If you follow my tales of relative woe you are likely familiar with the fact that I have been lamenting the fact that my game has gone seriously downhill in the past year, perhaps more. Once considered someone that was always a threat for the belt, I have gone through a period of time where I was never a threat, and if I was ever in a top tiered situation, I wasn't really thought of as real competition. It was a "bye week" so to speak. My last time that I bowled for the championship I was defeated by more than 100 points over 3 games. It was embarrassing but we had fun with it anyway.
Well 2 weeks ago I was in the promotion match from 2nd division to the premiere league and I don't know exactly what happened there, but I was on my game getting scores that were consistently around 150, which is what I used to do a long time ago. I wasn't getting a lot of strikes but I was picking up spares very consistently, which is almost as important.
When you start the game out like this it can be a bit demoralizing for your opponent. Fortunately for her I spent the next 3 frames not converting but still ended up beating her by a lot. That was 2 weeks ago though.
The way it works is that the people with the top 4 scores in the premiere league, including the person who was promoted in the same day from the 2nd division, go into a wheel randomizer to see who is selected for playing against the current champion the following week. With my high game of 169, I was in the top 4. I truly hoped that when that wheel was spinning around that I was NOT going to be the person selected but I had the same 25% chance as anyone else and it landed on me. We have only had a handful of recently promoted people who got a chance the very next week to bowl for the overall title, but I was now one of them.
Our current champion has held the title for over 2 months and while he has had a few close encounters, for the most part he is significantly better than the rest of us. I wasn't resigning myself to defeat but given the way in which my performance has been the opposite of consistent in the past year, I wasn't planning on being able to replicate the magic that I had just finished doing.
I decided to not practice and not overthink the game and just turn up, relax, and try to do my best.
The day started out like it always does with people turning up mostly on time but a few stragglers kind of held up the process. I got the names registered like I always do and thankfully got the count right on the first try. We began our games after a brief announcement and my first match started out about how I expected them to with my opponent getting two spares in the first two frames and me getting a near impossible split in frame one, then not converting it, then getting an open frame in frame number two as well. So this mean, and I dont' remember exactly how it panned out but the max score that my opponent could have had at this point is 38 while the max score I could have is 18. This is not how you want a championship game to begin.
Well, I guess it took me 2 frames to figure the lane out because everything started to change from that point forward. While I was closing nearly every frame outside of the first two including getting 2 strikes in a row, my opponent was getting very unlucky on his first ball and was ending up with impossible splits regularly.
Final result after game one was
165 (me) to 152 (not me)
I couldn't believe this. This guy has been unstoppable for over two months and had defeated everyone. Now I had him backpedaling. This was not a time to get arrogant though and I needed to stay focused. In game two I wouldn't say that I slipped but rather was bowling more like I should be, whereas my opponent stayed very consistent yet was still plagued with bizarre splits that honestly, should have been strikes
Result of game two was
154 (me) to 158 (not me)
Now the way the scoring works is that it is the total of all games' scores added up which matters, not the winners of individual games. So if you aren't great at math I'll do it for you: After game one I was up by 13 points and with the 4 point victory by my opponent in games 2, I was now a mere 9 points ahead with a full game to go.
Keep in mind what I told you about strikes and spared and how if one person gets one and the other doesn't, that 9 point lead is gone instantly.
Towards the middle of game 2 a busload of kids turned up and I tried really hard to stay focused but is there anything louder than a group of 100 or so kids in an arcade? I don't think so.
In game 3 every single frame mattered the most but it went like this. Anytime that my opponent would get a strike or a spare, so did I, and every time that he had an open frame, for some reason I would as well. It was almost like we were being driven by one another and this is what made the game so fun to watch. No one had clear victory at any point. In fact, it all came down to the very last frame in the very last game. My opponent had a single pin pickup in frame 10 and he MISSED IT. It was a relatively easy 9 pin too and he gets these 90% of the time. I know he was really disappointed in himself because he knows he can make those most of the time. I on the other hand ended up also with 9 pins on ball one of the 10th frame but mine was the 10 pin, which since I have a right to left spin, is the most difficult pin for me to hit. I did a cross lane squeeze (made up term) but I managed to knock it down and get the extra ball in the 10th. This basically sealed his fate at this point because all I had to do was not roll a gutter ball and I was going to be victorious. I ended up getting 8 of them.
Third games scores
148 (me) to 150 (not me)
So while my opponent was much more consistent than I was, i was pretty consistent as well. In the end it was those 2 strikes in a row in game 1 that made all the difference. That one situation boosted my score by 20 points and even though it didn't seem super significant at the time, it ended up being enough to win the entire thing.
overall championship score
467 (me) to 460 (not me)
While I cannot be 100% sure of this because we have nearly 4 years of stats in our group I believe that this is the closest any championship game has ever been ever since we adopted the 3-game format.
If we had asked the people in attendance to bet on who would win this matchup I would guess that almost everyone, including me, would have bet on my opponent to win instead of me. Everyone was surprised and happy not because they dislike the guy I was playing against (he is a really nice guy and very humble champion) but because everyone loves a good underdog story, don't they?
So this time the wheel that spins to see who takes on the champion was being spun to see who would play against me. Unfortunately it landed on the guy that is likely the 2nd best player in the entire league and normally, unless something strange is going on with him, he will bowl significantly better than everyone. I am not going to be pessimistic about this though because the week prior to me winning the championship, the guy who is playing against me LOST to the guy that I beat. So let's just hope I can bring the heat for the 3rd week in a row. Win or lose it is a great time
Still not going to let you guys know who I am but if you live in Da Nang I would imagine you could probably figure it out if you really wanted to.
Here's to hoping that I can make a sporting game out of my first title defense in probably 2 years tomorrow!