Hello Everyone,
While discussing bowling recently my friend and I noted that none of us have ever made a 7-10 pickup, but we’ve all seen professional bowlers on TV do it.
Are the pros skilled enough to pickup the 7-10 split with regularity or is it skill plus a whole lot of luck when they do it?
it depends mostly on the type of lanes.
The dreaded 7-10 split is by many accounts the toughest shot in bowling. WIRED’s Robbie Gonzalez went to the U.S. Bowling Congress to meet a pro bowler, an engineer, and a robot named Earl, to find out why it’s actually Almost Impossible.
This story says it’s a shot that gets hit only 0.8 percent of the time among PBA tour members. So mostly luck, I would guess.
I’m not sure about that. I can (or could) hit a strike 20% of the time and a pro does at least 80% – at least four time better. I’ve never hit a 7-10 split. If pros can do it 0.8% of the time. Even if you gave me 0.1% the pro is 8 times better. Presumably that is a skill difference. They have to be very lucky to do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s mostly luck the way I look at it.
Note that it requires bouncing the pin off the side or the backdrop. This, plus the pin itself is crucial. For professional bowling, either a specially made lane set is used or if they’re competing at a local lanes, the best lanes with are used. The may replace the sides and backdrop to ensure there’s lots of rebound action for TV.
Most pins at your local lanes are old and have lost their ‘bounce’ and may be mismatched weights. For professional play, new, weight matched pins are used. Again, not only to ensure accurate play, but to add that satisfying bright ‘crash’ instead the dull ‘thunk’ you hear with worn pins.
If you bowl a lot at the same lanes, you’ll sometimes be able to identify a dead pin in the rack, either by the way it looks, the way it reacts or the sound it makes when hit.
Nah, it’s luck. The pin you hit has to bounce off a non-solid barrier and then happen to flip over to the the other pin. You just can’t reliably make that happen due to skill alone.
The only skill difference is that the pro can hit one of the two pins reliably and hard. That gets you to 0.8%. Everything else is luck.
I guess it depends on what “mostly luck” means to you, but for bowling if it relies almost entirely on something the bowler (or even the bowling robot from the video) can’t control then to me it’s luck.
Yep, while you might theoretically be able to do it if you’re really lucky (and indeed people have), in reality the movement of the atoms that compose the material make it impossible to predict exactly how it will rebound. On top of that, air currents will subtly change the path of the ball.
The one thing that I didn’t like about the story is the seeming insistence of hitting it off the backdrop. From what they showed, the few conversion attempts are from having the pin bounce back from the machinery on the side of the backdrop, not the backdrop itself. As shown, the pins lose a lot of energy when hitting that backdrop, and they need to hit something pretty solid to be able to fly out fast enough to cross the entire width of the lane with the speed necessary to dislodge the other pin.
I think it has to hit the backdrop though. It may bounce off the wall/machinery on the side first, but then it will hit the back. The physics require it.
Here is one that hits the side and then the backdrop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XWyVOh5AX8
I think this clip has all of the PBA conversions before this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Jk8KiBDWM
The most common way (if you can use that term for three or four conversions) is to hit the side, then off the back. Typically low, off the part that the Wired video shows used to be attached but is now loose (and thus less “bouncy”).
Moderator Action
Moved to the Game Room (from GQ).
His opponent (Butturff) has one of the great names in sports.
In all my years of bowling (not a pro and not even really that good if I’m being honest, my average is around 165) a 7-10 split just means at best you’re getting a 9. Not worth really trying to pick it up. It feels like a rigged carnival game where it looks plausible to do but is basically impossible.
Watching that video earlier in the thread, I wonder if there might be a better way to attempt the 7-10 than bouncing one pin off the back curtain. You can’t hit either pin far enough on the outside to drive it directly across to the other. But you can hit one on the inside and send it straight over the gutter and into the wall. If you do that hard enough, could the pin bounce off the wall and straight across the alley to get the other pin? It’s hard to tell in the video, but it looks like the walls next to the 7 and 10 pins are a lot more solid than the curtain at the back of the pit, and so the pin would rebound off them with more force.
And here’s the other thing. When I last watched bowling, a few decades ago, the bowlers would use a different ball when trying to convert a spare. The strike ball has a grippier surface so they could get a bigger hook into the pocket and more action among all the pins. To pick up a spare, they’d use a ball that rolled straighter. (I don’t know if that’s still the case.) To pick up a 7-10, it might be better to use the grippier ball. I’m right-handed. If I throw a ball and can get it to hook into the 7 pin on the inside, can I bounce it off the wall and across the alley into the 10 pin? Still not an easy conversion, but might be better than 0.8%. I’d have liked to see the pro, or the robot, try that.
Oh, is Earl the robot named after Earl Anthony?
It would fall into the gutter and get caught up there. That’s why nobody tries it that way. Even if you hit it hard enough to bounce back, it would have to somehow bounce up out of the gutter and then the momentum is no longer pushing it across the lane to hit the other pin.
Why don’t you ask him, one robot arm to another?
If you hit the 7 pin off the wall and across the alley, there’s only a small gutter that it has to cross. If you want to bounce one pin off the back curtain into the other, it has to not fall into the much larger pit that’s behind the alley. My way requires less “up” than the lucky bounce they were trying to do in the video.
You’ve gotten it zero times out of how many? It’s not all that common that one is faced with a 7-10 split to begin with. If you’ve faced it, say, 200 times in your career, and each time you had a 0.8% chance of getting it, it’s well within the range of plausibility that you’ve just been a little less lucky than you should have been.
Meanwhile, when you look at the data set of all professional matches, all of which have records kept, there’s easily enough data there that that 0.8% will come up consistently.
As far as specifically trying to make the split, is it even worth it? Presumably, even with the pros, there’s some small chance that a player faced with a 7-10 misses both pins. It might not be worth it to use a different ball, or to try to hit the pin extra-hard, or whatever, if that increased your chances of getting neither.
Psychologically, it’s probably wiser to just assume that frame is a nine before you even throw the second ball and just aim to knock down one. I haven’t watched enough pro bowling to know but how many in that situation try to hit the pin on the gutter side and how many just hit it as solidly as possible?
From what I’ve seen (and due to this thread I binge watched videos of folks trying to pick up the 7-10), virtually no one tries for the gutter side, as that seems to be a certain gutter ball.
So is it literally impossible to nick the gutter-side of either pin and have it slide along the lane and knock over the other pin? The conversions on the videos were professionals who presumably knew that the better odds were to hit one pin hard and hope for a good bounce. But are there at least anecdotal accounts of a conversion with no “help”?
Did you watch the video earlier in the thread? It shows a diagram of exactly where the ball would have to strike a pin in order to slide it sideways into the other.
In a nutshell, when the ball strikes a pin, the pin will move directly away from the point of contact. Hit the pin exactly on the front, and it will travel straight backwards. Hit the pin on the front right, and it will travel back and left. If you want to slide the 10-pin to the left, you have to hit it fully on the right side. The ball is rolling down the alley, so it’s coming from the wrong angel to strike the outside of the pin, And it would fall into the gutter if you tried.
Yes, I watched. But what if you used a smaller ball and were able roll it along the edge of the lane (starting on the edge) and have it just be falling into the gutter the microsecond that it nicks the pin, which barely falls over but bounces in such a way that it slides across the lane and taps the other pin so that it wobbles and falls? This is how I’ve tried to convert my 7-10 splits (although obviously unsuccessfully). Bring righty, I try to roll the ball along the right edge, and feel like I’ve gotten close, although most of the time it falls into the gutter before it gets all the way down to the pin.