In our league most of the bowlers bowl with a lighter ball because none of us are really all that good and a heavier ball is just going to increase the amount of weight that gets thrown in the gutter. There are only a handful of people that bowl with anything above 10 lbs which if you bowl, you know is probably the lightest ball in most lanes that has adult sized finger holes. Yet some of the members manage to get some pretty great scores despite the low weight. Nearly every professional bowls with 15 lb balls, which in most leagues is the heaviest ball you are allowed to use.
As you might expect, a heavier ball is going to create more pin movement when you hit the pins. The question is, can you control a heavier ball?
I do not use the thumb hole when bowling, so for me a heavier ball is even more difficult to control because I palm the ball and use only the two finger holes. This, depending on how I hold my wrist, allows me to make the curve that makes my game unique. It also results in far fewer nasty and near impossible splits because chances are I am rolling past the pins on the left even if I miss the pocket between the 1 and 3 pins.
Here is a chart for reference.
If you are right handed, and I am, ideally you want to hit the pins in the "pocket" between the 1 and 3 pins. This would be the 1 and 2 pins if you are left handed. You can skate across the front of the pins as well in a line all the way down the front and this sort of hit is called "Brooklyn Style" because I guess someone in Brooklyn was the first person to use it as an intentional strategy.
When I miss the pocket but still hit the 1 pin, I have a chance to do a "Brooklyn" and anyone who doesn't bowl with a curve, and this is most of the people in our league, does not have this advantage.
I started noticing last week when I was bowling with my usual 10 pounder that even though I was hitting the pocket, I was still ending up with some pins leftover and this was making me mad. After 20 years of experience you would think that this would be evident but I decided to do an experiment and see if I could roll a slightly heavier ball and get some more "crushing" results and in the very next frames I managed to do exactly that.
the first 2 frames were where I was figuring out how to roll the heavier ball and this was less than desirable. Rather than switch right back to the lighter ball though, I stuck with it and made note of where my feet were on my approach and where I was releasing the ball at the toss line as well. As you can see from frame 3 onward, I found my mark and this made me very happy.
It isn't often that I bowl 3 strikes in a row and the most I have ever bowled in a row ever was 6. The most I have managed to bowl in a row since moving to Danang is 5. That is actually the official record for all of us over the years and 3 people have managed that, one person has managed it twice.
So the trick here, with the heavier ball is for me to focus a lot o WHERE i am releasing the ball on the wood rather than how hard I am rolling it. Many people feel as though the trick to bowling is to throw the ball as hard as you can but this results in bad things happening more often than good. If you can't control where you are throwing the ball how hard you throw it doesn't really matter. This is where the pendulum swing of your arm and how quickly you approach the toss line becomes so important. I think a lot of people in our own league as well as amateurs around the world pay far too much attention to how hard they are throwing the ball rather than the momentum that you are building up by your approach. Some of our members run up to the line taking a certain amount of steps and then stop completely and then pull their arm back to roll the ball.
If you are doing this... stop it. If you want to throw that way just stand at the line and do it. There is no rule that states that you have to run up in a certain way. For many, especially if you are just starting out, this might actually be more effective than doing a run up at all. If the run up throws off where you position your arm on your release, there isn't any reason to actually be doing it.
For me this change to a heavier ball combined with me really focusing on the positioning of the ball, rather than how hard I was throwing it, resulted in me bowling about 60 pins higher than I normally would across 3 games. My average is about 130 and I bowled 2 games in the 160's. So yeah, it made me happy. As you can see in the above picture though, the same cannot be said for the person I was bowling with. He was terrible and thankfully had a sense of humor about the whole thing.
It was a good practice day for me but as usual, none of this practice amount to jack squat. The only scores that matter take place on our official league day of Thursday. I plan on using exactly that ball and this is why I took a picture of the serial number on it. Even though it is a house ball, the balls can vary dramatically from one to the next even though they look the same.
Oh and here is a picture of Nadi who was upset with me for leaving her at home alone all day while I was out galivanting with my friends and bowling.
It's not very much in focus but that is because if anything really bothers her, it is flash photography. She hates it. She also hates you trying to take her toy that is at her feet right there. But that is exactly what I did moments after taking this shot.