; TS: 122; MK: 195; JD: 166 ::: Scratch 634, Hcdp: 271, Total: 905

The Decline of Bowling

2010-03-15T17:56:00.010-06:00

If you have never explored the site Google Insights for Search, I would highly recommend you do so. You will find that Google has opened their search database to the world. If you enter a term, you can see how the frequency of searches for that term has changed over time and how they pattern geographically. It gives you glimpse into the minds of the internet browsing world. This can give you "insight" into the rising or fading popularity of anything, and how the popularity of that thing varies geographically.

In that light, I decided to check out how searches for bowling have changed through time. If you simply enter "bowling", you get results that are confounded by other search terms, like "bowling green". So, I decided to use the phrase "bowling ball". I am assuming that people who search using the term "bowling ball" are almost always interested in the sport, and as such, these data can tell us about how many people in the world are thinking about tenpins. If you do this, here is what you will find:

There are two important features of this graph. First, it oscillates with peaks in the northern hemisphere winter and troughs in the summer. This part is easily explainable. When people are cold, they think about bowling balls. Yeah, I know. Bowling is a winter sport. In the summer, people are concerned with other things. The more troubling aspect of this graph is its decline. Since early 2004, searches for "bowling ball" have decreased at an average rate of 9% per year. The popularity of bowling is waning.

For the moment, I don't really have an explanation for what is causing this, but I strongly feel that it is a cultural phenomenon. Explaining such cultural changes is not an easy thing to do. I will note that if this were a stock, I would consider buying it. Bowling cannot decline forever. At some point that trend will reverse, and the sport will have its day. Who knows what will spark that change, but I am confident it will happen in due time.

Announcing the WTSBMBC: The 1st Annual Wyo-Tex Spring Break Mediocrity Bowling Classic

2010-03-15T12:04:00.011-06:00

Brought to you by the Seriously Underachieving Cadre of Keglers (S.U.C.K.), to be held over the next two days in Laramie, Wyoming and Arlington, Texas, the 1st Annual Wyo-Tex Spring Break Mediocrity Bowling Classic, known by the easy to remember acronym WTSBMBC, is sure to become a major event in the world of sport. The best of the worst bowling teams in the the world, the fighting HCLC-A'ers, will be entering the bowling battle field versus the men in black (and red) from the Cowboy State, the Bowl Movements.

What's at stake? If the Movements win, EB and any of his fellow bowlers who so choose will don Rockies caps for the opening week of the MLB season. If the Texans are victorious, Movement2 and any members of his team with 15 lbs balls will wear Rangers caps on April 5, 2010. The teams are so evenly matched that this bout will be fought with a minimal handicap difference (HCLA, 274; BM's, 271) over a three game set. Pin total means nothing. Winner of at least two of three takes the title.

America's Cup, you can suck it. You got nothin' on this. Competition to be broadcast on ESPN 8, The Ocho.

Did the ancient Egyptians invent bowling?

2010-03-14T07:07:00.008-06:00

In histories of bowling, it is commonly claimed that the origins of the sport can be traced back over 5,000 years to ancient Egypt. It is not difficult to find various accounts like this one from the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame:

A British anthropologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, discovered in the 1930's a collection of objects in a child's grave in Egypt that appeared to him to be used for a crude form of bowling. If he was correct, then bowling traces its ancestry to 3200 BC.

Here's a similar account from tenpinbowling.org:

In 1930 the British anthropologist Sir Flinders Petrie and his team of archaeologists discovered all sorts of primitive bowling balls, bowling pins and other materials in the grave of an Egyptian boy from 3200 BC. It appears that the ancient Egyptians played a primitive form of bowling and that bowling is more than 5200 years old.

Being an anthropologist myself, I thought I would look into the validity of these claims, which have become so pervasive as to be treated as settled fact. It did not take me long to find the primary source for the Egyptian bowling story. It is from the monograph Naqada and Ballas 1895 by W. M. Flinders Petrie and J. E. Quibell, published by Bernard Quaritch in 1896. You can read the monograph here if you are interested. There is one obvious falsehood to the standard narrative of bowling's origin. The find did not occur in 1930 nor the 1930's. This book was published in 1896 and concerned fieldwork that took place in 1895. Flinders Petrie did not even work in Egypt in the 1930's; from the mid-1920's onward, he worked in Palestine and Jordan.

In the 1895 field season, Sir Flinders Petrie excavated the cemetery at the site of Naqada, and Quibell worked at the nearby site of Ballas. Between the two sites, they unearthed more than 3,000 graves, a huge number by modern archaeological standards for a single field season. Naqada is on the western bank of the Nile in east central Egypt. The archaeological remains from the site span some 1,400 years dating between ca. 6,400 and 5,000 BP (before present). In Grave No. 100, Petrie did indeed find some interesting objects associated with the remains of a child. Rather than summarizing it myself, I'll let you read his words from p. 35:

And from Plate VII, here is how Petrie envisioned these objects in use:
Well, the first thing to point out is that the balls in this image are marble-sized, which gives very different meanings to the phrases "bowling balls" and "bowling pins". In fact, I was able to find a very low quality image of the actual items, shown to the right. Second, this reconstruction, which very much looks like some form of bowling, is Petrie's best guess for how all of these objects could have been used in a single activity. I should note that they were not discovered in this arrangement, and the board on which they sit was inferred; it was not found. Also, we have no idea if these items were ever intended to be used together. We don't even know if they were gaming pieces. They were also discovered with a chipped stone knife and spear points, which are not included in the reconstruction. Finally, I should note that to my knowledge, no one has ever discovered another set of items like these in one place. In other words, this is a unique find. Even if Petrie was correct about how these items were used, this was not something commonly done in Egypt.

I must admit that I find his reconstruction compelling, but is there some other plausible explanation for what these items represent? Absolutely, we could come up with many. Given their context, an interpretation of child's toys is not unreasonable. For example, the marbles might simply be marbles, which have as many uses as a child can imagine. What about the "pins?" Petrie notes that "they can only stand on their flat ends", but if they are spinning, they can stand on their pointed ends. Could they be tops? Their basic geometry is very reminiscent of wooden tops, like the one shown to the left.

Have spinning tops been recovered from other contexts in Egyptian archaeology? I was surprised to not only discover that they are not uncommon, but also that one was in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamen. On the right is a picture of King Tut's spinning top made of ebony with inlay of faience and ivory.

So, where does this leave us? Well, the story that has commonly been told about the origins of bowling is not entirely false. Flinders Petrie did discover items in a child's grave in Egypt, which he reconstructed to have been used in a game that could be construed as crude form of bowling, although he related these items to the game of skittles, best played with a sack of sweet chewy "fruit" flavored candies. One obviously incorrect part of the story is the year of discovery, which was 1895, not the 1930's.

But Petrie's interpretation is highly speculative and should not be treated as fact. In that light, I very much like the wording on the website from the International Bowling museum, which begins with "If he was correct...", though they need to change the date of discovery to reflect the facts.

Finally, I should note that Petrie's skittle/bowling hypothesis is testable. These artifacts are curated at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University (not to be confused with the Assholian Museum at Cambridge). If Petrie was correct about the function of the objects, it would be expected that the "pins" should show clear pitting from the impact of the marbles and other "pins," just as actual bowling pins do. If they are tops, as I have suggested, they should show very different patterns of wear (circumferential scratches). Of course, we must also keep in mind that these items could have served some entirely different purpose or purposes. This sounds like a marvelous study for an undergraduate in archaeology at Oxford to undertake. We could finally get to the bottom of this Egyptian "bowling" business.

Bowl Movement Status Report for March 13

2010-03-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

Just to keep everyone updated on the current team stats, I thought I'd put our junks out there in the open. Sorry about exposing your private parts to the world...

Strikes Per Game

2010-03-13T08:48:00.009-07:00

When I started keeping track of my bowling stats about 16 months ago, I did so because I felt it would help me better understand my tendencies. I would also be able to track my trends to figure out which parts of my game were improving, and which parts were slipping. Also, I think that knowledge is a good thing even when there is no obvious immediate value to it. It didn't take me long to figure out what now seems so obvious. If I ever wanted to bowl a 200 game, I would have to figure out how to hit the pocket and how to do it regularly. I can't do this quite yet, but I'm getting better.

The value of strikes in bowling is simple. With the exception of the 2nd and 3rd ball in the 10th frame, the next two balls you throw count toward the strike frame. Land a turkey, and the frame with the first strike is worth 30 pins. Keep that chain of X's going, and you add 30 pins to your score every time all the pins fall.

This is not to take anything away from spares. Spares are a good thing, too, and to become a master, you need a great spare game. But with a spare in every frame, your score ceiling is 190 (or 191 if strike your last ball). It seems mildly ironic to me that there are approximately 280 different spare combinations you can face as a bowler, many of which require different and very precise shots, but spares count for less. Picking up spares, especially the ugly ones like splits and the 3-9, is considerably more difficult than getting a strike. Trying to convert spares all night long is draining. You have to work harder to do it, but the reward is less.

Anyway, there are various ways to measure your striking ability as a bowler. I often use strike%, or the percentage of strike opportunities converted. In this post, I want to look at strikes per game. When you are at the lanes, I think it's a bit more intuitive to see things this way. This statistic can vary between 0 and 12. At this stage of my bowling development, I am usually happy if I average 4.0 strikes per game over a three game set, but this season, I have averaged 3.5.

For the 189 series I have on record, which are spread among seven bowlers, the relationship between strikes per game and series score is very strong. It is shown in the graph below and on the left. The general relationship is clear, and it allows you to set some simple targets. If you are shooting for a 400 series, you should be aiming for around 2 strikes per game. If your goal is 500, you will need around 4 strikes per game. If you your are shooting for the magical land of 600, a good target is 6 X's per 10 frames, and it only gets more difficult from there. I'm not saying you absolutely need 6 strikes per game to get to 600 or that if you do this you are guaranteed to get there. In fact, you can in theory do it with as few as 2.0 per game, but you leave yourself a lot more to do in terms of picking up spares. You can also fail to reach 600 with as many as 10 strikes per game, but this would be a very unusual outcome.

Notice in contrast that the number of spares converted is much more weakly correlated with series score. Spare conversion is important. I would have had my first 600 series last week if my spare game was on, but spares are much less meaningful in determining the scoring outcome of a game. Notice that two of our highest series of all time have come with fewer than two spares per game. The reason is simple. If you are getting a lot of strikes, there are fewer opportunities to pick up spares, so a paucity of spares does not necessarily equate to a lot of spare leaves left unconverted

I will also note that if you view the game this way, goals seem less difficult to attain. I average 3.5 X's per game for the season. Next season, I'd like to get that to 4.0. If I did, I would be averaging a 500 series rather than seeing that as a really good night. To get from 3.5 to 4.0, I need to get on average one to two more strikes over a three game series. When viewed this way, it seems like a goal that is very reachable.

Bowling in Moving Pictures: Conservation of Energy

2010-03-12T14:02:00.001-07:00

In the following film, you will see a physics teacher demonstrating the value of faith in the laws of science in an adaptation of the age old game of Dutch Tenpins. It is also a highly effective and proven way for dorks to impress girls with their retired bowling balls. Just set up this apparatus in your garage. Then, use your superior skills in the scientific method figure out a way to actually get a girl into your garage.

Bowling Alley Mural Reviews: Triangulation

2010-03-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

An overt response to the mid-20th century quadrilateral movement in kegel art, the bowling alley mural Triangulation by Anonymous brings a sarcastic approach to the geometric earth tone polygonal genre in masking units. Freed from the constraints of squares, rectangles, trapezoids, and parallelograms, Anonymous is irreverent in her demonstration that despite the four-sided shackles imposed by lane end geometry, no self-respecting muralist must be confined to angular sums of 360 degrees. Thus, the artist makes the centerpiece of her work an inverted pink triangle overlying fields of beige to brown. Oblique and horizontal black bars bring depth to what would be otherwise a rendition of fragmented construction paper overlapping on a featureless plane. One must not search deeply for meaning in this sure to be classic of bowling art. Regrettably, I feel compelled to borrow a quotation from the renowned bowling art critic, Pierre Bordeaux who wrote of Triangulation (roughly translated from the original Basque), "The meaning could not be more clear. From time immemorial, the inverted triangle has symbolized the female organ, in all of its vulvacious glory, and what better a medium for expressing it than a target at which we propel our balls." What more remains to be said? Nothing.

Dear Brunswick Bowling,

2010-03-11T11:55:00.005-07:00

I am writing concerning an urgent matter in the world of bowling. If left unresolved, the sport we all know and love is in jeopardy. In my search for a hero to come to the rescue of keglers around the world, to whom else would I turn (other than Pelican canoes and Dick's Sporting Goods)? In the spirit of the great turn of the century founder of your company, John Moses, I appeal to your better nature. For we rollers of the world depend upon your deeds.

You see, our bowling team is need of sponsorship. If we continue to the end of the season sans sponsorship, we will have $20+ dollars extracted from our already paltry winnings, and if this happens for the 4th consecutive year, the entire sport will be threatened. How you ask? It is a simple matter of the fungibile nature of currency. Those $20+ out of pocket will not be spent on bowling, bowling balls, bowling shoes, bowling bags, bowling tape, bowling accessories, or bowling juice. Those funds, which could have been acquired by some fine bowling business, would in turn have been spent elsewhere by an employee of said business, perhaps on groceries, pornographic magazines, Just for Men Gel, or replacement wiper blades. Every time these funds change hands, the economy is stimulated and jobs are created. Without said sponsorship, that guy working the assembly line at the Just for Men Gel factory could be laid off. If he is laid off, he will no longer bowl. If he no longer bowls, he will not be purchasing a new Brunswick Python. If demand drops for Brunswick Pythons, you will be required to reduce your work force. Why? Obviously, it is because you failed to sponsor us.

Who are we, you ask? We are the men who comprise the greatest bowling team in the history of universe, the Bowl Movements. I know what you are thinking, "We already sponsor some amazing bowlers, like Parker Bohn 3, Sean Rash, and Carolyn Dorn-Ballard. Why should we add some no-names from Wyoming to our cadre of moochers?" The reasons are simple and two-fold: 1) As I have already explained, the future of your business and the sport depend upon it. 2) It is time to recognize the hard working men and women who bowl every week and struggle to hit the 200 mark. We are the foundation upon which the sport is built.

Yes, two of us already use your equipment, and two of us don't. Here is what I say to anyone who asks me about my ball, "It is a Brunswick Smash Zone. It is the most finely engineered piece of bowling equipment ever produced. Its dark pearlized cover stock was inspired by the aragonitic surface sheen of the black pearls sought after by the skin divers of Bora Bora. It is a machine to be handled firmly and yet also with the gentle touch of an infant koala. I highly recommend one if you are looking for a new ball, and I think you should recommend one to everyone you know, and tell them to do the same."

I recognize your current strategy of sponsorship. It is common in sport; it is the guilt by association approach. If a great bowler is seen performing well, people will ask, "What kind of ball are they using?" It is an odd question since the word "Brunswick" appears in huge block letters across the front of their tacky jersey. It is not difficult to show that this tactic does not work. If things associated with great bowlers are taken up by those who are not so great, then why don't I see Parker Bohn's mustache adorning the faces of bowlers ?

You see, Brunswick Bowling, it is time to usher in a new era of sports sponsorship. It is time to sponsor the everyday man and woman. It is time to show the world that an investment of $24 can save the economy and the sport of bowling. It is time for you to ponder the potential fiscal windfall of the phrase "Brunswick Bowling presents the Bowl Movements." I will sit by the phone until you call.

Sincerely,
Movement2

The Four L's of Bowling

2010-03-11T08:47:00.003-07:00

Any true connoisseur of bowling knows the four L's. If you do not, you average under 260. Pathetic. For those of you who require schooling in the art of rolling, I will reluctantly oblige:

1) Laramie - The Gem City. Population 27,204. Elevation: 7,165 ft above sea level. Bowling: The highest per capita number of 200+ bowlers in the world. Mecca is to Islam as Laramie is to Kegling.

2) Lanes- Eighteen highly engineered plastic bowling surfaces covering hardwood. Ten on the left side; eight on the right. The right is reserved for nobility.

3) Lounge- The locker room. Prior to and post-rolling, this is the chosen sanctuary. Put your ass on a stool and knock one back. It's almost time to roll, or it might be time to commiserate with your colleagues about your inability to breach 800.

4) Liquor- A little somethin' to take home, or perhaps to sip prior to arrival. Either way, it is the secret sauce of striking success.

Bowler Puzzler VII: Pathways to 290

2010-03-11T00:00:00.007-07:00

One of my heroes is an anonymous primate who maintains a site called balmoralsoftware.com. If you click on that link, you will find an unassuming webpage with a number of links in small print. The last of these links reads "Bowling Scores". If you click on that link, you will be transported to a wondrous world of the most detailed mathematical treatment of bowling scores ever written. Whenever I do so, I feel like Charlie entering Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Yes, I have a problem. If you scroll down on that page, you will find a list that tells you how many different ways there are to arrive at any particular bowling score. For example, you will find that there are 2,447,444,695,948,898 pathways to a score of 124. That means that are more than 2.4 quadrillion ways to score 124.

These numbers become much more tractable as you get into the high 200's. A major break occurs between the scores 290 and 291. According to this wonderland of bowling scores, there is only one way to arrive at a score of 291. This is accomplished with eleven consecutive strikes followed by a one on the bonus ball in the 10th. This makes me wonder if anybody has ever actually scored 291, but my question concerns 290. According to "Mr. Balmoral," there are eleven ways to score 290. The first should be obvious... eleven straight strikes followed by a gutter ball. Here is my question:

What are the other ten ways to score 290?

The Constant and Erratic Pace of Improvement in Bowling: 10 Pins Per Year

2010-03-10T08:11:00.005-07:00

Anyone who bowls competitively, whether in a leagues, tournaments, or both wants to improve their game. With time and practice, you will, but improvement is frustratingly slow. It seems as if our memory is only capable of tracking things over a period of weeks or months, and on this time scale, things do not seem to change much. You have those weeks when the pins are falling, and those when it feels like you are fighting to pick up spares all night. There are weeks when the confidence is there, and others when it is on vacation. Improvement is best gauged over a period of years. The system is simply too noisy to see the underlying change over short time scales.

The core Movements started bowling in the 2nd half of the 2006-2007 season, in early January of 2007. It has been three years since we began this endeavor. I did not start tracking our statistics until midway through our third season in December of 2008. Thanks to Bowl.com, however, I can at least reconstruct our averages for those early years. Here is how our averages have evolved over time:

That graph on the right shows the average of all three bowlers, John, Joe, and myself. Since January of 2007, it has been ticking up like clockwork. The pace is very constant, and is equal to ten pins, or a full rack, per year. In our first season, we averaged a paltry 127. This season, we bowl with an average just under 157. This is a huge improvement. For three bowlers, it equates to getting 90 pins per night more than we did three years ago.

The graph on the left shows the data that make up this constant growth, and notice that for individual bowlers, improvement has been anything but constant. I am poster boy of this. From 2007 to 2008, my average dropped seven pins. John and Joe offset that drop by adding 12 and 20 pins to their averages, respectively. The next season, I added 19. So far, John's average has dropped three pins this year. Of the three bowlers, only Joe has seen improvement every year.

So, if you are having an off year, you can find some solace in that it happens to other folks, too. Over the long term, you will improve. You just have to fight through those rough times. Eventually, you will find yourself moving back in the right direction.

You can expect to add about 10 pins per year to your average in your early years, but this pace cannot continue ad infinitum. At some point, it must slow because nobody averages 300. Apparently, we have yet to reach that plateau as a team, but I expect it will come soon. If this trend continues, we will be averaging nearly 180 pins per game two years from now and 200 in four. That seems like a tall task, but if you had told me three years ago that I would average over 160 today, I would have had a hard time believing it. In fact, I have a hard time believing it right now.

The Volcano

2010-03-09T08:29:00.019-07:00

A volcano spends most of its life doing nothing. It looks like any old mountain. But deep inside of its bowels, the pressure builds within its magma chamber. The overlying rock acts as a shield for the gases inside. They cannot escape. A threshold of pressure must be crossed, but when it does, a massive explosion results, and ash is sent high into the atmosphere.

I think this is more or less what happened at Laramie Lanes last night. For six weeks, we have been dormant. Over that time, we have had five consecutive losing nights with a 3-17 record plus a last place finish in the City Championships. The pressure has been building, and it had to be released. That happened in Game 1.

Game 1 has historically been our worst game, but last night, it was our all time best with a scratch pin total of 756 or an average of 189 pins per bowler. It was an odd game by all accounts. Laughlin and Gingy each had four in a row in frames 3 through 6 to finish with a pair of 183's. Daniele had zero strikes, but went 8 for 10 on spares. He picked up his first six including three splits. I set a team high game record with a 233. This was garnered with eight strikes, but I missed two of three chances for spares in that game.

The 756 in Game 1 broke a long standing team record. Our previous high game was more than a year old, set on January 5, 2009 when Becker was in town subbing for the Canadian. The old record was a 749. The graph below shows the progression of the record through time. The new record may be around for a while, but I've got a feeling that sometime within the next year or two we might get to 800.

After the explosion, we reverted to our normal ways. We followed a massive Game 1 with a dud. We finished with just about 200 pins fewer in Game 2, averaging 142. We have seen this happen before. We build a nice lead in Game 1 only to watch it evaporate over the next two games. But apparently the volcano was not finished. It still had one more belch to emit. In Game 3, we came back with a 167 average or 669 scratch, another big game for us. We finished with three wins and a loss bringing our 2nd half record to 12-24. It felt good to win.

Here are a few statistical notes. John had a 500 series and converted 7 of 9 single pin chances. I missed a 600 series by eight pins because I could not pick up spares (5 for 13). Gingy had another massive night for a Rookie averaging 152.3 and set a new personal high for strikes with 11. Daniele's strike ball was not working all night, but he led the team in pickup%, getting 63% of his chances. In fact, he tied the team record for most spares in a series with 17.

On a side note, we faced Team 6, or the team formerly known as Overrated. They also bowled their asses off. In fact, they too had their best performance in weeks. On most nights, they would have gone at least 3-1 or 4-0. I felt bad for those guys because I could very much relate. They were just unlucky to run into us on the week when the volcano finally popped.

Does a bad first frame portend a bad night of bowling?

2010-03-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

Last week, EB of the Thumbhole Chronicles suggested that I look into first frame effects. According to the man from the Lone Star State, "I guarantee you that for bowlers like me, the first frame portends the outcome (most of the time-- I have been known to have three opens in a row and then mark out the rest for 160-170 game). For pros, of course, this doesn't mean a thing. Or does it?" I know what he's talking about. You step up to roll your first ball, but you leave a nasty split. Worse yet, you leave a solid 10 pin and fail to pick it up. You return to your seat having opened the first frame. Is this a symptom of things to come, or is it an isolated incident that has little bearing on what follows?

To answer this question, I performed two analyses using our database, which currently includes 552 games. In the first, I compared the outcome (strike, spare, or open) of the first frame of each game to the average game score. In the second analysis, I compared the first frame score of the first game to the score for the entire series.

Before I continue, I should note the obvious. With regard to game scores, it would be expected that a strike in the first frame would yield the highest average game scores, followed by spares and opens. However, when the outcome of the first frame of the first game is compared to the final score for the series, the effect should still be in play, but it should be much smaller since it comprises a much smaller fraction of the total score (1/30 vs. 1/10). I will also note that for a EB, a bad start seems to have the opposite effect.

The bar graphs below compare average game scores to first frame outcomes for the four primary BM bowlers this season. Generally speaking, the data pattern in predictable ways. For three bowlers (JL, TS, and JD), average game scores are greatest when the first frame is struck. For all four bowlers, the lowest game scores occur when Frame 1 is left open. For the Rookie (JG), the highest average game scores occur when the first frame is a spare. There is another interesting difference relating to our cleanup man, JD. For the other three bowlers, the difference between the best and worst average game scores is typically around 10 pins (the difference between a mark and an open frame), but for JD, the difference is 27 pins. If he records a strike in Frame 1, he averages 161.6 pins a game. If he leaves the first open, he only averages 134.5, a huge difference. For JD, what happens in Frame 1 seems to be extremely important in determining the outcome of a game.

The situation is similar for series scores as shown below. For three bowlers (JL, JG, and JD), the highest average for a series occurs when the first frame of Game 1 is a strike. I do slightly better, however, if I pick up a spare to start the night. The difference in series average between a struck and open 1st frame depends upon the bowler. For JL and TS, the differences are minimal, but again for JD, there is a massive difference. In fact, the difference is amazing. If he gets a strike in the opening frame, he ends up on average with 65 more pins for the series than if he leaves it open. It is the difference between a 481 series and a 416.

So does a bad first frame portend a bad night of bowling? Yes and no. It seems to depend upon the bowler. For three of us, it doesn't seem to have much of an effect. In fact, the effect is pretty much what you would expect. For Joe, our anchor, the effect appears to be enormous. For this reason, I hope he never reads this because it will turn him into a head case. Stepping up to bowl on the first frame in league night is very much like standing on the 1st tee at the golf course. You want to blister one right down the middle of the fairway, but if you slice it into the deep grass, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. If you want to turn things around, you have to just forget about it and move on. Johnebob seems to be very capable of this; Joe,well, umm...

On Age and Bowling Ability, Part II

2010-03-07T14:07:00.001-07:00

A little while ago, I looked at age and bowling ability. The observed relationship between average and age for professional bowlers suggested continual improvement from age 20 through 50. I argued that this correlation was in fact spurious, caused by a weeding out effect. In brief, most pro bowlers quit the tour at an early age because it is not a lucrative career unless you are among the top 10 or 20 of the sport. The result is that those pro bowlers who bowl into their 40's are the best in the sport, while those in younger age brackets are characterized by a wider range of skill levels.

A few months after I wrote that post, I came across an academic study that examined the same phenomenon, so I thought it would be germane to share their findings. The paper was authored by Allison Elizabeth DeVan and Hirofumi Tanaka, both of the Department of Kinesiology and and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin. The study is titled "Declines in ten-pin bowling performance with advancing age," and was published in the journal Age and Ageing in 2007 (Volume 36, pp. 693-694).

This was a very simple study, and in fact, it was much like mine. DeVan and Tanaka compared the average score and age for 147 male bowlers in the 2002 PBA World Championship and Senior World Championship. As such, they have a much greater range of ages than I did, even with a couple of bowlers in their 70's represented. Here is a summary graph of their findings:

According to the authors, "Performance appeared to be maintained until approximately 45 years of age and started to decrease more rapidly thereafter." (p. 693), and that over a 50 year period, there was only a decline of about 10%. They also found that in comparison to other sports, such as running and swimming, the decline in ability in bowling was considerably less.

In short, among pro bowlers, averages start to slip in their late 40's. There are reasons why this generalization might not apply to amateurs. For example, if you start bowling late in life, the improvement in your game from practice and repetition might outweigh the decline from the physical effects of aging. In other words, you might peak considerably later. Furthermore, it is very clear from their study, not to mention all the gray haired folks you see dominating the pins on weekday mornings, that you can bowl very well into your later years.

So, for all you folks out there who are enrolled in medicare, collecting social security, scared of a young black male president, and driving around with your blinkers on, you can still go out to the lanes on a Friday night and kick those young whipper-snappers' asses. Just don't challenge them to a 100 m butterfly.

The Age Gap in Professional Bowling

2010-03-06T07:48:00.032-07:00

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the reasons for success in any field are two fold: 1) Unusual opportunities; 2) Practice and dedication. With regard to the first, Gladwell suggests that something as simple as year of birth when coupled with the right environment can foster success. In other words, a large reason for the success of the people who are the best at what they do is luck. You just happened to be born at the right time and were given special opportunities. For example, did you know that many of the hyper-successful players in the computer industry, like Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Bill Joy, were all born in 1954 or 1955? All of these guys came of age at the time when the personal computer boom was just beginning, and due to unusual circumstances had a lot of experience with computers at a young age.

The second key to success is practice. According to Gladwell, to become a master of anything, whether computer programming, music, basketball, or accounting, you need 10,000 hours of practice. This obviously requires dedication, but it also means that you need to have the opportunity to practice. If you want to get 10,000 hours of practice in bowling, for example, you need a lot of spare time (pun not intended), not to mention money or perhaps free access to a bowling alley.

So, were there better years in which to be born to become a PBA bowler? Well, I decided to look at the demographics of professional bowlers, and I found something unexpected. Here is the age distribution of exempt professional bowlers in the 09-10 season:

Notice that professional bowling is dominated by two disparate age groups. There are a large number of bowlers were born in the mid to late 1960's. There are very few who were born in the early 1970's, and there is a second large group of younger bowlers born during the late 1970's and early 1980's. In other words, there is an obvious and profound age gap in PBA bowling. If you were born in the early 1970's, your chances of being a successful PBA bowler today are very low.

So what explains this pattern? Well, the PBA came into existence in 1959, also the birth year of Walter Ray Williams, Jr. Beginning in 1965, PBA bowling competitions were regularly broadcast on television on ABC. In fact, the 1960's were the heyday of bowling. Not only were people regularly seeing the sport on TV, but participation in bowling was skyrocketing, bowling stocks were soaring on Wall Street, and newspapers were devoting a lot of ink to the sport.

The image to the right is from the August 4, 1961 edition of the Montreal Gazette, which that day, gave 15 pages to the sport with headlines like "Automation Booms Bowling into Multi-Million Business," "Mass Participation Sport," and "What is the Saturation Point". According to the Gazette, "The activity has boomed into its own with the development of automation, the spur of TV, shorter working hours and better wages - even the traffic situation which sees many people willing to drive far afield for their recreation." The USBC could only dream of headlines like this today. The 1960's were a wonderful environment in which to foster the development of professional bowlers. It should be no surprise that Walter Ray Williams, Jr, Pete Weber, Brian Voss, and Norm Duke were first hitting the lanes during this time. Speaking of Weber's, Dick Weber, perhaps the greatest bowler of all time, was born in 1929. He was in his bowling prime as the PBA first came into existence and first was aired on television. Not to take anything away from his ability, but his success, then, can be in part attributed to the luck of his birth year.

But what happened in the early 1970's? If you were born in 1973, your chances of becoming a pro bowler were not good. Participation in bowling remained fairly strong through the 1970's, but by the 1980's, the sport began to suffer. For example, in June of 1980, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune published the story, "Bowling, Golf Decline In Participants". This trend continued throughout the decade. In February of 1986, the Toledo Times ran a story titled, "Bowling Facing Participation, Cost Problems". In July of 1989, the St. Petersburg times had the headline, "Decreased participation worries ABC, proprietors Series: Bowling". In other words, bowling was no longer cool; it had lost its respect, as this headline from the Wall Street Journal would imply. Those would-be future professional bowlers in their teenage years in the 1980's had other things on their mind, like Def Leppard and Van Halen.

What is interesting is that if you were a teenager in the 1980's, chances are you would not become a professional bowler, but if you were born in that decade, your chances weren't bad. Why? Well, it probably has little to do with the popularity of the sport. I would argue instead that it is about economics. Bowling differs from the major professional sports in that it is not a very lucrative career. The top bowlers, those who have been at it for a long time, can make a decent living. For example, Parker Bohn III has been on the tour for 26 years and has over $2.5 million in earnings, or an average of about $100,000 per year. This is an impressive amount to earn in bowling, but for a high level professional athlete, it's peanuts. In comparison, PJ Haggerty, who has been on the tour three years has just over $60,000 in earnings, or $20k per year.

Young people, folks in their twenties, are at a point their life when they can engage in risky behavior, and joining the PBA is a major risk. Unless you become a star in the sport, you are probably going to lose money trying to become one of the best. Only a very few will succeed. The cost of travel to tournaments alone will offset earnings. So, the swelling ranks of 20-somethings in bowling today, I think, is due more to the fact that younger bowlers can afford to take risk in their early adult years, and I would not be surprised if there has always been a large number of bowlers of this age in the sport. In fact, most bowlers join the tour before age 30. Once you get into your 30's, if you are not having much success in the PBA, you will look for a real career elsewhere.

This phenomenon, however, cannot explain the age gap. As the current crop of bowlers ages, the lack of early 1970's born bowlers will simply migrate to the left on the first graph in the post. The bowlers today in their 40's and early 50's will not be replaced, and in 10 years, the demographics of bowling will be very different. Those potential bowlers born in 1972 and 1973 were most likely victims of the cultural crash of the bowling bubble.

Why I find this so fascinating is that I was born in the spring of 1973. Now, I have a perfect excuse for why I am such a terrible bowler. I grew up bowling duckpins with grandmother in the late 1970's and early 80's. She and her group of fellow retirees bowled once a week at Penn Daw Lanes on Rte. 1 in Alexandria, Virginia, not too surprising given the boom in the sport of the 1960's and 70's. Eventually, we stopped bowling, like many other people, sometime during the 1980's. If I have to find somebody to blame for all of this, I am going to blame Richard Millhous Nixon. I was born during the height of Watergate. Nixon was an avid bowler. If there was anybody who could have caused the social and cultural decline of the sport, it was him. "Dude you like to bowl? Nixon was a huge bowler. Lame."

I need a new accountant

2010-03-06T07:00:00.005-07:00

I obviously do a lot of number crunching. I must admit that are few things I enjoy more (huge dork). I should have been an accountant like my hero Herbert Kornfeld. Anyway, back in the dark ages of September, I laid out three goals for the new season: 1) A team 2,000 series, 2) An individual first ball average of 9.0 or greater, 3) A team 75% single pin conversion rate.

On the 16th of November, Daniele pulled off the 9.0. I thought that's all we had managed to do, but I was wrong. Somehow, it slipped by me that on January 18th when facing the Lazers, we got the 75%. On that date, we converted 23 single pin spares out of 30 chances, or 76.7%.

That only leaves one more thing to do: 2000 pins. Given how we've been bowling lately, I have my doubts that we'll get there, but ya never know.

The Late Season Doldrums

2010-03-05T07:55:00.007-07:00

I was thinking about how poorly we have bowled lately. Mostly, this is on the veterans because the Rook has actually been on his game. It occurred to me that a similar thing happened to us last year. My recollection was that we were chugging along, and then sometime late in the season, we just hit a wall. So, I decided to check if that was true.

I looked at a 10 week moving average by date for this year and last. When I did, here is what I found:

It is true that last year we limped to the finish line after peaking early. From early January to mid-March, we essentially leveled off around a 147 team average. Then, we hit our slump. This season, we peaked in mid-January with a team average around 153, and since that time our bowling has fallen off a cliff. So, we do seem to have some kind of late season decline, although the timing of it last year was much later.

There is a silver lining to this cloud. Notice that for every date, our team average is better this year than it was last , but we are threatening to change that very soon. In fact our crappy bowling lately is roughly equivalent to our best bowling from last year, even though it feels much worse.

I also went back the first ever BM Report, and it was nice to read that I was happy with a 450 series. Now, I expect to get 50 pins more than that every night, even though I haven't actually done that in something like eight weeks. All of this is to say that yes, we are in a major slump, but we are getting better as a team, no matter how crappy it seems.

And the worst bowling team in the entire city is...

2010-03-05T07:05:00.005-07:00

The Bowl Movements! Finishing in the City Championships with a scratch series of 1,637 pins, it is now official that we are the worst bowling team in the city. Incidentally, last year, our scratch pin total was better than that of two other teams, so we have definitely slipped. From this terrible picture taken with my phone, you will see that in the scratch standings, we finished 56th of 56 teams. If you can't laugh at yourself, at whom can you laugh?

The Caesars took us by five pins. If you look carefully at that image, you will notice that the Misfits in 54th position beat us by more than 200 pins scratch.

In brighter news, there were three teams who actually had a worse night than we did. In the handicapped standings, we were 53rd!

The 10 pin

2010-03-04T08:33:00.010-07:00

Excusez mon français, but I f$&king hate the 10 pin. It sits back in that corner and just grins at me with a stupid little smile, daring me to try to hit it. It always taunts me with the same little chant, "You just nailed the pocket, and I didn't fall. Ha ha. F*#k you!"

So, here's a short history of my history with the 10 pin. For my first couple of seasons of bowling, the 10 pin really wasn't any different than any other pin. Then, I started throwing a hook. It wasn't much of a hook, so I quickly figured out what I needed to do to collect the 10. Over time, my rotation has gotten stronger and stronger, and over the last month or so, the 10 pin has become very difficult for me to hit. In order for me to get the ball into the corner, I need to do one of two things. I have to throw the ball with everything I have to get the speed up around 20 mph, or I have to throw it so far outside that it runs an inch from the gutter for 30 feet. I find these shots very difficult to accomplish. The latter takes perfect precision, and when I really put a lot of muscle into a shot, I lose a lot of accuracy.

So, yesterday I bowled a few practice games, and in one of them, I threw every ball at the 10 pin, a grand total of 20 shots. Strangely, I ended with a score of 69. Anyway, of those 20 shots, probably three of them would have felled a solitary 10. I was at wit's end.

As I'm leaving, I talk to Adam, who is the closest thing we have to a pro around here. I told him I wanted his advice on a spare ball. He said, "You need a Columbia-300 White Dot." That's the ball up there at the top of the post. We pulled out the catalog and looked at them. He said it would cost me $65 with the drilling included. He got out the order form, but I put the kibosh on the order. I feared for the future of my testicles if I came home to the boss after buying my third bowling ball on a whim.

Once I got home, it only took me about six hours before I got the cajones to bring up the subject with my wife, and I tried to be tactful. I explained my conundrum. My intent was to buy a ball that I will only use for a single shot: the solitary 10. Maybe I'll use it for a 6-10, too. This seems a bit over the top, but I explained that the solitary 10 is one of my most common leaves, and I just can't pick it up anymore. Not surprisingly, my wife, who is quite saintly in her ability to put up with my bad habits like bowling, golf, fishing, skiing, etc., was mildly supportive.

So, what do I do next? Of course, I go to Bowlingball.com to read customer reviews of the White Dot. There were two of them. Here is what they say:

Review 1: I love the Columbia 300 White Dot. Great for 10 pins (for righties) and 7 pins (for lefties), not so good for hook unless you force it on the bowling ball.

Review 2: I purchased this ball when listed under SV. Thank god I did. I used to struggle with ten pins. I average anywhere from 210-221, depending on the league but always had problems picking up my ten pins. This ball will not move, it goes straight as an arrow. It also looks really cool going down the lane. I recommend this ball to anyone looking for a good spare ball!

STOP TEMPTING ME INTERNET! So, here's where I stand. I really really really want to buy one of these balls, but before I do, I am going to try out the Green Lady. This is my old 13 lbs Columbia Scout Reactive to see if I can throw it into the corner. Like any dude who really wants to buy a new toy, I have a great excuse for why that's not a good idea. I want a 14 lbs ball to match the weight of my current ball.

Bowler Puzzler VI: The Streak

2010-03-04T06:30:00.004-07:00

To this point, I haven't posted a puzzler that my usual crowd hasn't been able to solve. The master solvers of my tiny audience are MaddysDaddy, HCLC Doc, and KafkaStoleMyBike. I predict that this will be a challenge for all of you to solve. Prove me wrong!

In the 2005-06 season, Walter Ray Williams, Jr finished with a 100% single pin conversion rate. Impressively, he converted 475 spares in 475 chances. This is an amazing streak by any measure. What is certain is that if he had more chances, eventually he would have missed one. In the following season, he did. So... even though his stats show a 100% conversion rate, in actuality, given enough opportunities to shoot at single pin spares, say 10,000, he would have missed some. So, we can assume that the probability of Walter Ray picking up a single pin spare was not 100%, but it was very close to it. Let's assume that in the 05-06 season, Walter Ray had a 99% chance of converting any given single pin spare. With that assumption:

What is the probability of not converting at least one single pin spare in 475 chances if you have a 99% chance of converting each spare?

[Kafka, you are on the hot seat because you took a class of mine in which I taught you how to solve problems like this one.]

What does it take to be a professional bowler? A first look

2010-03-03T07:00:00.004-07:00

Considering becoming a professional bowler? Not me. I'm a terrible bowler. Still, I have wondered how my stats compare to those of a pro, but I have found that it is actually very difficult to find basic statistics to describe the aptitude of professional bowlers. The PBA really only lists averages, TV appearances, titles, and other broad categories. I suspect they hold their stats card tight to their chest, so they can control the fantasy market.

To get around PBA stats censorship, over the last two weeks,I decided to take matters into my own hands. PBA bowling is aired every Sunday morning on the Entertainment Sports Programming Network, and the stats are right there for the taking if you have the patience to score the games yourself. These stats were culled from the final rounds of two events: Bayer Don and Paula Carter Mixed Doubles and the 67th Lumber Liquidators U.S. Open. They include a total of 14 games and 10 bowlers, of which three are women and seven are men.

Here are a few things to keep in mind. First, these data only include the final rounds, or bowlers who have generally bowled very well, so the numbers may be a bit high. Second, this is not a large sample of games, so I don't know to what extent they are representative of pro bowlers as a whole. Third, these games were bowled on tournament oil conditions which are considerably more difficult than the standard "house shot" to which most people are accustomed, so you should be somewhat hesitant to compare them directly to your stats. Nonetheless, my gut feeling is that they are fairly representative of high level professional bowling under tournament conditions.

So how did they do? Over these 14 games, the average score was a 224, which equates to a 673 series. This is a very high average, so these numbers are probably a little inflated. Regardless, how did they get there? Well, they struck nearly 60% of their chances, or an average of 6.7 strikes per game. When they didn't record a strike, what happened? I observed 61 opportunities to convert spares. Of those, 48 were successfully picked up, or a conversion rate 79%. Why did they miss? In most cases, the spares not picked up were splits. I observed 11 total splits, or slightly fewer than 1 per game. Of those splits, only two were converted successfully. Very few makeable spares were not converted, single pins are the best example. Of the 32 opportunities to convert single pin spares that I observed, 30 were converted, or 94%. Here's a simple summary of their performance:

So, are you still thinking of going pro? The biggest problem with comparing the stats of amateurs to those of pros relates to strikes. Oil conditions most seriously affect the strike throw. If you can pick up your spares like a pro and strike 65% to 75% of your chances under easy conditions, your game might be in the right ballpark. Otherwise, forget about it.

Defiance of the Probabilities

2010-03-02T08:26:00.008-07:00

Do you know the difference between a lawyer and rooster? A rooster clucks defiance. So this morning I decided to do a team by team breakdown of our bowling performance. Last night, we faced Lesser Fat for the third time this season. The Fatties are comprised of Randy, Schneids, Lucke, and Fleming. They have three straight on bowlers and one with a light hook. They are slightly better than we are with a handicap about 40 pins less than ours. Over these three occasions, we have won a total of two games against them. What about the rest of the league? Here is the breakdown of the win percentages for all eight teams in the league when facing the Movements:

The first thing to notice is that six out of eight teams have winning records when facing us this year. One team, The Mighty Hucks, has split with us. Only one team, Prairie Rose, has a losing record. Strangely, we have been great against Rose with a 10-2 record. The other thing to notice is the three teams who have absolutely dominated us: Lesser Fat, Little Caesars, and the Wolfpack. With the Movements, these teams represent the worst bowlers in the league by average (no offense intended to any of you; just stating the facts ma'am). Given our handicapping system, our chances of victory should be greatest against those teams. Yet, they have had our number. This is definitely shaping up to be a season not to remember.

Scratched Vinyl and the Art of Sulk

2010-03-01T23:43:00.009-07:00

I could recap the night's bowling, but it would sound much like a scratched record. For you kids out there who have no idea what I'm talking about, you see once upon a time, sounds were recorded as patterns of ridges and troughs in grooves on vinyl discs which were converted to sound when a needle... Oh, never mind.

Instead, I'll just write a script for the Briefcase to read during the annual awards ceremony.

Briefcase: Last and least in the Memorial League of Bernaski for the 2009-10 season, it's the Bowl Movements! With a grand total of 20 wins, we are dispersing to the Men in Black (and red) a total of twelve bucks! [Wait for applause.] They set new records for the fewest pins recorded by any team and the most 1-3 outings ever seen in a single season! They nearly set a record for 0 and 4's as well. Back in September, they started the season at an 11-1 pace, so no one could have predicted what was to follow. It has truly been a season to forget. Despite their inability to roll a ball sixty feet and hit a stationary target, they have been a welcome addition to the league. When a team is in need of a pick me up, a match versus the Movements is sure to turn your fortunes around, and for that, we are grateful.

Has the time arrived for Olympic bowling?

2010-03-01T17:08:00.012-07:00

Except as an exhibition sport, the Olympic games have never featured bowling, and it is not clear why. Let's start with the obvious question. Could bowling even qualify as an Olympic sport? Well, according to the I.O.C.:

To make it onto the Olympic programme, a sport first has to be recognised: it must be administered by an International Federation which ensures that the sport's activities follow the Olympic Charter. If it is widely practised around the world and meets a number of criteria established by the IOC session, a recognised sport may be added to the Olympic programme on the recommendation of the IOC's Olympic Programme Commission.

The first part of this is easy. Yes, bowling has an International Federation. It is the Fédération Internationale des Quilleurs, or FIQ. It has existed for more than 50 years and has been recognized for more than 30 years by the IOC as the governing body of the sport. The sport is definitely "widely practised" around the world. I will demonstrate this using a series of links throughout the post marked with asterisks, such as this one (*); click on any one and you will be transported to the website of a national bowling federation from around the world. All that remains, then, is whether bowling meets "a number of criteria", which are unspecified in this brief description, and frankly, I don't feel like trying to find them. (*) So, let's take another tact. What other sports are recognized by the IOC?

Well, one obvious comparison is curling. With curling, we can fairly easily dispel the notion that athletes must look athletic to compete in the Olympics (*). We could make the same argument about the 50m pistol competition, and yes, it is an Olympic sport. Here are some more obscure ones. Have you ever watched the Equestrian Eventing competition? Or what about a Canoe Slalom race? Shall I continue? Yep, badminton and ping pong qualify as Olympic. If you argue that bowling is simply a recreational activity, how is badminton any different? (*) Or BMX cycling?

My point is not to denigrate any of these fine sports. It is simply to argue that if all of these sports, not to mention forty or so others, qualify as Olympics worthy, why not bowling? I just don't understand what the IOC has against tenpins. I must applaud the USBC's work in this regard. (*) Last September, they published an article about efforts to get the sport into the Games, in which Kevin Dornberger is quoted saying, "This is a world effort... It cannot just be a United States effort or it will fail. We need more resources than that to succeed." Kevin may have hit the nail on the head.

I think here we may have the root of the problem. (*) If it is perceived that bowling is a sport that is ultimately American, then its Olympic bid will ultimately fail. This is why American football does not appear in the Olympics. From the perspective of a member of the IOC, I can see this argument being made quite successfully, except that over the long term, it doesn't really work. (*) Think of Olympic baseball or basketball, sports that were once very gringo, but now are global and globally competitive (*). But maybe that's the problem. Bowling is not yet truly internationally competitive. There are quite a few non-American bowlers who have been successful (e.g., Jason Belmonte [Australia], Osku Palermo [Finland], Shalin Zulkifli [Malaysia]), but I bet the IOC knows that if they were to allow Olympic bowling at this point in time, whether as a team or individual sport, the podium would be dominated by Americans(*), and as long as that is the case, I wouldn't hold your breath. (*)

A related problem is organization. If bowling wants to move beyond an American phenomenon, it really needs to get organized internationally. If you go to the website of the World Tenpin Bowling Association, a subsidiary of the FIQ, you will see that a large number of countries have national bowling associations on paper. For example, this link will take you to the "Asian Zone". Here, you will be surprised to discover that even Bahrain, Iran, and Mongolia have national bowling organizations, but do they really? All that is listed for each of these countries (and in fact for most countries on this website) is an email address; there is no URL for a website. It gives the impression that most of the efforts to organize the sport have been American, despite the impressive list of participating countries that could be compiled. Until bowlers in a large number of nations find the will to truly organize and produce organizations like the USBC and websites like Bowl.com, the argument that bowling is an international sport will likely fail (in spite of *, *, and *)

So has the time arrive arrived for Olympic bowling? As much I would like to see the sport in the Olympic games and as much as it pains me to say so, I would need some more convincing to believe that we have reached that moment in time. As more international bowlers become competitive in the PBA and more countries organize competitive bowling associations, bowling's chances will become better. Then again, you could probably say the same thing about ping pong or badminton. But argument by denigration of your competitors is unlikely to be a compelling approach. The USBC needs to work behind the scenes and let the FIQ do the heavy lifting, and I think it's pretty clear they know that.

Bipolarity in Bowling

2010-03-01T07:00:00.004-07:00

I have no explanation for our team's bowling problems. They are similar to EB's in that we seem to be hot or cold with little in between. Lately, we have been on the cold side of things. Earlier, in the season, things were quite a bit warmer. I was looking at our team time series down there on the lower right, and I was struck by two things. First, our four worst bowling outings have all happened this season. That's more than a little disconcerting. Aren't we supposed to be improving? Second, it really looks like we are bipolar bowlers. We either bowl pretty well or very poorly. There is very little in the middle.

So, I made a histogram of our team series for the season to this point. Histograms show the distribution of the values of a variable, in this case team series. It simply shows how common different values are. Here is what it looks like:

This is not normal in two ways.. If you look at the distribution of virtually any bowling statistic for a bowler or a team, it will be "normal", or bell shaped. There will be a peak or mode in the middle of the graph, which tails off to the left and right. This distribution is bimodal, meaning it has two peaks. It's abnormality stems from its lack of normality, if that makes any sense. The lower mode falls around 1,625, or an average of 135.4 pins per bowler per game. The higher mode is at 1,825, an average of 152 per game.

So, yes, we seem to have two modes of bowling. Sometimes we bowl well; sometimes we bowl terribly. We rarely have a night when our bowling is comme çi comme ça. Why is this? I have no idea. If this pattern described a single bowler, I think I could argue it's mental, as EB is fond of saying. But this pattern describes the bowling of four guys who lack psychic unity. I am also pretty sure that it has nothing to do with the consumption of bowling juice. Whatever it is, I suggest tonight we add to the height of the peak on the right side of that graph.

Remember the Great Awakening?

2010-02-28T08:29:00.021-07:00

In the midst of our recent and prolonged slump, there has been one phrase frequently uttered by our cleanup man, Daniele, "Remember the Great Awakening?" It is a question that harkens back to brighter days on the Bowl Movement scene, days when the sun shone, flowers bloomed, lions played with lambs, and a majority vote actually meant something in the United States Senate. Actually, it wasn't that long ago. It refers to Daniele's bowling from December 7 through January 18, although it seems like it an eternity has passed.

Our cleanup man has a habit of naming things. For example, his two children have had endless names, such as Tater Man and Van Migliac. He is similar to Dubya this way, I guess. When he speaks of the "Great Awakening," he speaks of this:

That graph with a squiggly line doesn't look like much, but it speaks to a string of seven consecutive brilliant outings on the hardwood. Over these seven weeks, his low series was a 494; his high was a 566. He averaged 532 pins per night, or just over 177 pins per game with six 500+ series. He had five 200 games, including his high game of all time, a 222. He also had two 199's. On top of all that, he had the first and only 1st ball average exceeding 9.0 for a Bowl Movement on the 21st of December. The Great Awakening was a special time for JD.

Something happened. Over that magical seven week period, he struck 42% of his frames. For the rest of this season, his strike percentage has been around 29%. Now, I am one to usually attribute such changes to chance, but in this case, the difference is clear and absolutely real. Something was different during the Great Awakening. He was playing pocket pinball like a man with too much time on his hands, and by that, I mean he was absolutely blistering the pocket every night.

It is worth noting that JD has strikes in his genes. Earlier this season, his dad JD, Sr., rolled a perfect game in Erie, PA. Thus, you could probably infer that our cleanup man has an X chromosome, maybe even two. So, his head doesn't swell to the size of a watermelon, I should note that two weeks after the end of the Great Awakening, he bowled his worst series of the BIA, a 337.

So, yes, absolutely I remember the Great Awakening. Hopefully this week, our team can use it as inspiration to finally end this Rip Van Winkle impersonation and have an awakening of our own.

Bowling Puzzler V: The Perfect Velocity

2010-02-25T07:08:00.003-07:00

Ok, for all of you who are algebraically inclined, this one shouldn't be too difficult, but for those of you who aren't, good luck. You might be able to get in the right ballpark, but the exact answer will be elusive.

Most modern bowling alleys have some way of gauging the speed of a ball. I typically throw anywhere between 12 and 18 mph depending upon the shot. If you release your bowling ball directly at the foul line and it rolls to strike the center of the headpin, it will have traveled a distance of about 60 feet. If you throw your ball at a snail's pace of 1 mph, it will take approximately 40.9 seconds to cover this distance. If you throw the heater at 20 mph, it will cover the same distance in just over 2 seconds. Here's the bowling puzzler of the week:

At what velocity in the units miles per hour (mph) must you throw the ball for its speed to be exactly equal to the time in seconds that it takes for the ball to travel 60 feet?

Bowling Mustaches: The Movement2

2010-02-24T06:44:00.003-07:00

Heretofore, we have limited our reviews of bowling equipment to that of professionals, but there are other realms of bowling from which technical tips can be garnered. Today's bowling mustache is the Movement2, which burst onto the bowling scene on Monday in the City Championships of Laramie, Wyoming. Here are its specs:

Style: Movement2
Color: Dark Brown
Thickness: Thin
Length:Width Ratio: 5.43
Earnings: -$1,242
Titles: 0

The Movement2, often confused with the "Peach Fuzz" stache adorning the lips of junior bowlers, is ideal for those interested in worshiping false idols and in maintaining a minor bowling slump. It is proven to give its wearer false confidence. An expedient endeavor, the Movement2 can be grown in about seven days and is best recognized by weak "wrap around the lip" appearance. If you decide to attempt a Movement2, it is unwise to be seen in public without a stick, otherwise you will find it difficult to beat off the ladies who flock in from all corners of the bowling alley to request assistance in various sexual activities.

Sit Shandwich

2010-02-23T10:30:00.002-07:00

In the immortal words of Freddie Mercury, "We are not the champions, my friend. And we'll keep on sucking till the end. We are not the champions. We are not the champions. Plenty of time for losers 'cause we are not the champions of the world."

About halfway through the second game last night, somebody, probably Johnebob, said, "This is a real shit sandwich". Yum. That pretty much describes our bowling last night. I wouldn't be surprised if our scratch series is last in the entire field. Oh, well. There's always next week. I'm starting to sound like EB.

The Odds

2010-02-22T09:10:00.005-07:00

Tonight, we bowl in the Laramie City Championships. The most likely outcome is that we donate $84 to Cody Caldwell, Brett Baker, Adam Whathisname, and the rest of the Gem City's best. In fact, our chances of placing are fairly low, but not impossible. Our top ten finish in the handicapped division last year was impressive and our not bottom finish in the scratch division was also well earned.

So, here's how I see it. I have no idea how many pins took the handicapped division last year. According to what I wrote about midway through the competition last year, the top performance was a 2,916. We came in at 2,859. This year's tournament uses an 80% of 240 handicap. This gives us a 287 handicap, or a total of 861 free pins. If we assume that 3,000 pins will win it for sure, we would need to roll 2,139 scratch to guarantee victory. That means we need 713 pins per game, or an average of 178.25 per bowler per game.

Allow me to put this into perspective. Over the entire course of the BIA, I have a total of 133 team games in the database. Of these, two are greater than 713. So, we do this about once in every 66 games. We need to do it three times in a row tonight to guarantee victory. Our highest scratch series ever as a team was a 1,978, rolled on January 4 of this year. We need 161 pins on top of that. Given our performance this year, I would estimate our chances of getting 2,130 at 0.0005, or 1 in 2,000. If we lower our goal to 2,100 pins, it goes down to 575 to 1. If we want to place, I can't see it happening without 2,000 pins. The odds of that are about 42 to 1. Now, that's doable.

How do you get 2,000 pins? Well, we need to average a 500 series as a team. While the Ging man has been in that neighborhood lately, I think it's safer to assume that he'll come in around 400. That means John, Joe, and I need 533 a piece. We can do that. If there was ever a night for somebody to break 600 (Johnebob, I'm talking to you), tonight is the night.

Finally, I should note that if we put up a blistering 2,000 series, we will finish with only two pins more than last year. That should tell you two things. 1) We bowled our asses off last year; 2) We have gotten better, a lot better.

Bad bet, Pinnius

2010-02-21T09:02:00.008-07:00

Pinnius, God of Bowling, why must you smite me? Have I not followed your ten commandments of bowling, such as Number 7: Cultivate thine mustache on thy fertile field of thine upper lip? What more must I do? Provide you offerings of burnt flesh, like hot dogs on a rotary heat lamp cooker? Come on, buddy. Can't you lend a brother a hand? And what are you doing in Vegas? I had no idea you could bet on the Laramie Bowling City Championships there. Looks like our odds are about right. You're going to bet on Prairie Rose, aren't you? You bastard! I thought we were your chosen sons. Why don't you just go back to that bowling alley in Valhalla, get drunk and eat nachos. We'll do this one on our own.

White House mum on bowling scores

2010-02-20T12:20:00.011-07:00

Despite the campaign pledge to air his bowling games on C-Span, President Obama has remained quiet since August about his bowling. It's been six months since we heard that he bowled a 144 on his birthday. In the meantime, Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney have dominated the political bowling scene. It seems that there is a good chance that the 2012 presidential campaign will be waged on the hardwood.

As a taxpayer of this great nation, I am disheartened by the lack of transparency in government, and I beg the press to dig deeply into the President's bowling activities. Come on Helen Thomas! Help me out here. How about you, Jake Tapper? Chuck Todd? Savannah Guthrie? Bill Plante? Do me a favor. At the next White House press conference, just ask this question, "How's the President's bowling game coming along? Has he improved on his 144?" I need some data to update my Presidential Bowling Time Series, and the citizens of the United States of America deserve to know.

Dick Evans made my day

2010-02-19T20:15:00.004-07:00

To be perfectly honest, I don't read a lot stuff written about bowling. I like to keep my perspective relatively independent. I had never heard of Dick Evans, even though he is a former president of the Bowling Writers Association of America. Anyway, I came across something he wrote back in November, and it made me happy that there are voices of reason in the world of bowling.

Streakers, chaotics, and hypocrites

2010-02-19T13:34:00.006-07:00

In the previous post, I examined the relationship between pickup percentage, (percentage of spare chances converted) to strike percentage (the percent of strike opportunities converted) to see if improvement in bowling comes with improvement in both facets of the game. Afterward, I thought it might be interesting to look at these data as time series, or to examine how pickup % and strike % have changed over time for the Movements. I found some unexpected things.

For this analysis, I used a 10 week moving average, one of my favorite tools for gauging change in skill in bowling. Let's start with the data for our cleanup man, JD. Below on the left are Joe's time series for strike and pickup %. Notice that he has been slowly improving in both aspects of his game over the course of the season with a few hiccups, like the one he is currently experiencing. He peaked back on the 11th of January, and based on last week, he may be heading back in the right direction. If you take the dots that make up each of these curves and compare them directly, you find that there is a strong positive relationship. This means that when Joe is feeling it, he is feeling it in all aspects of his game. When he is getting a lot of strikes, he is also picking up his spares. Also, when the strike game is not there, the second ball is absent as well. I should note that he has made HUGE strides in both aspects of his game this season, perhaps due to his ball change.

In comparison, Johnebob and the Rookie show a second type of pattern. In both cases, there is no relationship between pickup and strike %. This means that they operate independently, or that some nights the strikes are there, sometimes not. Some nights the spare game is there, sometimes not. But there is no relationship whatsoever between the two.

For a third type of pattern, you have to look at my trend below. The curves seem to symmetrically oppose one another. If am improving in strikes, I am getting worse at spares. If my spare game is coming around, my strike game is slipping. In fact, when you compare the two directly (below right), that is exactly what's going on. It suggests that over the last year or so, I have always been improving at one aspect of my game while getting worse at another. I've been going nowhere fast.

So here you have three different types of bowlers. I'll call the first the "streaker" because they are streaky. When the strike game is on, so is the spare game. When one is off, so is the other. This will result in dramatic and streaky changes in game scores from week to week. Johnebob and Gingy could be called "chaotics" because there is nothing predictable about the relationship between their ability to throw the first ball and second. As for me, I should be called a "hypocrite" for constantly contradicting different aspects of my game and making little progress as a consequence.

Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny?

2010-02-19T09:27:00.013-07:00

Ontogeny refers to the the growth and development of an organism from embryo to adulthood. Phylogeny refers to the biological evolution of an organism over time. The phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phlyogeny" is the largely abandoned concept in biology that the course of evolution of a species can be reconstructed through the stages of its development. So I don't have a bunch of creationists using this post as evidence that evolution is some kind of scientific conspiracy, I suggest that you if you are really interested in evolution, spend some time studying the fossil record, genetics, and taxonomy; then get back to me.

While this concept does not work so well in evolutionary biology, does it apply to bowling? In other words, can we look at the stages of development of a series of bowlers of different levels of experience and reconstruct our own evolution as bowlers? In short, I have no idea, but my best guess is that the answer is a qualified "yes". Unfortunately, there isn't much of a fossil record of bowling.

What inspired this question was another question. Is there a correlation between the ability to get strikes and pick up spares? In other words, as you improve as a bowler, do you improve in both aspects of your marking game? If it is simply a question of accuracy, then the answer should be yes. To this end, I compared strike percentage to pickup percentage for this year for five BM bowlers including the four core bowlers and K-terk our sub. I also added in last year's stats for Gee-off, the Canuck, who left for greener pastures at the end of last season. Here's what I found:

Notice how all of the early stage bowlers, those I have labeled "Rookies" fall within a fairly tight cluster. Invariably, they strike 15-20% of their frames and pick up 34-38% of their spares. Joe, John, and I (labeled "veterans") form our own cluster, although it is more dispersed. Without exception, we pick up more than 40% of our spares and strike more than 25% of our frames, although we each have our own strengths and weakness.

If I had data from our first seasons in the Memorial League of Bernaski, would we plot down there with the rookies? I don't know. I think the answer again is "yes" but the grouping would probably be more dispersed. All three of those guys have an average in the high 120's. Our first season averages were: JD: 118, JL: 128, TS: 135. I was really proud of that 135. Wow, things have changed.

Here is what I do know for sure. I think that graph nicely speaks to the second question. Yes, there is a relationship between the ability to get strikes and spares. As you get better at one, you will improve at the other, but we will all take our own path. Some folks have a better spare game. Others have a better strike game. Also notice in that graph that no single bowler is the best at both aspects of the game, nor the worst at both. We all have strengths and weaknesses.

Also, I think it is likely that we all have different starting points based on prior experience bowling and general athletic ability. So while we can generally look at a series of bowlers with different levels of experience and reconstruct a general trend of evolution, the exact path taken will be unique to each bowler.

p.s. I was hoping to add some PBA players to that graph, but the PBA provides such lousy statistics that I was unable to do so.

An update: After collecting some data on PBA bowlers by watching ESPN, I was able to do this. Here is how we compare to pro's. Only a massive gap to cross before we join the tour!

The Month of the Rook

2010-02-18T17:30:00.008-07:00

As of late, I've been a bit focused on myself, my woes, and my facial hair, but there are other things astir in the Movements. For example, two weeks ago, Johnebob landed a 512 series and a dozen X's. This week, the Italian Scallion knocked down 510 pins. But simmering beneath the glory of the veteran 500's have been two remarkable performances by the Rookie.

I keep waiting for the Rook to join the 88 club or to form his own club even lower, but he has been keeping a good distance from that number. Check out his series over the last month or so:

The first four series in that group are pretty much what's expected for a freshman season, but the last two are above and beyond the call of duty. Consider that he came into our February 8 league night with a 127 average. That is equivalent to a 381 series. On that day, however, he put up a 450 series. Then, this week, he went even higher, coming home with a 470. It makes you wonder if he has a 500 in his near future. I should note that the highest series on record for a rookie Bowl Movement was put up by the Canadian on December 22, 2008 when he recorded a 478 for three games, but the 920 pins put up by Gingy, this season's rookie, over the last two weeks are easily a record.

It is also worth pointing out that this upward swing is not sustainable. He has been adding an average of 28 pins a week to his series. If he could continue doing so, he'd easily be over 500 in 2 weeks. By the end of the season, he'd be brushing up against a 900 series. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen. He hasn't even recorded double digit strikes once over the last two weeks. On Feb. 8 he had nine X's. This week, he had seven.

So what's going on with the Rook lately? Obviously it's about spares. For two weeks in a row, he has picked up more than 50% of his spares. This week, he led the team in pickup%, getting 66.7% of his leaves, or 16 for 24. This is easily a record for a rookie in the BIA. The 2nd closest performance was his own from the previous week when he got 54.2%. He also did the same back on September 21.

Keep it up Rook. Keep doing what you're doing. If we're ever going to get some wins, we're going to need it.

Bowling Mustaches: The Smallwood

2010-02-18T00:22:00.005-07:00

As a continuation of our effort to review top of the line bowling equipment, our second featured bowling mustache is the Smallwood, developed and successfully implemented by PBA World Champion Tom Smallwood. Although a fairly nascent development in the bowling world, the early success of the Smallwood suggests that it may soon become commonplace in the sport. The Smallwood's specifications are:

Style: The Smallwood
Color: Light Brown
Thickness: Thin
Length:Width Ratio: 6.30
Earnings: $84,087.50
Titles: 1

The Smallwood is not recommended for beginning bowlers. Its smoothly tapered margins may prove too technically challenging for most novices to master, but doing so is likely to pay dividends. If you choose to attempt a Smallwood, it is important to thin it just beneath the septum. Also, it is most effective when paired with a subtle soul patch.

Boy, do I feel stupid

2010-02-17T14:20:00.014-07:00

So here I am in the midst of a minor slump. For the the last five weeks, I am stuck around a 150 average. I have been endlessly tinkering with my game to no avail. I am even cultivating a tight mustache with the hopes that it will help. Yesterday, I decided to go for a long ski with a lot of uphill to clear my mind. This morning, it was time to figure some things out on the lanes. I bowled eight games. I averaged 181.5. That is huge for me. I went in with a few ideas:

1) Simplify this game. I have been trying to throw a straight ball to pick up spares and have had limited success. My pickup percentage has been slipping. I decided to abandon it. Why not just have a single shot and a single release?

2) Hit my target- If I can throw the same shot and hit my target regularly, I should be able to pickup anything.

3) Know your target- I have had all kinds of targets from the near triangle marks to the pins themselves to things in between. On the strike ball, I always aim for the near targets. This was the big one for me today... I decided to come up with a simple chart that translates target to pin struck for spare balls. Let's call it a spare chart.

Let me explain exactly what I did because it made a HUGE difference in my spare game. Ok, about 15 feet from the foul line are seven aiming marks arranged in a wedge. You know what I'm talking about. They look like this:

For every spare shot, I recorded at which board the ball crossed the target marks and which pin it hit. I have two different starting positions for spare shots. For spares on the right side, I begin with the center of my right foot on board 30. For pins on the left side, I put the center of right foot on board 10. So, for each starting position and each spare shot, I recorded something like this: Board 15: 3/6 pins. This means that the ball rolled across the 15 board and hit the pins between the 3 and 6 . I recorded this information regardless of the board I was trying to hit. After repeating this process about 40 times, I was able to build a spare chart for my game. It looks like this:

The vertical lines represent where the ball struck the pins. The target board is where the ball crosses the targets. The starting position is where I begin my approach. By the end of the day, I had picked up exactly 2/3 of my spares. This is a MAJOR improvement for me, and many of those I failed to pick up were splits. In fact, after the first game, in which I went 1 for 4, my pickup percentage was always over 66.7%. It felt absolutely amazing.

So... here are a few things to keep in mind. I assume that all good bowlers already have some system like this, whether it is formal or not. I feel like an idiot for taking so long to collect this basic information about my game. But keep in mind that this is for my game. I would recommend to anybody that they do the same thing for their game. I doubt my system will work for everybody. The only downside is that you have to look like a dork collecting a bunch of data while you bowl. I look like this all the time, so I'm used it.

Also, I have no idea if I will be able to repeat today's performance on a regular basis. But I have now boiled my game down to something very simple. Throw one type of shot and hit my target. That's all I have to do. It remains to be seen whether I can hit my target, but at least now I know what it is.

Bowling Puzzler IV: 200 on the Scoreboard

2010-02-16T23:29:00.000-07:00

For bowlers of lesser skill, 200 is the magic number. It is the difference between a good game and a great game. For our team, the fate of the 200 game almost invariably comes down to the 10th frame. It goes something like this... You are sitting on a 166 and two strikes in the 9th. To get to the deuce, you need to strike your first ball and get at least 7 on the 2nd. Because we suck at bowling, scores of 200 or above are always a late game affair. Here's my question. If we were better at bowling, say with 200+ averages, would we see scores greater than 200 appear on the scoreboard earlier in games? Well, yes, of course we would. But the real question is:

What is the minimum number of frames you have to bowl to see a score of at least 200 on the scoreboard? What about 250?

Time for some hardcore slump busting

2010-02-15T23:32:00.010-07:00

I am a believer in science. I am a believer in probabilities. Nonetheless, I also know when enough is enough. Tonight was another losing night for the Movements. Damn you, Little Caesars! After the last game, Nathan said, "That was our best game ever!" No shit, Sherlock. We bring that out of everybody. Sure, the Rookie had his best night ever, and Daniele went 500. Still, we could only muster one stupid win.

It is time to move into the realm of the supernatural. Here's my plan. Next week are the City Championships. Our chances of placing are about as good as the chances of Bryan Shuster voting for Barack Obama in the next election. The plan is three pronged:

1) Bring back the Rockies towel. The towel was our kryptonite. According to the great Chinese philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, "If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss." The original towel was probably transported to Albuquerque by a Union Pacific locomotive, but I've got two more in the storehouse.

2) I will not shave until next Monday when I will shave the hairs of my face into a mustache. I'm thinking a Smallwood, soon to be reviewed. Mustaches obviously enhance skill and confidence in bowling. When the bowling residents of our fair city see my fine stache, they will crumble in the shadow of my intimidation.

3) On Sunday night, I will give Pinnius, the god of bowling, a thorough thrashing. This technique brought many wins last season. Coincidentally, the first time this method was employed was the week prior to the City Championships. What week is it? That's right, it's the same week.

City of Laramie, let's see how your bowling can stand up to my magic! If I could just get a few more Movements on board, we would be unstoppable. Who among us is willing to don a nice bowling stache? I will not remove the stache until I go sub-500. Chances are, that will be Monday night, but what the hell? Nothing else is working.

Not in shape? Not a problem

2010-02-15T08:21:00.006-07:00

Almost a year ago, I wrote a long rant about the lower status of bowling in the world of sport. An anonymous commenter chimed in with, "For the sake of tv, it would help if bowlers had more hair (on their heads) and less gut. You know, looked a little more like athletes." It has certainly been my impression in observing both avocational and professional bowlers that fitness is not a major concern for many bowlers. This is not to say that all bowlers are on the portly side, but many are. Fitness, both aerobic and muscular, should be an asset in bowling, but is it?

One way to answer this question would be to compare a series of measurements of fitness in bowlers to their performance, and in fact, such a study has been performed. In June of 2000, Benedict Tan and colleagues published a paper titled "Correlations Between Physiological Parameters and Performance in Elite Ten-pin Bowlers" in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport (pp. 176-185). For a group of 42 highly skilled bowlers in Singapore, Tan et al. compared bowling performance to age, height, weight, Aerobic Power Index, grip strength, leg strength, and flexibility. They also examined the relative performance of three different types of bowlers "heavy ball strokers, heavy ball crankers, and light ball spinners" (p. 177).

Here are their results:

Allow me to translate this table for you if you are unaccustomed to looking at such data. Tan et al. compare physiological measures (on the top) to bowling score for males and females (left). They are using a method called correlation. Correlation measures the degree to which two variables are related to one another. The correlation coefficient, in the table listed as "Pearson Correlation" measures the strength of the relationship. This value can vary between -1 and 1. A high positive value (close to 1) means a very strong positive relationship. For example, a strong positive correlation between height and score would mean that you could predict average bowling score based on height, and that taller bowlers generally got higher scores. A strong negative correlation (close to -1) between these variables would imply that shorter bowlers are better. A value close to zero means a weak to nonexistent correlation. In the analysis of height vs. score for males, the correlation coefficient is -0.14 meaning a weak negative correlation... or that shorter bowlers appear to bowl better.

Equally important, however, is the next row on the table, the one labeled "Significance". This row tells us the probability that the observed relationship can be explained by chance. In other words, if you compare height and score for 42 bowlers, there will always be some degree of correlation even if none exists in the real world. Simply by chance, for example, the shorter bowlers in your sample might be a little bit better than the taller ones. In science, we do not consider any correlation to be meaningful unless the significance value is less than 0.05, which means specifically that there is a less than 5% probability that the observed correlation could be explained by chance. If you examine that table, you will see that there is only one meaningful result, the one I have circled in red. There is a positive correlation between aerobic fitness and bowling scores in females. None of the other variables showed any relationship to bowling average.

In other words, with the possible exception of aerobic fitness in women, in bowling, it does not matter if you are tall, short, fat, skinny, aerobically fit, strong, or weak. In fact, it doesn't even matter if you are young or old. They also found that it does not matter whether you are a stroker, cranker, or spinner. So what does matter?

The paper concludes that "other factors like mental skills and technique have a greater contribution to bowling success at that [elite] level." Here's the take home message. If you want to be good at bowling, spending a lot of time at the gym probably won't do much for you. You can do just as much good sitting on the couch and eating junk food. If I had to guess, like almost every activity, the secret to being good at bowling is really just practice. Now, get off your ass and go to the gym anyway!

Do you think that's air you're breathing?

2010-02-13T06:00:00.004-07:00

One of my favorite themes in bowling is causality and perception. We see changes in our bowling performance from day to day and week to week. We want to believe that we are responsible. When we bowl really well, we feel a sense of pride. When we bowl poorly, we feel like we had a temporary lapse of ability and have let our team down. It's like the hitter in baseball who goes hitless for 10 straight games. They are in a slump. Something isn't working. There is a hitch in the swing. Slumps feel real, painfully real, but are they? One of the major conclusions of those who study sports statistics and performance is that streaks and slumps are an expected outcome of the operation of chance, and only very rarely can they be demonstrated to differ from what we would expect given the operation of the rules of probability.

Here's a nice description of the problem. This is from a paper titled "Twenty years of “hot hand” research: Review and critique" by Michael Bar-Eli, Simcha Avugos, and Markus Raab, published in the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise (2006, Vol. 7, p. 536):

"No one doubts that streaks do occur in sports. Obviously, every now and then a professional basketball player may hit a string of nine or ten shots. The key issue in the debate, however, is whether the observed superior (or inferior) performance really deviates from what could occur by chance. Clearly, even random processes such as coin flipping could occasionally result in long streaks of heads or tails. So, an ‘‘unusual’’ performance by an athlete or a team may represent pure statistical probability, or it could be related to a real ‘‘streakiness’’ mood. Supporters of the hot hand strongly believe that even if one accepts the notion that in the world things are often random, there are still some moments in time when athletes act well above or below their norm (i.e., their base rate)."

What brings this to mind is my own recent performance. I started this bowling season on a tear. Consider this. Over the entire course of the prior season, a total of 36 weeks, I had in sum three 500 series, including the first of my bowling career. This season, I had 10 during the first 16 weeks. I was bowling like somebody who was starting to understand what the hell he was doing. Yet, over the last month, I feel like I can't get even close to 500. That's my perception, anyway. In reality, my last four series have been in a narrow range, from 442 to 460. The point is that my perception is that my bowling ability has eroded, but has it really? If you have read any of my prior statements on similar topics, you should be able to anticipate the answer.

There are some simple statistical methods that can be used to determine if there is some trend underlying a time series. A time series represents the collection of data over a period of time, such as hourly measurements of temperatures, daily stock values, or weekly measurements of bowling ability. If there is some underlying trend, like I am getting progressively worse at bowling, then I should be able to predict next week's performance based on this week's performance. In fact, I might be able to predict to some extent how I will bowl three weeks from now. If there is no underlying trend, prediction falls apart, and the data tell us that either no trend exists, or that it exists over much longer time scales.

One simple way of examining this problem is a technique called "serial correlation". It's pretty simple. Put all of your bowling series in a list in one column sorted by date. Put the same data in the next column over, but shift the values down by one row, as shown in the picture to the left. Now, make a scatter plot of those data. What we're doing is comparing last week's score to this week's score. If there is some underlying trend, we should see some kind of relationship between the two. If not, there is no trend. Here are two hypothetical examples:

On the left, the bowling series show a smooth rise and then a gradual drop. If we compare the previous to the subsequent week's bowling scores, there is a clear correlation. What this means in the simplest sense is that if I bowled well last week, I will also bowl well this week. If I bowled poorly last week, I will also bowl poorly this week. In other words, the system is to some degree predictable, and we can use past performance to predict future performance. For the time series on the right, scores seem to fluctuate wildly. When we do the serial correlation, there is no relationship between scores from week to week. This means that the system is totally unpredictable and that there is no underlying trend. Something else is driving these ups and downs, something like chance. I should note that you can shift the values down again to see how well your performance from two weeks ago predicted this week's performance. The more you shift the values down, the greater the time depth of prediction you are examining.

How does the real world compare? Here are the time series and serial correlations for four Bowl Movements for this season (Sorry K-Terk, I don't have enough data for you):
In brief, this system appears to be totally unpredictable at this time scale. Various degrees of correlation are present with the greatest being that for JD, but none of these correlations are greater than would be expected by chance. Interestingly, most of the correlations are negative. This means that if you bowl well one week, you are actually more likely to bowl poorly the next and vice versa, but we should not read too much into that as these are not meaningful patterns.

So... going back to my recent slump, it does not appear to be real. It feels real. It feels like I can't get more than 10 strikes in a series anymore. It feels like picking up spares is much more difficult than it used to be, but these ups and downs are simply to be expected. If I was bowling in the Matrix with Morpheus right now, he would be asking me, "Do you think those are bowling shoes you're wearing right now?"

Bowling Crime: Alley losing money? Just set fire to your competitor

2010-02-12T06:06:00.006-07:00

Steven Smink, a retired Philadelphia police officer, is the owner of Pike Lanes in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Apparently, Mr. Smink, like myself, was not much of a businessman. According to the website Daily Finance, Pike Lanes "was a dump with out-of-date equipment." With bankruptcy looming, what did Mr. Smink do? Allegedly, he hired two young men to torch his competitor, Loyle Lanes in Vineyard, NJ. Before he was charged with two counts of aggravated arson and conspiracy to commit arson, he was quoted as saying, "These things happen. You have wires all over the place and no sprinkler systems. You just pray that nothing shorts out and that no people are in the building if a fire breaks out."

Apparently, he left out the part about praying that nobody is in the building when two delinquents he paid pour gasoline all over the place and light it on fire. Charles Loyle, who built Loyle Lanes with his brothers, was quoted by NBC Philadelphia, "We got comments that he would put us out of business in two years, but it took him a little over two years but to take us out of business they had to burn us down." The moral of the story is this. To all of you bowling alley owners who wonder why your business is failing, you can: a) blame the president for a crappy economy; b) set fire to your competitor; c) invest a little money to spruce the place up. Please think before you answer that question.

Bowling Puzzler III: Syzygy

2010-02-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

Anybody who bowls on a team is familiar with the following. Most weeks, somebody has a really good night. Someone else usually has a bad night. From time to time two bowlers on your team will bowl really well. Even more rarely, three bowlers have good nights. For some reason, though, it seems like it is very rare that all four bowlers bowl really well on the same night. It's like the alignment of the planets. It's not that uncommon for a few planets to align in orbit, but to get a true syzygy of all eight (nine?) is a rare thing.

So, here's the puzzle. Assume there is a bowling team that bowls once a week with four members. On any given night, a person can bowl above average or below average. Let's say the chance of doing either is 50%.

How often would you expect all four bowlers to be above average? What about a five person team? How often should all five bowlers exceed their averages?

Don't sweat the single pins

2010-02-10T13:46:00.010-07:00

Single pin spares are annoying. If you knocked down nine pins, chances are you threw a pretty decent first ball. All that stands between you and a mark is one stupid pin. It shouldn't be that hard to get it, but for some reason, on some nights, it seems like a major chore. I watch the PBA with amazement at the ease with which professional bowlers can take out any single pin. Professional bowlers are all well above 90% in their single pin conversion rates. As for me, this season I have converted 92 out of 132 tries, or just about 70%. I'm actually pretty happy with that number for this stage of my bowling career. As for the rest of the Movements, Johnebob is at 65%, JD is a 50% single pin guy, and the Rookie is at 49%.

In this post, I want to explain why it shouldn't be a very difficult thing to do, especially for a pin that's not the 7 or 10. The most satisfying single pin conversion occurs when the ball strikes the center of the pin, sending it cleanly straight back into the pit, but you can miss by quite a bit and still get that lone duck. Shown below is the situation drawn to scale. A standard bowling pin has a diameter of 4.766". From where this odd measurement is derived, I do not know. The diameters of legal bowling balls range from 8.5 to 8.595". Let's assume that all bowling balls come in at the top of that range. What is the total width of the area in which you have to throw the ball to pick up a single pin? Well, it's twice the diameter of a bowling ball plus the diameter of a pin. It comes in at just under 22 inches.

A ball that just brushes against a single pin often will not knock it down, so let's deduct 1/8" from each side. So, to collect a single pin spare (not the 7 or 10 pin), you have to deliver the ball somewhere within an area that is about 21 5/8" in width. That's a fairly large area. In fact, it's more than half the width of the entire lane!

Now ask yourself this. If I asked you to throw a shot where the entire ball exited the lane on the right side between the midline and gutter, could you do it? What about the left? Of course you could. That's all you have to do to pick up a single pin spare. You just have to shift that lane "half" to the appropriate position.

Now, what about those pesky corner pins? To be honest, both of them put me a little on edge. I pretty much hate 'em. Well, the center of the 7 and 10 pins stand 2 3/4" from the edge of the gutter, so there's only about 1/3 of an inch between the edge of the pin and the gutter. By the same process, we can figure out how much room you have to play with over there. It comes out to an area with a width of about 13.6", or just about 1/3 of the lane. Can you deliver the ball to a a given third of the lane. Sure, you can. So stop worrying about it.

Advice for bad bowlers: How to throw a hook

2010-02-10T09:06:00.017-07:00

On Monday night, the Rookie expressed some interest in throwing a hook after reading an article in the most recent US Bowler. I am no expert; that's for sure. Nor, am I a coach. So you should take everything you are about to read with a grain of salt. I am writing this for him and for anybody else thinking about coming out of the straight bowling closet. Three of the Movements throw a hook. Johnebob and Daniele do not use a conventional throw. They use a thumb out technique and have had plenty of success doing so. I note this because there is more than one way to skin a cat. In any sport or physical activity, there is the "classic" or widely accepted way of doing something. Then, there are the other ways. If something works, even if it is not widely used, why change it? Anyway, my shot is closer to the classic, and that is what I am going to describe.

Another motivation is that I tried to learn a hook on my own by two methods, trial and error, and watching other people throw one. What I discovered was that you can develop all kinds of bad habits doing this. I made it an overly complicated shot. It's actually a very simple motion. Still, for the first 500 or so shots you take, it feels awkward as hell, but you have to give it time. You have to hone it. You have to learn how to throw it consistently. I am still learning. Again, I am no coach, so don't put too much weight on anything that follows.

Ok... stand up. Now, let you arm fall to the side and relax. Now, rotate your palm, so it is facing forward. Look at how your wrist is positioned, it extends straight out from your forearm. That is how you release the ball when you are a straight bowler. Now, do the same thing, but cock your wrist, so your palm is facing upward. That's how you throw a hook. That's it. That's all there is to it.

Ok, that's not entirely true, but it's close to the truth. I know you are wondering how that could cause the ball to spin. Assume that position again with the wrist cocked upward. Now move just move your thumb upward, so it's opposite your middle and ring fingers, the position it would be in if it were in the bowling ball. Now imagine a 15 lbs bowling ball in your hand. Which way does your hand want to rotate? Inward, right? If you release the ball this way, you will get spin whether you like it or not.

The other secret to throwing a hook is to get that thumb out of the ball first. If you have been throwing straight your whole life, this is a bit scary. You are used to the ball coming off of all of the fingers at the same time. When you throw a hook with that cocked wrist, the thumb comes out, the hand rotates with the fingers still in the ball, and the spin is generated. The middle and ring fingers should only be inserted to the first knuckle. This is why it's important to have a custom drilled ball. The spacing on that house ball you've been using might be too close.

I have two more things to share on the matter. You shouldn't put too much thought on trying to get the ball to spin because if you release it with that cocked wrist, it will. Once, you get the basic motion down, you can start working on getting a higher rate of rotation. If you get too "handy" with it, you will get rotation that is perpendicular to the long axis of the lane, or even a little bit of back spin because you will let the hand migrate to the side of the ball or even to its front. The ideal spin rotates at a 45 degree angle to the lane axis. This will give you the most break. Strangely the best way to do this is to keep your hand behind the ball. If I start getting funky spins, I always think about keeping my thumb behind the ball and directly above my fingers. Here's a nice slo-mo vid of a hook shot release:

Finally, if you haven't done this before, you may find that it's not easy to hold a 15 lbs bowling ball with a cocked wrist. You just don't have the strength. If that's the case, just practice and the strength will come along quickly. Don't be discouraged at first. It will feel strange. You might feel like you can't control it. With time, it will become easier, and your bowling will improve.