What Really Drives a High Bowling Average?
When I first decided I wanted to improve my bowling average, I had all kinds of theories.
You know, all the typical things a league bowler thinks about:
- I need to focus more on hitting my mark.
- Maybe I should get this new ball that just came out.
- I’m probably not throwing it fast enough. If I could just throw it harder…
- I guess I just need to work on my spares more.
I had all these hunches about what I was doing wrong and what I could improve, but hunches aren’t much to go on…
…however, data doesn’t lie.
That’s when I started tracking my statistics and what I found completely changed my approach to the game. It wasn’t just about striking more often — though that certainly helps. Instead, I discovered that three key stats mattered more than anything else when it came to achieving a high bowling average.
And the most important one? It wasn’t strike percentage.
How I Started Tracking My Bowling Stats
To know what to focus on and what to improve, I needed real data, not just gut feelings. I started tracking my statistics using two different apps: LaneTalk and Bowlr
Why two apps?
I bowl leagues at two different bowling centers, and LaneTalk only integrated with one of them. At the time, LaneTalk didn’t have a manual input mode like Bowlr did. If I wanted a complete picture of my bowling stats, I needed both.
These apps gave me a ton of useful insights:
- Strike rate
- Spare conversion percentages
- What spares I struggled with the most
- How my performance changed across multiple games in a series
Tracking these stats helped me identify patterns I never would have noticed otherwise…
… but I wanted to go EVEN deeper.
Digging Deeper: The Bowling Simulator That Changed Everything
As a software engineer, I built my own bowling simulator — a program that could quickly simulate bowling 100,000+ games based on my real-life stats.
I wanted to answer questions like:
- What would happen if I improved my 10-pin spare conversions by 10%?
- What if I struck just 5% more?
- Am I leaving too many splits? What if I reduced them?
I ran countless simulations, tweaking different statistics here and there to see what actually moved the needle.
What I discovered shocked me.
My hunches were wrong
First, I thought maybe I wasn’t striking enough. Turns out, when I checked my statistics in LaneTalk, I was already striking MORE than other bowlers in my average bracket.
So then I looked at spare conversion rate.
And there it was—I was missing more spares than I should have been.
This seemed like the answer. If I could improve my spare shooting, my average would go up, right?
So I spent hours and hours practicing spares, week after week. My spare shooting did improve—but my average?
It didn’t jump as much as I expected.
Sure, I picked up a few extra pins per game, but it wasn’t 10 or 20 pins per game better.
Something was still missing.
The Epiphany
I went back to the drawing board.
I spent hours and hours playing with the different percentages in my bowling simulation program. I could crank my single pin conversion up to 100%, meaning I got every single pin I left (which is BETTER THAN THE PROS, who convert single pins at a rate of about 95%). I could drive my strike rate way up, even higher than the pros (which hover around 60% for strike percentage), which would improve my average, but not as much as I thought.
That’s when I discovered it’s not one stat that makes the difference — it’s three working together.
Just three stats had an outsized impact on my average. These three stats, when combined, were the best predictors of whether a bowler like me would average 180, 200, or even 240+.
The Three Most Important Statistics for a High Average
The three stats are: Strike Percentage, Spare Conversion Rate, and First Ball Average.
1. Strike Percentage (This one’s obvious, but not the Whole Story)
Strikes are great — everyone wants more of them. More strikes mean fewer spare attempts, easier scoring, and higher ceilings for big games.
At first, I thought this was the most important stat. But as I dug deeper, I realized that while strike percentage mattered a lot, it wasn’t the statistic that separated great bowlers from elite bowlers.
2. Spare Conversion Rate (The Difference Between Good and Great Bowlers)
Every great bowler will tell you to work on your spares (ever hear “Strike for show, Spare for dough”?), but I didn’t realize how important it was until I saw my own statistics.
Every bowler misses a few spares here and there, but at higher averages, just a handful of missed spares per night can cost you 10, 20, or even 30+ pins per game.
A 190-average bowler who converts just one extra spare per game jumps to 200+. A 210 bowler who misses only one makeable spare per night could be averaging 212+ instead.
However, the real game-changer was…
3. First Ball Average (The Underrated Key to Success)
(If you don’t know what First Ball Average is, it’s the average value of your first shot at a rack of pins. It has a twin-sibling statistic called “9-or-Higher” Percentage, which is the percentage of times you knock down 9 pins or get a strike on your first shot at a full rack of pins.)
First Ball Average is the single most important statistic I found in my analysis. It’s the linchpin statistic that acts like the glue that pulls the other two statistics together.
Here’s why:
If you have a low First Ball Average, you can strike a ton, but you leave a lot of multi-pin spares, which are naturally harder to pick up than single pins.
With a low First Ball Average, you ALSO score less pins on average after your spares. You can have a high clean frame percentage, but you are still leaving pins on the table because you aren’t maximizing that first shot at a full rack of pins after you just picked up your spare, so your spare is less valuable. Ever throw the ball in the gutter right after a nice spare? You know you just wasted a spare.
Gaming the numbers
I’ve mentioned multiple times that you can game each of these statistics individually (First Ball Average is the hardest to game though).
You can easily game strike percentage. All you have to do is just throw a game where you alternate between strikes and double gutters. You’ll have a 50% strike rate and only bowl a score of 50. If you really want to prove that you can game this, throw a turkey, double gutter, throw another turkey, double gutter, and throw a final turkey, then gutter the fill ball. You’ll have a score of 170 and a strike rate of 75%, which is at least 10% higher than the pros.
You can game spare percentage as well. Just throw a 9 every first ball and pick up each spare, and you’ll average 190 with 100% spare conversion rate. A respectable average, but we are going for much higher here.
Finally, you can game the First Ball Average by alternating frames in a game where you throw a strike, then follow it up with a 9 count but don’t pick up the spares. You’ll end up shooting 140, but your First Ball Average will be 9.5 pins (and your 9-or-Higher percentage will be 100%).
Putting it all together
In order to boost your average to the absolute maximum, you NEED to maximize all three statistics simultaneously.
If you have a high strike rate AND you are covering your spares AND you have a high first ball average, you are simply going to have a high average. There’s no way to get around it.
If you have a 60% strike rate, you have 9.5 first ball average, and you are covering 90%-95% of your spares, you are averaging somewhere in the 220-230 range.
In other words:
- Strikes are great, but they aren’t always controllable. You can’t guarantee you are going to strike every time you hit the pocket, but you can hit the pocket more.
- Hitting the >actual< pocket so you avoid leaving splits and then covering the easier spares IS controllable.
- After you get those spares, continuing to deliver shot after shot into the pocket getting those strikes and 9-counts really adds up to high scores and high averages.
Your Homework
Here’s how you can apply this immediately:
- Use LaneTalk, Bowlr, some other app, or a notebook to start tracking your numbers.
- Focus on hitting the pocket consistently rather than just being happy with every strike you get (we all get away with some strikes).
- Develop a repeatable spare system and make single-pin spares automatic.
Bowling is all about consistency, and these three statistics are the key to taking your game to the next level.
What’s Next?
I’m planning more deep dives into how I improved my strike percentage, how I built a spare system that works, and how I fixed my biggest weaknesses, but those posts are for another day. For now, make sure you are on our email list so you are notified the next time a post comes out.