Bowling technique is used as an example of something you can abuse in order to get quick wins and easy improvement on bowling ability, yet quickly hit a skill ceiling and you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) if you wish to reach an advanced level.
From TFA there also seems to be a third path of "this isn't wrong, it's actually a better technique", and the article does outline the whole journey of self-coaching, being called a cheater and ultimately being validated via a string of victories and imitators.
We need people like this that self-teach "in the wild" to break down expectations and learn what's possible. This is how revolutionary leaps are made in a field; Eddie Van Halen with guitar is a classic example.
> you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling)
Yeah that's what's happening with me in tennis. As a kid I never really took any formal coaching, just learnt from my brother and started rallying with people.
Recently, I decided to start playing again, so I went to a coach and I am learning the correct technique from the beginning. Have to constantly correct and rewire my automatic reactions.
It feels really good to learn something you're bad at, and then seeing your brain slowly automating the new stuff over time.
I had the same thought regarding that article, and I think it's worth emphasizing that even the bowler in the GQ article risked being an "expert beginner" but managed to escape the trap:
"As such, Advanced Beginners can break one of two ways: they can move to Competent and start to grasp the big picture and their place in it, or they can ‘graduate’ to Expert Beginner by assuming that they’ve graduated to Expert."
...and then from the OP:
> When Belmonte first joined the PBA, he reveled in his power game: Let’s break some pins, he remembers thinking. But as he watched some of the game’s finest up close, he realized something: “These guys had the ability to make the ball dance. They could make the ball dance to any tune the lane was asking for. And I couldn’t do that.”
> He worked to decrease his rev rate, his velocity, the number of moving parts to his game. And he slowed his approach, eliminating a “kangaroo hop” designed to generate power, and delivering the ball from a position of greater stability and balance. “I noticed my ball was still striking with 20 percent less revolutions, and my ball was still sending messengers. But I was more consistently in the pocket. And I realized, I don’t need to break a pin every round.”
So despite the "expert beginner" article using the author's own bowling experience as an anecdote of what not to do, it's not trying to say you should always follow the crowd and blindly trust the prevailing wisdom; rather, it's saying that you should seek to understand your faults and grasp the bigger picture, and not automatically assume that minor expertise necessarily implies major expertise.
>Bowling technique is used as an example of something you can abuse in order to get quick wins and easy improvement on bowling ability, yet quickly hit a skill ceiling and you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) if you wish to reach an advanced level.
I had to bite the bullet on this a few years ago for my league. I grew up doing 5-pin and when switching to 10-pin the timing of everything was messed up due to how I threw and I didn't want to make the change. Finally someone convinced me to do it a few summers ago and had some bad slumps due to it. The improvements finally really showed this past season with significantly better consistency though.
There's other such things, such as the Fosbury flop. However, it's a high risk, high reward endeavor, because you don't necessarily know in advance that it's a better approach. There's a survivorship bias here, there's any number of people with eclectic techniques that ended up not being any better than the "standard" technique even after tons of practice. You also shouldn't use "but maybe it's a better technique" when using a known dead end, which will be a very tempting play for a lot of people. No, you're not going to take the known-broken bowling technique and be the one to rehabilitate it after millions of other people.
> you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling)
I was told I'd need to do that with typing.
I started out two-finger hunt-and-peck at age 7 on a TI 99/4A, and gradually added more fingers. Using my pinky for Shift, in particular, was a gateway to using my middle fingers for letters too. I didn't take any speed tests at the time, but retrospectively I'd guess I was around 8-10wpm.
By the time I got to middle school and took a typing class with Mavis Beacon emphasizing home-row and stuff, I was already faster than the kids leaving the class from the previous semester, on the order of 20wpm. I did the exercises but I didn't really change my style much, and left the class typing roughly the way I started, but with more awareness of how I was "supposed" to do it. Feh.
Then in high school, I learned about BBS's and modems, got my own modem, and found a local multi-line BBS with multi-user chat. And that created a heck of an incentive -- the faster I could type, the more I could participate in the present conversation rather than what happened 2 minutes ago.
Social connection was thus linked to typing speed, and for a 9th-grader it's hard to find a more powerful motivator than that. I found myself adding fingers and breaking the 60wpm mark before the summer was out. No more hunting, still basically pecking, but pecking with 3 or 4 fingers on each hand.
These days my typing style superficially resembles a home-row style; my wrists rarely move, but I perch over QWEF/QERG and JIO' rather than ASDF and JKL; like Mavis would've liked. I find the slightly higher perch gives me easier access to the symbols on the number keys and functions in the F-key row. I sit comfortably around 80wpm on plain text, and handily outrace home-row typists on code or anything with a lot of symbols.
Moreover, the division between hands simply isn't. When typing with two hands, the letters in the middle, YGHVBN, are fair game for either hand. But if I have to reach for something, or if my right hand is on the mouse, I'll reposition my left to WRTH or thereabouts, and it feels perfectly natural to roam around the whole keyboard as needed.
Thus my keybindings in games and CAD are probably horrifying to a home-row typist, but since I'm not wasting half my left hand's reach with tab/caps/shift, I have a lot more useful keys available to me in keyboard+mouse mode. I have CAD bindings from QAZ all the way to IKM, with only OPL off-limits. (And frankly, my left hand is on a SpacePilot half the time anyway. When I bounce it back to the keyboard, it's not required to settle into any particular home position, because the whole board "feels like home" for either hand.)
I've never felt a desire to unlearn my evolved style and start over with home-row; I believe it to be demonstrably inferior for the sort of things I actually do.
Why in the world would an online article not include a short gif or an embedded video showing the bowling technique? Is gq.com primarily a print medium?
Primary sources are anathema to mainstream media. It's not just political articles, it's the whole damn profession. If you can watch ten seconds of him bowling you don't need to spend ten minutes on the article.
Maybe because it's not so different from the usual technique as the article wants you to believe. Unless you're a bowling expert you wouldn't even notice it.
Wow, just watched a clip and was reminded of my time on my high schools varsity bowling team in 2001. Long story short, I was cut from the team because I used this exact technique of not putting my thumb in the hole. The coach’s verdict was “I couldn’t develop to a meaningful player who refused to learn the proper technique” and ultimately cut.
Now, I wasn’t an exceptional bowler, and I swore off bowling after that, but this article and YouTube clips bring back memories.
Note: for people with small hands like myself, it’s difficult to thumb a bowling ball in a manner that is conducive to curving the ball. As an adaptation, the “two handed approach” is a side effect of keeping the ball steady before delivery.
> If you’re not impressed, if you happen to think that because you can fire a 250 at your local Bowlero, you can compete on the PBA Tour, let’s make one thing clear. Your local lanes are oiled in a way that helps turn misses into strikes, and when coupled with recent advances in bowling ball technology, have produced an abundance of 300 games among amateurs. But the oil patterns on the tour, unlike those at your local house, are devilishly difficult: the comparison is akin to logging a hole in one at your local putt-putt course, the contours guiding the ball toward the hole, versus sinking a downhill double breaker at Augusta. In other words, there is no comparison.
Wikipedia is actual more clear about this technique
>The two-handed approach should not be confused with the two-handed delivery. Just prior to the release of the ball, a bowler using a two-handed approach removes their supporting hand, effectively delivering the ball with only one hand. They are considered a one-handed bowler by governing bodies …
>An actual two-handed delivery involves using both hands simultaneously to give force to the ball and is extremely rare in adult competition; it is mostly seen with young children first learning the game.
I find it super interesting when a new efficient technique breaks into professional sports. As it is described in the article, there is always push back from the establishment, with even accusations that the new technique is cheating, then in some cases the rules are changed to ban the new technique and in some cases the technique makes its way into mainstream. Some interesting examples from the top of my head:
- V-style in ski jumping: when it appeared in professional ski jumping in the 80s it was considered inappropriate by judges, and athletes had to avoid it to not be penalized with low style points. But at some point in the 90s it became so much superior in distances achieved that athletes started winning with that even after penalties, so it became recognized as valid by judges and took over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_jumping_techniques#V-style
- Fosbury flop in high jump: this one didn't receive much push back, it was kind of a Columbus egg, once Dick Fosbury won the gold in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, it spread quickly and in no time all major athletes were using the technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop
- front flip on long jump: this one was quickly banned from competition, due to safety concerns. It is theoretically more mechanically efficient and has potential to produce longer jumps, but since it was never allowed to be perfected in high level competition we will never know how far it could go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_jump#Action_in_the_air_an...
- dunking free throws in basketball: this is other one that was quickly banned. Once a young Wilt Chamberlain demonstrated he could in fact dunk from behind the free throw line in a low league sort-of demonstration game, a rule banning it was created in the low leagues, and when Chamberlain made into the NBA the rule soon followed.
https://www.sbnation.com/2022/3/26/22996516/wilt-chamberlain...
It is easy to understand. A LOT of people have invested A LOT of their life into learning something. And now somebody comes and basically says "the thing you were doing is worthless now". And assuming most people identify with what they do, what they are also hearing is "you are worthless now".
There is for example a new theory that the cancer is not, in fact, a genetic disease. That it is actually a metabolic dysfunction of certain cells and the genetic abnormalities are A CONSEQUENCE of the metabolic dysfunction (driven by huge increase in free radicals). Here more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KusaU2taxow
But a huge number of people have devoted their entire lives to fighting cancer based on assumption that it is a genetic disease. And when you come with a proposition like that, almost all people become deaf to your arguments and the only thing they hear is danger to your identity.
The butterfly stroke in swimming was originally a faster variant of the breaststroke, demonstrating another possible response of the establishment: containerized adoption.
Another one: Soccer (football) style kicking for field goals in American Football. Pete Gogolak introduced it to the AFL in the 60s and by 1980 the traditional kicking style had disappeared entirely.
Bowling is developing into "big balls golf." You try to read and guess oil conditions, with the oil pattern being different at different venues, and the pattern change by every previous bowl of the day. An innovation that would make it more interesting to watch would be a way of showing these differences to the audience.
>> Your local lanes are oiled in a way that helps turn misses into strikes, and when coupled with recent advances in bowling ball technology, have produced an abundance of 300 games among amateurs
Sorry, is this real? I haven't gone bowling since I broke my wrist in an accident 20 years ago. I was never a great bowler before that, but it never crossed my mind that the bowling alley would somehow conspire to help me get a high score. If anything, bad shoes and too much wax would send me sliding. I know most of the good old bowling alleys died, and got replaced by these new urban work/life/bowling/sushi places that charge $50 a game, but are they really putting special grease patterns down to let the sensitive children walk away happy for instafucking more strikes? Is that a real fucking thing?
The wax is on the lane, only way you’d get it on your shoes is if you walk on the lane which you don’t.
The pattern thing is a bit more complicated, veritasium has a video on it (and on bowling balls).
Wax was introduced to protect the lanes, however players fairly quickly learned to use the wax, as it allows hooking more easily and severely, which makes hitting the right location at the right angle much easier. Bowling alleys will then use different patterns for different purposes e.g. a local alley will use a more forgiving pattern, while pro alleys will use a “sport pattern” from a variety of standard patterns (or possibly in-house) to tune the difficulty and for more interesting shots.
House patterns are actually a lot simpler than pro patterns, usually it’s a simple sideways gradient (more in the center, less on the sides) going straight down to halfway to 2/3rds the lane. Aside from player satisfaction (it punishes mistakes less), a factor of them was simply saving oil.
This is not new, complex patterns were first experimented with by the PBA in the 90s (spraying lanes by hand) to make shots harder, as the balls had advanced too much. Though it only became an official feature in the 2000s as machines became capable enough to print specific patterns, reliably.
This means reading wax patterns has become an important skill of pro bowl.
In essence it’s the opposite of what you think, sport lanes and events use patterns specifically designed to be more difficult on purpose.
This is absolutely real, and I am impressed they included that. It is called a "walled shot" I used to work as a bowling mechanic when going through college. The lanes in PBA bowling have to have a minimum amount of oil. There should be more oil in the middle and less on the boards towards the gutters.
However every single house has no oil at all on the boards towards the gutter. This allows the balls when thrown with a hook to boomerang back and smash the pins.
I always wanted to make it a PBA shot, but the managers said no absolutely not! Bowlers equate how good a place is with how good they bowl! They get angry and superstitious about everything. Like they would think the head mechanic oiled the lanes better than 19 year old me but it was really done entirely by the machine. So if you gave them a regulation shot, and they started bowling worse, they would go to an easier house.
Edit: It is not just the high end recreational bowling centers serving sushi, it is all of them. They change the pattern if hosting a PBA event.
you'll find more about it if you google "oil pattern bowling". it's obviously though a micro optimization only professional players will be able to utilize.
As a serious bowler I wouldn't say Belmo broke bowling - he's saving it.
Two handed bowling isn't unfair and it's not easier than one handed bowling. I've tried it on multiple occasions but it's really hard to generate the speed required to throw 500+ revs.
Furthermore, if it was so easy everyone would switch it to because it's clear that it won't get banned.
I don't see this one here yet: the two-handed, underhand free throw in basketball.
I'm happy to have a more knowledgeable person correct me (not having been a player, ever), but AFAIK this is a known-good technique. It's perfectly legal, but players feel it makes them look like a sissy.
I've had holes drilled into multiple balls which were supposed to allow me to bowl comfortably with thumb inserted. I always ended up taking my thumb out of the ball and palm it instead, with my hand positioned in the opposite direction from normal. My latest ball is a bit lighter than the average one... 13 pounds... and there are only two holes which are drilled slightly deeper than normal. I don't know how many RPMs I'm putting on it, but it's definitely spinning faster than most people I've bowled with. After having watched a video, this guy looks to be doing much the same thing except he's stabilizing the ball with his other hand.
I learned to bowl this way from a friend of mine over 25 years ago and it's been a favorite ever since. My mom was a member of a bowling league at one point and I absolutely wore out her 11 pound ball when she stopped playing competitively.
That is so interesting for amateur play, it will be a revolution for casual players with low grip strength. The way he performs the whole swing while holding the ball with the palm of both hands, instead of just gripping with your dominant hand's fingers, means he is using arm strength during the heaviest part of the swing. I mean, it is the full strength of both arms vs the grip strength of only one hand, it should be an order of magnitude difference, so weaker players will be able to focus more on technique instead of being 100% dedicated to just not dropping the ball mid swing.
bowling is fucken weird..I was a junior almost pro bowler and I know Belmo, being around the same age, coming up at the same time and in the same area as him…he’s a freak in the best sense of the word. I remember some other kids who would bowl with a bigger hook (and their thumbs) but Belmo was just super consistent…knew he would do great and very glad he has, despite all the haters
[+] [-] rkachowski|2 years ago|reply
Bowling technique is used as an example of something you can abuse in order to get quick wins and easy improvement on bowling ability, yet quickly hit a skill ceiling and you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) if you wish to reach an advanced level.
From TFA there also seems to be a third path of "this isn't wrong, it's actually a better technique", and the article does outline the whole journey of self-coaching, being called a cheater and ultimately being validated via a string of victories and imitators.
[+] [-] ralphc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhaynayar|2 years ago|reply
Yeah that's what's happening with me in tennis. As a kid I never really took any formal coaching, just learnt from my brother and started rallying with people.
Recently, I decided to start playing again, so I went to a coach and I am learning the correct technique from the beginning. Have to constantly correct and rewire my automatic reactions.
It feels really good to learn something you're bad at, and then seeing your brain slowly automating the new stuff over time.
[+] [-] memcg|2 years ago|reply
I read your comment, and the linked article, and will enjoy thinking about it all day.
[+] [-] kibwen|2 years ago|reply
"As such, Advanced Beginners can break one of two ways: they can move to Competent and start to grasp the big picture and their place in it, or they can ‘graduate’ to Expert Beginner by assuming that they’ve graduated to Expert."
...and then from the OP:
> When Belmonte first joined the PBA, he reveled in his power game: Let’s break some pins, he remembers thinking. But as he watched some of the game’s finest up close, he realized something: “These guys had the ability to make the ball dance. They could make the ball dance to any tune the lane was asking for. And I couldn’t do that.”
> He worked to decrease his rev rate, his velocity, the number of moving parts to his game. And he slowed his approach, eliminating a “kangaroo hop” designed to generate power, and delivering the ball from a position of greater stability and balance. “I noticed my ball was still striking with 20 percent less revolutions, and my ball was still sending messengers. But I was more consistently in the pocket. And I realized, I don’t need to break a pin every round.”
So despite the "expert beginner" article using the author's own bowling experience as an anecdote of what not to do, it's not trying to say you should always follow the crowd and blindly trust the prevailing wisdom; rather, it's saying that you should seek to understand your faults and grasp the bigger picture, and not automatically assume that minor expertise necessarily implies major expertise.
[+] [-] starky|2 years ago|reply
I had to bite the bullet on this a few years ago for my league. I grew up doing 5-pin and when switching to 10-pin the timing of everything was messed up due to how I threw and I didn't want to make the change. Finally someone convinced me to do it a few summers ago and had some bad slumps due to it. The improvements finally really showed this past season with significantly better consistency though.
[+] [-] jerf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myself248|2 years ago|reply
I was told I'd need to do that with typing.
I started out two-finger hunt-and-peck at age 7 on a TI 99/4A, and gradually added more fingers. Using my pinky for Shift, in particular, was a gateway to using my middle fingers for letters too. I didn't take any speed tests at the time, but retrospectively I'd guess I was around 8-10wpm.
By the time I got to middle school and took a typing class with Mavis Beacon emphasizing home-row and stuff, I was already faster than the kids leaving the class from the previous semester, on the order of 20wpm. I did the exercises but I didn't really change my style much, and left the class typing roughly the way I started, but with more awareness of how I was "supposed" to do it. Feh.
Then in high school, I learned about BBS's and modems, got my own modem, and found a local multi-line BBS with multi-user chat. And that created a heck of an incentive -- the faster I could type, the more I could participate in the present conversation rather than what happened 2 minutes ago.
Social connection was thus linked to typing speed, and for a 9th-grader it's hard to find a more powerful motivator than that. I found myself adding fingers and breaking the 60wpm mark before the summer was out. No more hunting, still basically pecking, but pecking with 3 or 4 fingers on each hand.
These days my typing style superficially resembles a home-row style; my wrists rarely move, but I perch over QWEF/QERG and JIO' rather than ASDF and JKL; like Mavis would've liked. I find the slightly higher perch gives me easier access to the symbols on the number keys and functions in the F-key row. I sit comfortably around 80wpm on plain text, and handily outrace home-row typists on code or anything with a lot of symbols.
Moreover, the division between hands simply isn't. When typing with two hands, the letters in the middle, YGHVBN, are fair game for either hand. But if I have to reach for something, or if my right hand is on the mouse, I'll reposition my left to WRTH or thereabouts, and it feels perfectly natural to roam around the whole keyboard as needed.
Thus my keybindings in games and CAD are probably horrifying to a home-row typist, but since I'm not wasting half my left hand's reach with tab/caps/shift, I have a lot more useful keys available to me in keyboard+mouse mode. I have CAD bindings from QAZ all the way to IKM, with only OPL off-limits. (And frankly, my left hand is on a SpacePilot half the time anyway. When I bounce it back to the keyboard, it's not required to settle into any particular home position, because the whole board "feels like home" for either hand.)
I've never felt a desire to unlearn my evolved style and start over with home-row; I believe it to be demonstrably inferior for the sort of things I actually do.
[+] [-] perlgeek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joenot443|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfEKI5iL-Ok
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jansan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firstlink|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlvljr|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] erfgh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treyfitty|2 years ago|reply
Now, I wasn’t an exceptional bowler, and I swore off bowling after that, but this article and YouTube clips bring back memories.
Note: for people with small hands like myself, it’s difficult to thumb a bowling ball in a manner that is conducive to curving the ball. As an adaptation, the “two handed approach” is a side effect of keeping the ball steady before delivery.
[+] [-] stephenitis|2 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/11da-YAOXBI
[+] [-] erik|2 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/11da-YAOXBI?t=253
[+] [-] Neil44|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajnathani|2 years ago|reply
> If you’re not impressed, if you happen to think that because you can fire a 250 at your local Bowlero, you can compete on the PBA Tour, let’s make one thing clear. Your local lanes are oiled in a way that helps turn misses into strikes, and when coupled with recent advances in bowling ball technology, have produced an abundance of 300 games among amateurs. But the oil patterns on the tour, unlike those at your local house, are devilishly difficult: the comparison is akin to logging a hole in one at your local putt-putt course, the contours guiding the ball toward the hole, versus sinking a downhill double breaker at Augusta. In other words, there is no comparison.
[+] [-] haunter|2 years ago|reply
>The two-handed approach should not be confused with the two-handed delivery. Just prior to the release of the ball, a bowler using a two-handed approach removes their supporting hand, effectively delivering the ball with only one hand. They are considered a one-handed bowler by governing bodies …
>An actual two-handed delivery involves using both hands simultaneously to give force to the ball and is extremely rare in adult competition; it is mostly seen with young children first learning the game.
[+] [-] wingerlang|2 years ago|reply
> Belmonte’s technique is, technically, a one hander—his left hand leaves the ball a split second before he releases it with his right.
[+] [-] SkeuomorphicBee|2 years ago|reply
- V-style in ski jumping: when it appeared in professional ski jumping in the 80s it was considered inappropriate by judges, and athletes had to avoid it to not be penalized with low style points. But at some point in the 90s it became so much superior in distances achieved that athletes started winning with that even after penalties, so it became recognized as valid by judges and took over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_jumping_techniques#V-style
- Fosbury flop in high jump: this one didn't receive much push back, it was kind of a Columbus egg, once Dick Fosbury won the gold in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, it spread quickly and in no time all major athletes were using the technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop
- front flip on long jump: this one was quickly banned from competition, due to safety concerns. It is theoretically more mechanically efficient and has potential to produce longer jumps, but since it was never allowed to be perfected in high level competition we will never know how far it could go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_jump#Action_in_the_air_an...
- dunking free throws in basketball: this is other one that was quickly banned. Once a young Wilt Chamberlain demonstrated he could in fact dunk from behind the free throw line in a low league sort-of demonstration game, a rule banning it was created in the low leagues, and when Chamberlain made into the NBA the rule soon followed. https://www.sbnation.com/2022/3/26/22996516/wilt-chamberlain...
[+] [-] onetimeuse92304|2 years ago|reply
It is easy to understand. A LOT of people have invested A LOT of their life into learning something. And now somebody comes and basically says "the thing you were doing is worthless now". And assuming most people identify with what they do, what they are also hearing is "you are worthless now".
There is for example a new theory that the cancer is not, in fact, a genetic disease. That it is actually a metabolic dysfunction of certain cells and the genetic abnormalities are A CONSEQUENCE of the metabolic dysfunction (driven by huge increase in free radicals). Here more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KusaU2taxow
But a huge number of people have devoted their entire lives to fighting cancer based on assumption that it is a genetic disease. And when you come with a proposition like that, almost all people become deaf to your arguments and the only thing they hear is danger to your identity.
[+] [-] lukas099|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenadu02|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristianp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d--b|2 years ago|reply
Right now the only “excitement” one get from watching bowling is when one of the player fails at performing a strike.
[+] [-] SudoAlex|2 years ago|reply
However the professional bowlers will have the skill, experience and equipment to deal with all the different oil patterns.
[+] [-] xattt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devnullbrain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kon-Peki|2 years ago|reply
The required construction costs would almost certainly bankrupt 90% of the facilities, and kill the game
[+] [-] IggleSniggle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindslight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noduerme|2 years ago|reply
Sorry, is this real? I haven't gone bowling since I broke my wrist in an accident 20 years ago. I was never a great bowler before that, but it never crossed my mind that the bowling alley would somehow conspire to help me get a high score. If anything, bad shoes and too much wax would send me sliding. I know most of the good old bowling alleys died, and got replaced by these new urban work/life/bowling/sushi places that charge $50 a game, but are they really putting special grease patterns down to let the sensitive children walk away happy for instafucking more strikes? Is that a real fucking thing?
[+] [-] masklinn|2 years ago|reply
The pattern thing is a bit more complicated, veritasium has a video on it (and on bowling balls).
Wax was introduced to protect the lanes, however players fairly quickly learned to use the wax, as it allows hooking more easily and severely, which makes hitting the right location at the right angle much easier. Bowling alleys will then use different patterns for different purposes e.g. a local alley will use a more forgiving pattern, while pro alleys will use a “sport pattern” from a variety of standard patterns (or possibly in-house) to tune the difficulty and for more interesting shots.
House patterns are actually a lot simpler than pro patterns, usually it’s a simple sideways gradient (more in the center, less on the sides) going straight down to halfway to 2/3rds the lane. Aside from player satisfaction (it punishes mistakes less), a factor of them was simply saving oil.
This is not new, complex patterns were first experimented with by the PBA in the 90s (spraying lanes by hand) to make shots harder, as the balls had advanced too much. Though it only became an official feature in the 2000s as machines became capable enough to print specific patterns, reliably.
This means reading wax patterns has become an important skill of pro bowl.
In essence it’s the opposite of what you think, sport lanes and events use patterns specifically designed to be more difficult on purpose.
[+] [-] gnopgnip|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialp|2 years ago|reply
However every single house has no oil at all on the boards towards the gutter. This allows the balls when thrown with a hook to boomerang back and smash the pins.
I always wanted to make it a PBA shot, but the managers said no absolutely not! Bowlers equate how good a place is with how good they bowl! They get angry and superstitious about everything. Like they would think the head mechanic oiled the lanes better than 19 year old me but it was really done entirely by the machine. So if you gave them a regulation shot, and they started bowling worse, they would go to an easier house.
Edit: It is not just the high end recreational bowling centers serving sushi, it is all of them. They change the pattern if hosting a PBA event.
[+] [-] 2-718-281-828|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] test1235|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEI69YFm9uo
[+] [-] evandale|2 years ago|reply
Two handed bowling isn't unfair and it's not easier than one handed bowling. I've tried it on multiple occasions but it's really hard to generate the speed required to throw 500+ revs.
Furthermore, if it was so easy everyone would switch it to because it's clear that it won't get banned.
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
I'm happy to have a more knowledgeable person correct me (not having been a player, ever), but AFAIK this is a known-good technique. It's perfectly legal, but players feel it makes them look like a sissy.
[+] [-] hindsightbias|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11da-YAOXBI
the inertia on that curve is crazy
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|2 years ago|reply
I've had holes drilled into multiple balls which were supposed to allow me to bowl comfortably with thumb inserted. I always ended up taking my thumb out of the ball and palm it instead, with my hand positioned in the opposite direction from normal. My latest ball is a bit lighter than the average one... 13 pounds... and there are only two holes which are drilled slightly deeper than normal. I don't know how many RPMs I'm putting on it, but it's definitely spinning faster than most people I've bowled with. After having watched a video, this guy looks to be doing much the same thing except he's stabilizing the ball with his other hand.
I learned to bowl this way from a friend of mine over 25 years ago and it's been a favorite ever since. My mom was a member of a bowling league at one point and I absolutely wore out her 11 pound ball when she stopped playing competitively.
[+] [-] SkeuomorphicBee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] windowsworkstoo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb88|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbrindze|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darrenf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carscache|2 years ago|reply
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