Wednesday - November 30, 2011

Nice Try Drew

Not a winning night at Greed League. We won the first game by a huge amount, then lost the second, then lost the third badly, so we didn’t even take wood. 2 - 5 for the night.

I threw 24 over the first game, then rolled a 254 in the second and we lost that one anyway. By the third game I was exhausted, and all the aches and pains from the past couple of days ganged up on me, so my approach was short on the last lunge step. Which means that my line was fine but the ball was going short about a foot and coming in way too high, so my score really suffered. What should have been an easy 600 series wound up being in the mid 500s. Meh. But hey, I earned another refrigerator magnet award for the 250+ game. Whoopee!

We’re still holding on in second place, but we’d better start posting some wins if we’re going to keep it.

OK, and I’m off to work. The 2 day job on that house is stretching into 2 1/2 days because of the season. The rain is over, and it’s still pretty mild out for late November, but there just isn’t any darn usable daylight at this time of the year. 7 hours instead of the 10+ you get in the summer.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/30/2011 at 08:55 AM   
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   Friday - October 28, 2011

Rough Week Bowling

Bah, humbug.

We split Tuesday on Greed League, 3-4. Good thing we won big the first game, because we lost the next two by just a few points each. Our team is in 2nd place, but I don’t know if we’ll hold onto that after this week. Still, I was bowling mostly well. I’m getting a lot more on the ball lately, and getting it further out to the dry so that it comes back sharply. Unfortunately I don’t have the line quite right yet, so my scores are only a bit over average even though I’m hammering the pocket almost every frame. Something needs a minor adjustment, and then I’ll start getting lots more strikes. Right now I’m getting way too many nine counts, but at least the leave isn’t always the 10 pin. I hate the 10 pin.

We lost pretty bad Thursday on Cheap League, 2-5. Conditions were just plain weird. Worse, one of the lanes had been bowled on before our league started, so the two lanes were very different. I know it’s unreasonable to expect the bowling alley to clean the lanes and then lose sales by setting them aside for several hours because leagues are coming in, but it would be nice if they could refresh the lanes used for open bowling. Thursday night is a big league night for them, with 2 6:30pm leagues, a 7:30pm league, and then a 9pm league. The kid usually runs the lane machine at about 4:30, and that’s the dead part of the day; probably only half a dozen people at most come bowling between 4:30 and 7:30. So you’d think it wouldn’t be much trouble to set 4 or 6 lanes aside, and then clean and oil them at about 7. That’s only about 5 minutes work. This house is all synthetic, so the oil doesn’t need a chance to settle in like it used to with the old wooden lanes.  Whatever; half the challenge is adapting to varying conditions. Once again I was hooking right into the pocket, but getting more 9s than strikes. But my spares game was pretty good, so I wound up rolling 10-15 over average each game. We bowled the low average team, a group of beginners we gave a 138 pin handicap to. And naturally they had their best night ever! One woman on their team threw a 191 followed by a 179, which is outstanding given her 113 average. They were getting headpin strikes with their wimpy straight ball throws, while we were all hooking in powerfully and leaving pins. Go figure. That’s how it goes sometimes. So our Thursday team will sink even lower in the standings, probably down to last place after this week. Funny thing is, we have the highest average and the greatest number of scratch pins of any team on the league.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/28/2011 at 08:40 AM   
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   Friday - October 21, 2011

Random Chance

Sorry to have not bored you to tears with my bowling blogging lately. I’ve been in a slump, but my teams have been doing Ok. Mostly.

We won all 7 on Tuesday at Greed League. The other team had an off night, and we weren’t quite so off, so we slaughtered them. Took the first game by 214, the second one by 190, and the third game by 78, which gave us the wood by more than 480 pins. Slam! My bowling was pretty awful though; all or nothing. I could not hardly make a spare to save my life, but my series total for the night was only 4 pins below average. Talk about a slump: I started the first game with 5 opens in a row. Egad. But then I threw 5 strikes in a row and a spare to finish up just a bit over average! The other team was leaving evil splits all over the place and blaming the oil patterns.

Last night at Cheap League we all bowled well but lost all 7. My ball was pretty much dead, so I had it resurfaced and run through the rejuvenator to steam the oil out. The thing was a sponge and had to go through twice to get clean. So now the ball is hooking again, and I put new fingertip inserts in so I can get some rev on the ball, and my slump is over. I threw a 575 series, which is back up where I usually bowl. Not that it did any good. The other team just flat out out-bowled us. I even came up with a 214 in the third game, which helped our team tie our opponents’ scratch score, but they had a 10 pin handicap so we lost that one by 10. We’re in 9th place on this 12 team league, but we have the highest team average. That means we’re always giving handicap points to everyone else. The whole league was having a hard time adapting to the new conditions last night. The oil pattern was pretty easy, but the alley had just sanded the approaches (finally! it’s been 3 years, and the approaches were almost as sticky as fly paper), so we were all sliding around as if we were on ice. Lucky me that I have fancy bowling shoes that have replaceable soles, so I could switch to a less slippery toe slide and a stronger heel brake.

Sometimes you can bowl poorly and win. Sometimes you can bowl quite well and lose. It almost seems like it’s random chance. 

Posted by Drew458     on 10/21/2011 at 09:22 AM   
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   Friday - September 16, 2011

Rolling Right Along

My team on the Tuesday night Greed League took all 7 points. That’s a small miracle. We didn’t win it so much as the other team lost it; we bowled pretty much on average but the other team bowled well under average. Not sure if this was a tactical move on their part to keep their averages down, or if it was just an off night for them. I’ll take the wins, thanks.

We were cracking jokes, and new team member Bob tells the one about NASA and the pen. It’s an old urban legend at this point, but the truth is that the Space Pen is real, it’s still made by the Fisher Pen Company, and a plain old pencil can actually be dangerous in a space capsule. I’m not sure if they quite believed me when I mentioned all of that, but you can still buy either the original Fisher AG-7 which is still in use today by all the space agencies, or the slightly cooler, better looking, and less expensive bullet version which comes in a neato box where the foam lining looks like a lunar landscape.  The story behind proprietor Paul Fisher is interesting reading too. Radical, Libertarian, engineer, and successful mass marketeer. Learning a bit about thixotropic non-Newtonian pseudoplastic fluids is also interesting; the ink in Fisher’s pens have this property, as does a large amount of the fluids in the human body.

So anyway, back to bowling. We took 5 out of 7 in my Thursday night Cheap League, and had a blast. We lost the first game by less than 10, and then rallied for an absolute slaughter in the second game, winning by more than 180. The 10th frame was a dream come true for me; I’ve spent years being on teams that just sputter to a dull finish in the 10th, but in this game my team was on fire. Out of 12 possible balls we got 9 strikes and a spare. It was stunning. Awesome. We got the third game too, proving to ourselves that we could overcome the psychological challenge of the massive automatic scores generated by the other teams 2 absentee bowlers, both of whom are great rollers. Plus the 29 pin handicap we gave them. Their lead bowler would throw one ball, and suddenly about 58 points would show up on the scoreboard. Yikes. But we did it.

I call the one group Greed League because they charge $22 a week, pay the league officers quite well, and give out a 1st Prize award to the winning bowlers that is $130 more than the year’s dues, and that’s for a men’s league of only 8 teams. It’s a money league and the competition is ferocious. I call the other one Cheap League because they keep costs to a minimum. This one is only $14 a week even though they pay the same alley fees as the first league. Their officers get paid less than half as much, and the prizes for the winners are really small. With 12 teams, it’s a mixed league that emphasizes the social over the competitive. So it’s my team’s plan to win this one while also being Miss Congeniality and making friends with everyone. And really, the bottom line isn’t all that different: my whiz-bang spreadsheet shows me that a $100 prize in this league gives you the same net expenditure as a $394 prize in Greed League, so why spend the money in the first place?

Posted by Drew458     on 09/16/2011 at 09:59 AM   
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   Wednesday - August 31, 2011

test

Damn, I lost another post! I wrote 8 good paragraphs this morning, and they’re gone. I must be hitting the wrong button, and shouldn’t blog before my first two cups of coffee are working.

It was all about how I found out that this Tuesday bowling league I’m on is Shark Central, and how they deserve their black reputation and haven’t learned a thing since half the league quit in disgust a few years ago. Whatever. I needed to rant, and did so through my keyboard. Consider yourselves fortunate that all that vitriol went off into the digital ether somewhere.

But just for fun I think I will build a Shark-o-Meter into my little bowling spreadsheet tool, with settings from 0 to 11 reflecting top weighting the award money, the range from “happy shiny people” to “screw you, winner take all”. This league would probably rate about an 8 or a 9. Very sharky. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/31/2011 at 03:04 PM   
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   Thursday - August 25, 2011

Yay Us !

Winter league starts next week.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/25/2011 at 08:48 AM   
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   Thursday - August 18, 2011

Big Mistake

We had an off night at league, and managed to win only 1 game last night. This was the first week of position rounds, and we played the 2nd place team who was trailing us by 7 points. Now they are only trailing us by 4 points, which means we will have to face them again next week. If they win all 3 games they get the championship. If we win just 1 game then we get it. Yikes. Too much drama.

I went to the kick off meeting for the Tuesday night league. The motion was made to raise the weekly dues by $2, with the reason given that all the other Big Money leagues charge at least that much and that this league hasn’t raised it’s dues in several years. Funny thing is, this league is not advertised as a Big Money league, and it may not be working as one either.

So I made a serious mistake. I sat down and tried to figure out what the goals of this league are, and how they can be accomplished by the prize fund. Which means I started playing with spreadsheets. Big Mistake. Excel is a dangerous toy to give to an obsessive/compulsive like me. I’ve spent 2 days now running numbers, but the truth is “you can’t get there from here”. At the meeting it was said that this league historically tries to award the 1st place team enough cash so that they wind up bowling for free for the year. That’s great, but what about everyone else? Are we “big money"-ish in that the top places are awarded as best as possible at the expense of the bottom places? Or do the winners bowl free, and everybody else splits the remaining money as closely as possible?

I’ve been running those scenarios, which means I’m plugging away at a 70 page long spreadsheet. And honestly, it looks to me like “winners bowl free” can be done for $5/wk LESS than the current cost. Sure, sure, the more money everybody puts in, the more we can all get out. But it also turns out that the less we put in, the less we get out while at the same time having more in our pockets every week!  And then I realized I really am a Tea Party person at heart, because what I’m doing is no different than what Congress does, just in miniature. Give them enough tax money to fund the most important goals, and leave the rest in my wallet.

Now I want to run the “winners bowl free, but everyone else gets a really tight split on what’s left” scenario. Spreadsheets are dangerous.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/18/2011 at 01:21 PM   
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   Thursday - August 11, 2011

I need one

Link sent in by Vilmar - How to get ahead in bowling. Oh, wait, sorry, that was a head. These would be perfect for a Halloween bowling party. Or for totally freaking out your opponents. Truly sick!

Yes, it’s a bowling ball. It just looks like the head of a zombie! Artist Oliver Paass painted a set of these balls that were then placed in German bowling alleys to advertise a TV channel specializing in horror films.

In bowling, intimidation is half the game. I wonder if you can get these made to order? Sneak photos of the folks on the other teams and get them made up. Seriously frightening. If they were made on slightly under-size balls, then given a clear plastic coat to bring it up to proper diameter, like the famous Viz-A-Balls, they’d even be legal. Gross, but legal.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/11/2011 at 08:44 PM   
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   Wednesday - August 10, 2011

Good, but not Good Enough

We bowled against the X family team tonight. We beat them soundly (by 128) in the first game, and by 63 in the second, but lost the 3rd game by 38. So we took 5 out of 7.

We were 4 points over the 2nd place team going into this week, but they won 2 tonight. With tonight’s 5, that puts us 7 over them. Which is one full week’s worth of points. Problem is, the last two weeks of league are position rounds, which means the 1st place team plays the 2nd place team both weeks unless we can put a total lock on it. So we need to win 4 next week at least, which will open our lead to 8 and clinch us the win. Problem is, they’re better bowlers than we are. So what we really need to do is to not buckle under pressure. We can win this. We can. But it isn’t going to be easy.

Should we win 5 or 7 next week, that will put us out of reach even if we lose all 7 the week after. So instead we’ll bowl the last place team the last week, and the 2nd place team will bowl the 3rd place team, which happens to be the X family, who are right on their heels points-wise.

Never a dull moment.

And Winter league starts the week after Summer league ends.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/10/2011 at 10:18 PM   
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   Wednesday - August 03, 2011

We’re Goona Loose

We got hosed tonight at league. 0-7 against the team we beat 7-0 the last time we played them. Their weakest bowler has moved to another part of the state, and they replaced him with a guy who is really really good. Total sand bagger. JS has a book average just over 200, but in truth he’s a 255 bowler, thereabouts. We bowled well in the first game, all of us well over average; I shot a 237. And we had an 82 pin handicap. They beat us by 62. We didn’t bowl as well the second game, but neither did they. They beat us by 54. We rallied a bit in the third game, rolling about a 750 raw (832 with handicap) and they rallied as well, and beat us by 70. So we got creamed, but we forced them to show their mettle. 164 average bowlers throwing 230 games twice in a night? I don’t think so Timmy. So while we will hold onto first place, this team stays in second place and picks up 7, which cuts our lead to 4.

Next week is the last week of regular bowling. We can probably win at least 5. Then the last two weeks are the play offs, where we will face tonight’s team again two weeks in a row. Unless some kind of miracle happens, they’re going to beat us right at the end of the season. Just like sand baggers. Which is what you call bowlers who do tactical bowling far better than you do.

Rats.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/03/2011 at 10:20 PM   
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   Thursday - July 21, 2011

Well Done

Ricky X threw a 300 game when his family team bowled against us last night. It was the third 300 he’d thrown in his entire life. He’s a pretty good bowler with a 209 average. He strokes the ball on an inside line, a smooth arc roll that goes out a little past the 3 arrow and comes back. He doesn’t throw a cannonball or a super revving ball that hooks like mad; he throws a mild roll that gets the job done.

By the 8th frame of that game everyone in the league was aware of what he was doing, and held up their bowling to watch him roll, and cheered him on. Strike in the 8th. Cheers. Strike in the 9th. Cheers. Two strikes in the 10th, more cheers, and when he rolled the last strike to hit 300 the whole league went wild.

I’m really proud of that. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Good people.

On my winter league nobody even noticed when I threw 9 in a row for a 10 strike game that got me 277. My own teammates didn’t say a word, before, during, or after. Maybe the quality of bowling is so much better on that league that such bowling is common. Maybe the level of competition is so sharp that congratulating your opponents is unheard of. And winter league is more than twice as long as summer league. IIRC there were 3 300 games on that league this past season, 2 of which were thrown by a guy who has thrown more than 100 of them. So high scores are no big deal to them. That’s a shame, really.

The X family won that game, but we won the other two. We really rallied in the 3rd game and won by more than 100, so we took the wood for the night and went 5-2 on the points. I threw a 600 for the night. The X family has Ricky as their star, and they win or lose by how he bowls. We have a team, and we won because we all bowled well. I’m really proud of that too. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/21/2011 at 07:11 AM   
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   Thursday - July 14, 2011

Losing Safely

We had a bad night at bowling. Phooey.

Bill has realized that his super cranker style of palming the ball is giving him tendinitis. Bowler’s forearm. I’ve had it myself. It means you’re doing things wrong, putting too much effort into throwing the ball. And he has; he’s been using an ancient plastic alley ball, but putting so many revs on it that it hooks like mad. So he’s decided to be a stroker, and is using a second hand ball he picked up for $10 and had drilled for him in the conventional style.

That’s kind of a mistake. If you go the stroker route and you want the ball to hook, or even flare, you want a fingertip layout. He’ll figure that out eventually. It makes a huge difference.

So he’s back to square one, learning the whole game over. And his scores reflect that. He went from throwing 170-230 games to throwing in the 90s. Ouch. That really annoyed him, no kidding, so he tried bowling harder to make things better. Rocketing the ball down the lane. Twisting his hand all around trying to get some action on the ball. Mistake. It was like looking into the past for me, as this is exactly what I went through several years ago. Ease off Bill. Slow down. Be gentle. Let the ball do the work. Get the ball out there, and turn your hand late. Turn your wrist, not your shoulder. Come through the ball, and “answer the phone”. Ha, I didn’t listen either when people told me that stuff. It took me a long time to embrace those methods. But gosh it was a shock to me when he over-rotated, go this thumb stuck in the ball, and threw it straight up in the air and into the gutter. I haven’t done that one in years.

The rest of us had a bad night too, hardly even making our averages.

We played the last place team, 4 raw beginners who roll in the very low 100s. We gave them a handicap that was far larger than the average of their best roller. They didn’t have a great night either, but we sucked worse, so they won. They took the first game by a dozen. They took the second game by 8 I think. We came back in the third game, and if we could have rallied and won by 20 or so we would have taken wood and split the night 4-3. But we couldn’t, even though I went 23 over on that round. We won game 3 by 4 pins but didn’t get wood, so we went 5-2 for the whole night.

The good news is that losing to this team won’t really change anything. An extra 5 points for them won’t hurt us, and we still have enough margin to hold on to first place for another week no matter what. Our poor showing will drop our averages a couple of points, which will only help us hand out less handicap to the next team we play. I’m hoping Bill quickly learns the laid back down-and-in stroker line and gets his numbers back where they belong. It’s more fun that way, and I don’t want him injuring himself trying to win a silly game. It’s not worth it. But I do want to win.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/14/2011 at 08:35 AM   
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   Thursday - July 07, 2011

13 ahead

We went 5-2 at bowling league last night. Nothing exceptional to report really. The 2nd place team lost all 7, so they might fall to 3rd, but our 5 point win puts us at least 13 points ahead of the next team. That’s almost 2 full weeks of full loss we can suffer and still hold our place. Not that that is going to happen.

We bowled the new kids last night. Team “Nighthawk” is 3 just out of high school guys who have never bowled before, and a vacancy. They throw in the very low 100s and below; the vacancy position gets 140 pins and is their anchor - their best bowler. Hey, they’re beginners, and I’m glad they had the guts to join a league.

I wanted so much to give them lessons, but I know better. They’ll figure things out eventually.

We stomped them the first game, bowling well above average while they all bowled well below average. Then we eased up 80 pins and they improved 60 pins and we still beat them. In the 3rd game we weren’t even trying, and they were bowling as best as they could. With the huge handicap they got from us, that lead to us chasing them the whole game, barking at their heels. We did a little rally in the 9th and 10th, and closed the gap enough that had my wife (who is anchor this season) had rolled 2 strikes and a 1 in the 10th we would have won that game as well. She didn’t, so we didn’t. That’s Ok. We still made wood for the extra point. Better to take the one game loss and keep our averages down. Tactical bowling. It’s all part of the strategery.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/07/2011 at 08:21 AM   
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   Thursday - June 30, 2011

Getting There

I’m still unsubscribing myself from various email connections, but it’s working. I’m down to about half a dozen or so emails a day at this point. Now if I can just get my wife to do a similar thing; last time she checked hers she had nearly 2,000 unread junk mails in her inbox. Yikes.

We won all 7 at summer bowling league again this week. That puts us out in first by about 6 points I think. Go team! I’m having a great time with these guys, and I’m going to try to get them to join my Tuesday winter league. It’s the fun that matters. Besides, I’m bowling pretty well with them. I threw a 633 series Wednesday night. I got a 239 in game 2, and that was because I messed up the 10th frame, 3 / 9. So I threw away a 260 game. Big deal. I’ll take a 239. And it was extra nice, because we had a visit from a guy we bowled with on a summer league years ago, back when I could hardly throw the ball. Needless to say, I’ve improved a bit since then. So much for being “tactical”; my average is going to be right back up in the low 180s next week when we face the E family team. The whole family is bowling crazy, so that should be some good competition.

I saw the neighbor lady for about a minute yesterday. She’s out of the hospital but staying with her parents for a while. She has this assemblage of rods over her forearm, pinned into the flesh, holding everything together. And all that weight is supported by some big L bracket she has to wear that holds her arm out to the side. Uncomfortable and inconvenient, but it beats losing the arm or being dead. I don’t know when she’ll be back here, but I’m guessing she’ll return to her teaching job in the fall. Motorcycles and deer: a very bad combination.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/30/2011 at 06:53 PM   
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