Originally Published March 13, 2010
Today I spent a significant amount of time scouting the USBC Nationals 2010 Open Championships oil pattern. I don’t bowl the team event until 8:30pm tonight so I figured I’d look at the oil pattern (see pic below), scout out my thoughts on the oil pattern (see other pic below), and then check out what bowlers were actually doing on the Open Championships Oil Pattern.
The USBC Nationals oil pattern as always is very challenging but not brutal, in my opinion. It simply forces you to make shots… and if you play it in the right spot with the right ball you should have a very small margin of error, which is what I’m trying to figure out how to find.
USBC Open Championships 2010 Oil Pattern
Thoughts On How To Play The USBC Open 2010 Oil Pattern
You can see from the pic below I feel (having not yet bowled on this pattern) that the best shot will be 6 at the arrows while never crossing outside of 5 – or – hitting around 13 at the arrows targeting between 8-11 at 45 feet depending on ball choice and foot position.
Anyway, having made these guesses I figured checking out what people who were actually doing well were actually doing and found many to be laying down around 20, hitting the third arrow and hitting around 10 at 45 feet. Then again many of these people doing this were in the singles block which would have been games 7-9. I think this may be a great shot for when the lanes break down. For fresh oil however I’m still going with my gut.
In a soon to be published post I’ll show some video of the people who were doing good on the lanes earlier in the same day I bowled.
Also, in case you missed my last preview posts, you can check out my post on me:
- Leaving for the USBC Open Championships and me
- Arriving in Reno after a wild drive.
Update March 14, 2010
How To Play Oil Pattern At The USBC Open Team Event
Yesterday I took a good chunk of time out of my day to scout the lanes and see how people were playing the lanes I took some video of the Singles event when the oil was broken down and as you’ll see in this video I also took some video of the first game of the team event to get a perspective on fresh oil.
Having not bowled on this yet I had some thoughts about how the lanes appeared to be playing based on the shots of others and my analysis of the USBC oil pattern chart I posted yesterday (see above).
Take a look at the video for what I was thinking at the time.
USBC Open Team Event – Fresh Oil
Here the link to the fresh oil analysis on YouTube in case the above doesn’t work for you.
How I Actually Played The Lanes
I wish I had some video to show as I have for last year at the 2009 USBC Open but I didn’t have my lovely wife available to man the video camera.
In any event I started off playing the line that the man in the above video was playing. Considering I have a lot of hand this was not hard. I threw my Brunswick Fury Pearl from the 20 board at the foul line to about 13 at the arrows and about 8 at 45 feet and this worked well for practice and into the first game. At this time the ball started checking up high so I switched to my Twisted Fury on the same line. The difference being that my Twisted would skid longer before flipping… unfortunately it wanted to skid too long.
Looking back on it I really could’ve worked with either ball and made adjustments and been fine the shot was there but I felt that playing my inside up-and-in line, as mapped out on my last post on the USBC Open Oil Pattern, with my urethane ball (14 year old Columbia Beast) would be a good change. After all when the lanes get challenging it’s tough to argue with going straighter.
This up and in shot worked really good on the right land and not as great on the left. In fact from the end of the second game to the end of the third I was perfect on the right, all strikes, but left 3 splits on the left. In the end of the third game I switched back to my Fury Pearl just for the left lane (a couple boards inside of where I started the day – about 22 – 14 – 9). This let me carry perfectly and was probably the shot I should’ve thrown the whole time even though the up and in shot was obviously there for me on the right lane.
Again, I wish I had video but I wasn’t about to order a $100 video from the crew on site to do it for me so this will have to do.
I ended up shooting 178 – 182 – 182 for a 542 series. Not that great but this was a great lesson for doubles & singles later today. I will likely start off with my Fury Pearl bowling ball just as I ended the night last night and make it work with a slow controlled arching hook.
I’ll post some video of how others were playing the Doubles / Singles event from an earlier squad complete with my thoughts and commentary and then later give a synopsis of how I actually played the lanes and what I thought about them.
You can see these thoughts and others on my 2010 USBC Open Tournament Recap.
