Bowling Championship successfully defended for a 5th week, almost picked up another championship as well

So the DUMBO (DaNang Unadvertised Moronic Bowling Organization) continues to grow in numbers and we had a very successful outing yesterday that saw us occupy nearly ever single lane in the alley. If we continue to get more and more interest we may have to start to pre-book the entire lanes before we arrive. We used 8 of the 12 lanes yesterday, and if we were to turn up with what is now becoming close to 30 people on a week and they didn't have all the lanes open, we would be in big trouble and have to turn people away - which would make some members, including me, rather upset.

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My opponent this week is known as "Goro" and most of our members have no idea that this is a Mortal Kombat reference but him and I do, and that is enough. I was concerned about facing him because he is a 130-ish average bowler, which is right around what you can expect of me also. However, my one advantage is that he has zero experience being in the championship lane and even though the reward is nothing other than glory and a plastic WWE replica belt, a lot of people crack under the pressure. A lot of this has to do with the fact that then entire lanes watch our progress because the top award is on the line.

I must admit that a great deal of the time I kind of wish that someone would defeat me, so that I could go back to just casually bowling rather than being super-concerned about my every move and every failure.

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One thing we discovered by having so many people turn up with regularity going on 3 months now, is that that lanes have stopped BS'ing us about lanes 1-4 not being functional. In the past we had no ability to play on these lanes because they claimed they were broken. Now I don't know if that was ever actually true, but they were open this time around and it is a good thing that they were because there were too many of us there otherwise. Thankfully, there was only one other lane occupied by customers so we had plenty of space.

On to my performance

I had an amazing first game and I think that this demoralized my opponent a bit. We both bowl with a spin, so picking up spares is considerably more difficult for us than it is for other players. This is particularly true for any pins that end up on the right side of the lane for a spare pickup because both of us spin right-to-left.

Despite this, I managed to bowl incredibly well in the first game, scoring a 165. My opponent, who is normally a 130 ish bowler, barely broke 100 with a final score of 102.

This means that he enters the second game already down 63 points since the title is awarded to whoever has the best average score between the two games.

I don't know what happened to me in game two, but it was not championship level bowling skills that I exhibited.

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That's my score in the middle there. I have been doing weekly bowling at these same lanes for 5 months or so and I have never bowled this poorly in all those visits. It is very rare for me to not break 100 but something happened and I just couldn't catch a break or "find my stride" in game two. It was very lucky for me that my opponent didn't improve very much from game 1 because if he had bowled just slightly better than his average of 130 or so, that 63 point lead of mine would have disappeared rather quickly.


Later, in the tag team round my randomly selected partner and I managed to scratch together a total of 110 points, which doesn't seem like much because it isn't. However, no one else for the 12 total tag teams did very well either and there was a 3-way tie at 114. We settle these ties by having a "sudden death" round where it all gets determined in 1 frame or however many it takes to see who has the most points. It was settled in one round as "RichRash" bowled a 9 and "DangCrap" despite knocking down 8 with an "easy" 2 pin remaining spare attempt, missed them both.

It just pains me a bit that if my team had bowled just a mere 5 more pins, that we would have had that championship as well.

I suppose I am a little glad that we didn't win it, because people in the league might start to get a bit frustrated since I already have 2 of the league's total possible awards (top score of all time at 202, and the championship belt.)

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So for now, the belt remains safely in my house for one more week. I have now defended the belt the most number of times than anyone in DUMBO's history has ever done so. The previous record was 4 weeks.

I am sure you can see how incredibly proud of me my dog Nadi is. She loves it!

If you live in DaNang, and I know there are a few people on here that do, please do come and join us!



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8 comments
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Not to get off topic, but I met a guy one day that was telling someone that "bowling is great exercise" and while I didn't say it out loud I knew that any "sport" that you can drink beer and eat nachos while you are doing it, probably isn't great exercise. :)

I do love it though and even though I exercise on a regular basis, there is something about bowling that makes me sore afterwards.

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yeah we all go through that as well. I bowl with a curve so I have to use a lighter ball. I only use a 10 or even 9 pounder. Despite that I still end up with a sore arm after every session.. plus i tense up in my back leg every time I roll, which is odd.

You are right, bowling is not exercise. Nearly every single person in our crew is overweight, some of them severely.

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Wow, you are killing it! That is pretty awesome. I hear you about wanting to lose. Especially when you are just doing it for fun. Some people take that stuff way to seriously and they can get really upset when things don't seem to go their way. Having the championship move around a bit seems like a great way to keep things light hearted and fun. Maybe you need to "throw" next week. :) That would probably go over even worse I am guessing!

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I'm finding that by not being worried about losing the belt makes me play even better... lol. It's been 5 weeks and I am seriously hoping that the guy that is playing me on Thursday, who is a pretty good player, can actually win... but I'm not going to throw the game, ever.

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I figured as much. It was just a thought. Maybe if you did a little pregame drinking before you head out it could tip the scales in his favor. It sounds like it is a pretty cool group and they all probably understand.

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You can't win everything as everyone will think this is fixed. I remember playing action cricket for a few seasons and we never lost one game over the entire period as eventually our opponents had psyched themselves out before playing us. When you have a justified reputation you can play poorly as your bad is normally better than their good.

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165 to 80 in one game? Ouch. I bet you would have preferred that it be the other way around :) I think I would struggle to break 100 these days but I was never much of a bowler anyway. I do enjoy it though.

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Yeah we didn't think it was going to become as popular as it has become. People are even spreading this concept to other cities and turning it into a weekly thing so that folks from other cities can join in as a visitor. Great way to meet a bunch of people if you ask me!

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