Monday Malady

168+213+211=592 (197 ppg)

On a night when it seemed like every other ball our team rolled was a split, the opposing team strung strikes and spares together on their way to a well deserved 3-1 win.

Once again, another low average/high handicap team had a breakout night against us. After every strike (and there were a lot of them) they would smile sheepishly, shrug their shoulders and walk back to their table with a relieved, almost apologetic look on their faces.

Hey, that's bowling. They were humble, bowled hard and were the better team last night. I don't know how the other top teams fared but I'm guessing that we might take a hit in the standings.

Simon, Nigel and I failed to make average, so I guess we should be happy that we managed to steal the last game and take a solitary point from last night's proceedings. We have 4 weeks left in the season to try and make some ground on the league leaders and every point is at a premium.

On a brighter note, Simon picked up a rare 4-7-9-10 split in the last game to keep us in the hunt and Paul had a personal best 235 game in the 2nd.

Personally, I was terrible. Scores aside, my release wasn't cooperating, I was off balance at the foul line and my spare game which is usually solid, was shaky at best. Most of my strikes were either light mixers or high hits which tripped the 4-9 late. Not pretty. 

In the first game, I missed on two consecutive 10 pins and a washout conversion for a 168. In the 4th frame of the 2nd game, I got extremely lucky on a 6-10 conversion; I barely caught the left hand side of the 6-pin which rebounded off the side wall to take out the 10-pin. 

The next time I saw the 6-10 was in the 10th frame so with the memory of the near-miss still fresh in my head, I decided to use my strike ball instead and took aim at the 10-pin, hoping that it would hook back just enough to hit the 6-10 pocket. I ended up throwing it too tentatively and picked off just the 6-pin for another open 10th frame.

In the final game, I missed on two split conversion attempts in the first 3 frames (4-7-10 & 3-10) but kept it together mentally to salvage a good game and help my team win the last game.

I hope to get some practice in on Wednesday where the goal will be to find a reliable way to convert the 6-10 and get my timing back.

How do you attack the 6-10 (or 4-7 for left handers)? Do you use a spare ball and roll it straight or do you hook at it?