First ever "bowl-off" happens in yesterday's championship

In DUMBO, our Da Nang based bowling organization, there are two belts or championships up for grabs every week. The white belt or promotion belt is a chance for one of two people to be promoted to what we call the premiere league or 1st division where the 7 best bowlers in our league duke it out for the overall championship.

This week we already had an unusual situation in the promotion or white belt showdown as it was a husband and wife that were bowling against one another. We also had a really nice turnout despite bad weather and the fact that a lot of people are out of town at the moment.

In the first game of three, things were extremely close... much closer than we normally expect them to be with "husband" scoring 128 and "wife" scoring 125. Things stayed interesting in game two as they once again bowled at a very similar level with husband scoring 130 and wife scoring 135. So if you are keeping score husband has 258 points after two games and wife has 260. There have been very few situations in the history of this league that any competition was this close after two games. Normally it is more of a case of 20-40 point difference after two games.

Things stayed very close all throughout the 3rd game as well as it seemed that any time one of them would get a mark, the other one would as well and when one of them failed to pick up a spare, so did the other. So I guess they are a couple that was meant for each other indeed.

By the 9th frame of game three there was only 1 point separating the two of them and after 10 frames the score for game 3 was husband with 107 and wife with 105. For the first time ever after 3 games there was a tie. This lead to a bowl-off, which is something we have always had in the rulebooks but never thought we would actually implement.

By this time all other lanes were finished bowling so they had a crowd. The way it works is that they get as many frames as they need but do not play an entire game unless of course they were tied all the way through them. On the first roll husband got 9 pins, with the damn 5 pin still standing. On his second ball he missed the spare pickup by just an inch or so. Then wife rolled her first ball and ended up with exactly the same layout of just the 5 pin standing afterwards.

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In our league and perhaps all other leagues like ours, the 5 pin is one of the most likely to be left behind after the first ball pins out of all of them. I have no idea how this is possible or why it happens so often but I shout out "stupid 5 pin!" when it happens because it happens a lot for me as well. One would think that because it is surrounded by other pins that actually do fall that this would be one of the pins that are most likely to fall.

When wife rolled her second ball at the lone standing pin it was in front of a silent crowd. She bowls quite slowly but it known for her accuracy. We could all tell by the time that the ball got halfway down the lane that it was going to hit the target.... and it did. She wins the championship by a single pin and this has never happened before.

The husband was jokingly claiming that he let her have the win on purpose, but we all know that she is actually one of the better bowlers in our entire league and is the only female overall champion that we have ever had. Not only did she win the promotion white belt, but she also won the tag team award and holds the highest overall female score for the month of October.

Although this is neither husband nor wife in the photo, we did have a visiting player who has one of the most awesome bowling shirts that I have ever seen. This gives most people the impression that he would be a lot better than other players because why else would someone own a shirt with bowling pins on it but alas, he was average at best.

It was yet again another epic Thursday and just like most of the people involved in our bowling group, it was the highlight of my week.