Spare shooting...

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kwettig
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Spare shooting...

Post by kwettig »

Was just browsing through this forum and came across a thread about spares. Currently I throw across lane at the ten pin with <5* of rotation, basically wondering about throwing straight down 4 board instead. Does throwing across the alley give you a significant advantage to throwing at the corners? I feel I might be better at throwing dead straight at all single pin spares but it would seem there's more "room" throwing at the corners from an angle?
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by steve s »

kwettig wrote:Was just browsing through this forum and came across a thread about spares. Currently I throw across lane at the ten pin with <5* of rotation, basically wondering about throwing straight down 4 board instead. Does throwing across the alley give you a significant advantage to throwing at the corners? I feel I might be better at throwing dead straight at all single pin spares but it would seem there's more "room" throwing at the corners from an angle?

The margin of error is greater when angles are used ....I too like to shoot down the arrows for all pins except the 7 - 10 ...The launch angle can be so big when playing extreme edge to edge for the corner pins...I usually try to stand in the center and play a smaller angle which seems to work for me most of the time ...sometimes none thing works ....Steve S
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by halfaclue »

If you think about this problem in pure numbers you will see the answer, I do believe.

A pin is around 3 boards wide, while a ball is around 5 boards wide. When throwing at a single pin this will give you a miss of the width of the ball plus the width of the pin, totaling 8 boards (just for the corners, single pins in the middle of the lane have more because of the gutter).

Also, remember that missing the target at the arrows is magnified on the back end. Just like throwing strikes angle is needed to maximize the possibilities of success.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by mozarkian »

It was a little mind blowing when I sat down and tried to put the components of this game into their true perspectives. We see a much wider lane and smaller ball than they really are. The ball is not five boards wide. Regulations allow a maximum diameter of 8.59 inches. The 39 board lane is 41.5" wide which makes it 4.8 balls wide. Your ball covers more than 20% of the lane's surface or 8 boards. The hard part is covering a particular 20% sixty feet away. If you made a scale model of a bowling lane using a scale of one inch to one foot you would have a 78 inch long structure with the 15 inch approach, 5 foot lane and 3 inch pin deck that is less than 3 1/2 inches wide between the two channels. Try to roll a marble five feet within a 3.5 inch area. It really is pretty amazing that we can accomplish what we do with a bowling ball.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by jakester »

Shooting corner pins is like a goalie in hockey coming out to play the angke and to give the shooter no look. Same for ten pins you shoot across lane to give yourself the best angle. I cover all pins in the center of the lane from my strike line and 4-7 6-10 from right or left using third arrow. I think I picked this up early on after reading the book, "par bowling" :idea:
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by crazyjim »

I use the center arrow for the right side pins with very llittle turn on the ball. I use the third arrow (Right side, right handed) for left side pins. On THS I hook at any thing middle or left. On the right I hook at the 3-6-9-10 and throw straight at the rest of the right side singles and combis. On sport shots I throw straight at pretty much everything.

Interesting, My coach had me do a drill where I developed a strategy for shooting all my spares from each of the arrows 1-6 (leaving out the seventh, fartherest to the left). I rarely miss a spare now, and have gone six weeks in league clean befor wiffing or chopping.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by 2y2 »

halfaclue wrote:If you think about this problem in pure numbers you will see the answer, I do believe.

A pin is around 3 boards wide, while a ball is around 5 boards wide. When throwing at a single pin this will give you a miss of the width of the ball plus the width of the pin, totaling 8 boards (just for the corners, single pins in the middle of the lane have more because of the gutter).

Also, remember that missing the target at the arrows is magnified on the back end. Just like throwing strikes angle is needed to maximize the possibilities of success.
The pins are 4.48 boards wide, the ball is 8.08 boards wide
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by mozarkian »

That means the target area for hitting the 7 or 10 is 11.25 boards wide and all the other pins have a 20.6 board target area. Now we can feel really bad when we miss a single pin other than the corners because the knock down zone is half a lane wide.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by pneumatic »

mozarkian wrote:That means the target area for hitting the 7 or 10 is 11.25 boards wide and all the other pins have a 20.6 board target area. Now we can feel really bad when we miss a single pin other than the corners because the knock down zone is half a lane wide.
Holy cow, I have never thought of it like that before, lol
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by kwettig »

Interesting comments. I've just gained permission from the owner to put any pattern in so I've been throwing on the shark pattern the last couple days...now I realize how much more work is to be done...but I've been struggling with shooting straight at anything. It seems now I have better luck throwing at angles. I hope I can tighten up my swing plane and get this figured out before state and nationals in the following months. I've tried looking at the foul line and the arrows but I can't seem to hit my target consistently. On my strike shot I visualize my line from laydown through the arrows to the breakpoint and focus on the board at the arrows I'm trying to hit during the delivery but get wild while targeting that way for spares. What works now for me is visualizing the line and looking at the pin. Last 39 games I've been keeping track with an app for my iPhone and I'm at 85% for single pin spares. But the ten pin I'm 26/37. 70%! 61/65(95%) for all the other pins. Need ten pins to be 90+% in a month. More info on drills to improve this?
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by crazyjim »

do not get discouraged, you may see your avg drop from time to time as you adjust to new thiings in your game. The improvements will usually come in very small chunks so to keep track you should keep a daily log of what to practice, what you learned and how you are doing in comp
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by 2y2 »

kwettig, try this technique:
http://bowlingknowledge.info/images/sto ... et_eye.pdf
I hope it helps
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by mozarkian »

We live and learn. I was told the arrows represented the position of the pins on the pin deck when I started bowling in 1956 and never had cause to question that until this topic focused my attention on the pins and the pin deck.

By USBC regulation the 7 and 10 pins are not centered on the fifth board from their respective channels, they are positioned 2 ¾ inches from them, plus or minus ¼ inch. That makes the knock down zone only 10.5 boards wide, ¾ of a board less than I previously calculated. (2 ¾ inches from the channel plus ½ the width of a 4.7 inch wide pin plus ½ of an 8.5 inch wide ball divided by 41.5 for the width of the lane times 39 the number of boards in a lane equals 10.525). It does not change the knockdown zone for any of the other pins which is the 4.7 inch width of the pin plus twice the 8.5 inch width of the ball, 21.7 inches or 20.393 boards, over half the width of the lane. The distance between pins is not the 10 inches I had always thought but 12”. That makes the actual distance between the inside edges of the pins in a split like the 4-5, 7.3 inches. Knocking them down with an 8.5” bowling ball leaves only 2.4” or 2.25 boards for the margin of error.

The space between the edges of the 1 and 6 pin is 19.3” down the line drawn between their centers. We see only the 7.3” between their positions across the boards. The sharper the angle of the approaching ball, the greater the distance becomes relative to the ball's path. It is a wonder we don't see the crankers rolling through the 3 pin spot and leaving both the 1 and the 6 more often than we do.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by dtb300 »

IMO, spare shooting is all about confidence in your shot making capabilities. If you leave a corner or any single pin and you think "Oh Poop", you probably will not be very successful. For myself, there are very few spare leaves which I do not think I will make.

How does one get to this point?

Learn to throw the ball straight or straighter - either with your strike ball or as I prefer, with a plastic ball. Take the lane conditions out of play for your spare shots. Like others have stated, you have 1/2 the lane to make that single pin. So when shooting a spare this way, and you miss, you can look at yourself and say "I really missed" and not blame the lane conditions.

For myself, learning to throw straight(er) and using a poly ball, improved my overall spare game immensely. In fact while my spare percentages increased, my SPLIT making also improved.

What I do is throw straight up the lane (parallel to the boards) for everything except 4,6,7, & 10 pins. The boards on a lane go right up the lane giving your a line from the foul line to the pin or area you are trying to hit - think of it as a free cheat. For the corner pins, I go cross lane.

Practice, practice, practice and find what works for you. If you do not throw straight at your spares, then a summer league is a great place to teach yourself. Around my area, summer league does not count towards a book average, so learning something new, while not worrying about your scores is an excellent opportunity.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by kwettig »

Thanks 2y2! Great article! That's kinda what I was looking for.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by 2y2 »

pneumatic wrote: Holy cow, I have never thought of it like that before, lol
I can see a misscoception here, we have to measure to the center of the ball to know how many boards we have available to hit a single pin, so I made this diagram to show it.

Image

I put in red the limit at which the ball is still on the lane to hit the 10 pin. Looking at the image we can see that we have 8.83 boards to hit the 7 or 10 pin and 12.55 to hit all other single pins, so it's not half the boards we have to hit corner pins than we have to hit the other ones, the difference is only 3.72, ¡Almost 4 boards! so it's not as difficult as we think to hit the corner pins, it's just perception.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by kellytehuna »

Having the channel just waiting to gobble up our wayward ball is what get's to most people, I would say. I actually like shooting 10 pins, myself. I know I can get them VERY consistently. I actually struggle more with the OTHER single pin leaves. I shoot something like 80% at baby splits, but shoot about 50% at the 3 pin! Go figure, right!?
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by jakester »

2y2, there's probably less of a difference shooting a corner pin spare than even you're showing.
Draw up the same diagram with a cross lane reference. I'm pretty sure we have almost the same room to shoot a ten pin as we do a six pin or three pin... if not I wouldn't be making almost all of them. It's not that I hate shooting them, it's that I don't like leaving them. If there's more than one/two a game at most I feel I need to change something. Like someone else said, I think I'm going to make every spare and a percentage of splits. We shouldn't be leaving too many splits.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by 2y2 »

jakester wrote:2y2, there's probably less of a difference shooting a corner pin spare than even you're showing.
Draw up the same diagram with a cross lane reference. I'm pretty sure we have almost the same room to shoot a ten pin as we do a six pin or three pin... if not I wouldn't be making almost all of them. It's not that I hate shooting them, it's that I don't like leaving them. If there's more than one/two a game at most I feel I need to change something. Like someone else said, I think I'm going to make every spare and a percentage of splits. We shouldn't be leaving too many splits.
You're absolutely right!, I recall when Walter Ray Williams Jr. got 100% in single pin spare shooting the whole season and someone asked him how could he hit every single shot, and he answered something like "How could you fail when you have almost 8 boards on each side of the pin to hit it" so if we put our minds in the same positive way of thinking, we should be much more effective spare shooters. If we think we have a lot of room for error rather than thinking it is difficult to hit a single pin, it is easier to be confident about spare shooting. Then again It's all about perception.
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Re: Spare shooting...

Post by kajmk »

A few tidbits.
Remember the old joke -
A man with a violin case arrives in New York an asks a Policeman "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Practice :oops:
Different strokes for different strokes -
Be careful about OVER throwing at a spare. Pros may do it, but they are a BREED apart and bowl an awful lot.
A single pin spare will fall with a modicum of force, don't try to make toothpicks just knock it over :)
Use power only when you need it, e.g. 3-6-9-10.
Use deflection as an asset, e.g. 3-10

I like Norm Dukes method, but he does roll a Lot of balls.
;)
PRACTICE SPARES

You might try picking the corners clean, e.g. 10 pin, the 7 pin.
You might try picking a CONTACT POINT - i.e. a PIN, any other pocket besides the strike pocket.
If you want to learn how to roll straight, try using a HOOK MONSTER, this will MAGNIFY errors (This is an OLD method, Dave Ferraro wrote that his father taught him that, among other things)
While one might contend there are an infinite number of "contact" points at the pin deck, one of my former coaches taught "13 points" of contact.
The 13 points are: Each pin in the front - 1-2-3 etc then the pockets - 1-3, 3-6, 6-10 and so on.
Once you get really confident, try doing this using the "Blind Shot" Warning try this WITHOUT a ball first for a few times. At the height of the back-swing, CLOSE your eyes and leave them closed until the follow through. An old coach of mine taught me that.
I don't know who he learned it from but he was in his 80's
The "Blind Shot" can be a useful training tool for this and other things.
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