How to screw up a near-guaranteed 200+ game in 10-pin bowling

200 games are very rare for amateurs like me and my friends. In 2024 we have only seen a handful and we are nearly 75% of the way through the year. I'm not just talking about on league days, I'm talking on any days at all including regular practice days. I went on a practice day today and did pretty well in all 3 games that I played but there was one game where I was absolutely on fire.

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Now I am going to preface this by saying that the bowling alley was an absolute madhouse today. It is the 2nd day of a public holiday and I was concerned that it was going to be exactly like it is. Since none of the kids are in school and most adults are not at work, mommy and daddy have to find something for the kiddos to do and for a lot of people, that choice is the top floor of the shopping mall where there are 2 kid playgrounds a, cinema, and multiple arcades. There is also a bowling alley up there but kids tend to be quite crap at bowling so not many of them were actually playing. However, they do create a ton of distractions and will actually wander up onto the lanes with zero regard to any sort of courtesy.

It doesn't seem that bad from the picture but I didn't want people to think I was perving on their kids so I didn't actually want to get a bunch of people in the photo but you can tell that this area isn't exactly designed with adults in mind and there were hundreds of kids in there, some of which would just come and sit in our seats and wander onto the bowling area until staff or parents came and pulled them back. Things like this make me wonder if I was just as oblivious to my surroundings when I was a kid because it seems like these youngsters just walk forward until they run into something like they are a Roomba or something.

So it was extra difficult for me to concentrate this time around but somehow I managed it. In game one I pulled down a 158, which is pretty good by my standards and about 28 pins above my league average. However, it was in game two where I really shined.

They say that "greatness begets greatness" and the fact that my lane partner was bowling above his own average helped as we seemed to just bounce excellence off of one another throughout the game. It was frame 3 where things really took off for me as it is very rare for me to bowl 3 strikes in a row, let alone 4. It was nearly 6 in a row because that 9 followed by a miss was actually a better head-pin contact roll than some of the others were but sometimes you are just unlucky when it comes to how the pins fall.

Having a 174 by frame 8 is almost a guaranteed 200+ game especially when up until that point, I was bowling about as well as I ever do but here is how you screw up this near sure thing: You get a wicked split in the 9th for starters and this was a very tough one with a very low conversion rate

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It is called a 4/7/9 split and it is extremely unlikely that you will ever end up with these 3 pins standing and only these pins standing. The only way you can convert this is to brush the two pins on the left hand side and make the front pin crash across the lane on a wing and a prayer and hope it hits the 9, which is 12 inches closer to the other 2 pins than the 10 would be - which is a slightly "easier" split to pick up but still nigh on impossible for me. I ended up getting close, but in the end only got 2 of them down. So this got me to 183 but seeing as how my game was going I still had a very good chance to surpass 200 but then something that is easier for others but really tough for me happened in the 10th frame.

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I call them "two-fers" but they are known as "double wood" and a variety of other nicknames. Basically you have 2 pins one after the other but they are around 22 inches apart. Since I bowl with a curve and am relatively incapable of NOT bowling with a curve i have to do something truly magical to get both of these. Either I have to miraculously hit the 3 pin on it's right-to-left so that it hits it just on the front and knocks it back somehow or I have to clip the head pin on the right and have enough spin on it to keep the spin going and hit the one behind it. The latter approach is what the pros use more frequently but I am not a pro, I am nowhere near as good as a pro and 90% of the time I am going to miss this shot. I missed this shot and ended up with an open frame in the 10th and a final score of 192.

Now don't get me wrong, this is a VERY good score for an amateur but for the most part I would rather be well away from getting 200 than be so close only to flub it up in the last two, very unlucky frames. I don't know why my luck turned so bad at the end of the game but that is exactly what happened.

Oh well, at least it wasn't on a league day where there was a ton of observers.