I am pumping up our league a bit by saying that I am the "city-wide" champion of Da Nang, Vietnam. The seriously good bowlers do not come to our outings and I would get destroyed by most people that have their own ball and shoes and have an actual technique. Be that as it may, I returned to the top award that our league has and took the championship belt from the guy who had held it for 5 weeks in a row. It was a crazy road getting there as neither of us actually performed very well.
There are all of our awards in total. The belt on the right is the overall championship belt and this competition takes place between the reigning champion and whoever's name comes up in the "wheel" which is just an app where we input the 3 highest scores and it spins until it lands on someone. The way it works goes like this:
- First you have to be in the Premiere League in order to qualify at all and we keep that number at 7 people
- You have to finish with the top 3 scores in the PL
- The person who gets the highest score gets their name put in the wheel twice
Most of the time, like you would expect, the person whose name is in there twice ends up facing the champion the following week. The time that my name was selected, which was last week, my name was only in there once. I admit that when it did land on me that I wasn't really looking forward to playing because I have been off my game lately. In fact, I am a bit concerned about getting relegated most weeks since returning from Mexico because on a day where I am bowling around 130 average, someone has to be doing worse than me since that is not a good enough score. Luckily for me there has been someone that did worse than me each week and I managed to stay up.
with people frequently missing a week, if you are in the top 7 there is a very good chance you will be in the wheel because 2 of the 7 people are already in that week's championship and therefore cannot be in the wheel. So that leave only 5 people to take 3 spots. I hope that isn't too confusing. It is for some of the numpties that come to our events and we just tell them to "take our word for it."
Anyway, I went into yesterday's event expecting to get destroyed because unlike most weeks, I didn't go and practice on Tuesday. I figured that the practice hadn't been helping me the weeks prior so I decided to go against the common definition of insanity where it says "insanity is the doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." So I stayed home and just did other things this week.
I'd like to say that I got to the lanes and hit the ground running and just had a wonderful first game and seriously humbled my opponent but that was not the case at all.
I got a 129 in my first game, which for me, is just terrible. Thankfully, the champ was equally shite and he managed a mere 120. So even though both of us were playing like butt, at least we were both doing it so it stayed fun. The second game was meant to be a 2nd chance for both of us but well, that's not what happened. I got a 122 and he got a 125. While both of those scores are trash it was kind of fun that after two games a mere 6 point separated both of us with one game to go.
Me and the guy who at that point was still the champ agreed for a little break between the 2nd and 3rd matches in the hopes that it would perhaps give us a chance to suck a bit less at this game that we claim to be pretty good at.
I suppose that it had some impact but it was kind of funny that me and him had basically identical games until about halfway through. I had a nasty split after my first roll and ended up with a 4/7/10 split. Almost nobody, including the real professionals can nail this split
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The only way to get this is to hit the 4 pin just barely, while also hitting the 7. Then you pray to the bowling gods that the 4 pin is going to miraculously fly across the lane and hit the remaining 10 pin.
It did not work that way for me and this left me with a 9 after the fist fram.
The the champ rolled and got 9 pins and then missed the single-pin pickup. Now we both had 9.
I want to take a moment to let you know how rare and awful it is for both of us to be missing single-pin pickups. We are (at least at this moment in time) the 2 best bowlers in the league. We need to be able to pick up single pin leftovers close to every single time.
our tit-for-tat continued: If I got a strike, he got a strike, if I got a spare, he did the same and it wasn't until the 8th frame where I got 2 strikes in a row that things started to look up for me because he did not get a strike. He got a spare though, so unless I did something great in the 9th frame so of course, I did not do that. He got a spare in the 9th so this put us in a clutch situation where the result of the preceding 29 frames all rested on the performance of the very last frame.
I did something right though, and even though I was nervous, I nailed my spare in the 10th and followed up with a pathetic 6 pins on the extra ball to end with a score of 143, which is ok but not great.
My opponent had a decent first roll but we both knew that he needed a strike or it would be mathematically impossible for him to win. He got a 9, that honestly, could have gone either way. Such was the luck that we were both having this day. In the end his 3rd game was 142 which mean that overall I won the 3-game series by a mere 7 total points.
This is so rare in our league. Normally victory will be assured by the end of game 2 because one player does substantially better than the other. In our situation, we were both doing equally horribly and at least a dozen players in the group, including people who are not even in the Premiere League, did better than both of us. It is just lucky that both of us were having a bad day because it would have been a lot less fun had one of us been doing really well and the other was stinkin' up the place with awfulness.
Something funny and very frustrating was happening to both of us all day long. The dreaded 3/9 leave for your 2nd ball. This must have happened to both of us at least 5 times during the game and while this seems really simple to someone that doesn't bowl, this is actually one of the harder spares to pick up. The pins are much further apart from one another than you might think so these two pins that are standing in a straight line are actually 1.5 feet apart from one another. So unless you hit it DEAD ON, the lead pin is going to fly at an angle and miss the pin behind. Also, the weight of your ball will be deflected by the weight of the front pin because of the cylindrical nature of where ball meets pin when it is standing. If you don't hit the 3 pin exactly in the center, you are going to miss this in all likelihood.
We call them "two-fers" or "hard wood" and both of us had many of these throughout the day. Neither of us picked up a single one of them even one time throughout the day. It started to be kind of funny because time after time we would end up with this after the fact and we basically had resigned ourselves to defeat when we looked down there and saw it. We would come close every now and then but not once did either of us pick this up. It is one of the tougher spare pickups in the game for amateur players like us. I still don't really understand how it is possible that these 2 pins remain standing when everything around them, especially the 6 and the 10 somehow fall.
Anyway, in the end I was crowned champion but I didn't gloat because it was only because my opponent bowled poorly as well that I ended up winning it. I don't feel like the best bowler in our group and I certainly wasn't yesterday. Next week I face off against a Vietnamese woman who has been bowling with us nearly since day 1. She is the only female to ever have the overall championship in the history of DUMBO. I'm pretty sure I can defeat her but I am not going to take that for granted. She is good and if she plays like she normally does and I play like I did this week, she will be the champion at the end of next week as well.