Last Night’s Oil Theory

If you don’t know much about bowling, this post won’t mean much. Last night I rolled a 122, followed by a 112.

lane_pattern_gradientFor someone who should be in a the top quarter of the league, this is not good. Lane 8 especially was a killer. I’ve moved my ball to playing up the right side and hooking into the pocket. This would be different than rolling a bowl through the lane and hitting the pocket with a wider hook. From what I’ve learned, up the right side seems like a more effective strike ball because it hits the pins with more MPH and that seems to be the goal of the game. Hit the perfect part of the pocket with the fastest ball you can throw.

With this idea in mind, after bowling a high career series for myself this past Monday, I felt I should work the lanes the same as I did 2 nights before. However this proved ineffective especially on lane 8 where my first 3 frames on that lane were 9, 1, 3 in embarrassing fashion. I started moving further left to compensate and this left weak entries in the pocket leaving the 7 or 10, which I wasn’t converting. Then I started losing my feel on the other lane and started making poor adjustments and rolling just as bad. In the 3rd game I went back to my initial game plan up the right side and guess what, I started hitting the pocket hard. I had 4 strikes and a spare in 5 frames. I finished with an exact 200 which was decent but had better potential and wondered what happened with a 122, 112, 200 series?

1384527691_76450The bottom line is that hi spot is not a first class bowling establishment. My theory is that the oiling of the lanes occurred in the afternoon and the machine missed the end of lane 8; i.e. it was shut off too early or ran out of oil. This caused my ball to hit the oil-less lane early and start hooking directly left. This led to missing hard down the left side. To compensate I moved left and tried to roll the ball to the right part of the lane. As the night went on, the oil on uncleaned bowling balls started to come back to the top of lane 8. In game 3 when I went back to the initial plan, it worked like a charm. I will say that at least 3 of the strikes were Jersey so I was getting paid back for the poor first few games but talk about a volatile night of bowling.