A few weeks ago I joined the local bowling league to help get me out of the house a little more often. It's good to interact with people now and then, or so they tell me.
I was on my high school bowling team and took it semi-seriously back then, and joined the bowling club in college as well, although I really didn't have a lot of time to devote to it along with my engineering classes. I tended to bowl around 150 then. I haven't bowled regularly in over 10 years.
Since I don't want to put a huge amount of time and effort into the sport, I never learned how to throw a hook. Or rather, I know how to throw a hook, and have done so two or three times, but I never put the practice in to get past the steep learning curve. Instead, I throw a straight ball.
Now when I say I throw a straight ball, I don't mean I throw it straight down the middle of the lane. That's a good way to get a bunch of splits. Rather, I start at the right side of the lane and bowl at an angle toward the pocket between the 1 and 3 pins. This works pretty good for me (I very rarely split) except when I leave the 10 pin standing, in which case I have to bowl straight down the right side of the lane along the gutter, trying not to fall in. This is difficult but I've gotten the hang of it.
For quite a long time I've had trouble breaking 160 consistently. There seemed to be a barrier there I had to break through if I was going to get any better. The problem is, there's an upper limit to how good you can be at bowling if you're not getting strikes. The best you can do with 9/spare frames all the way through is 190 (a spare is 10+your next ball, meaning you get 19 points for each frame with 9/spares) and my problem was I wasn't getting strikes back-to-back. Piling up strikes next to each other is the key to high scores in bowling, since a strike is 10+your next two balls. So a strike followed by a spare is barely better than a spare followed by a spare (20 vs 19) but two strikes together will net you 20–30 points depending on your third ball. A perfect, full game of strikes is of course 30 pins x 10 frames = 300 points.
So if you want to break 200 you've got to pile up the strikes, and I think I've finally figured out how to do it. I've noticed that when I hit the pocket like I should, the resulting pin explosion seems to "peel" all the pins away from the 5 pin, leaving one or two pins standing in the center, mocking me. I've tried various techniques to correct this but it seems the solution was actually rather simple: brute force. If I throw the ball harder, it'll plow through the pins rather than deflect off of them, and knock down that 5 pin that was giving me so much trouble. Result: more strikes, higher scores.
Of course, this carries with it a slight complication in that it's harder to maintain my accuracy when throwing the ball that hard, which is of course why I haven't been doing it all along. Also, I'll likely tire my arm out by the third game. What spares I do need to pick up will have to be rolled slowly and carefully, like I've been doing, but the first frame is going to have to have some authority behind it, and that's something I'm just going to have to get used to.
We'll see how far this gets me next week.
Update: This idea was a complete and total flop. My score dropped about 40 pins and I was not able to get substantially better with practice. I've gone back to my old technique.
Update 2: I upgraded from a 14 pound to a 16 pound ball. Now I'm getting the advantages of heavier impact without the loss of accuracy involved in throwing harder. I bowled about a 500 over three games my first day with the new ball. My average with the old ball is about 450.