Welcome

This is primarily going to be my bowling blog where I will post my weekly results and any highs or lows from bowling league that week. I will also deal with my karaoke habit and a few other non-poker related things as they occur.

So, to get to know me, I am a 41 year old father of two in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I like to play poker and for more information on that, check out my other blog, Low Limit Grinder. I also enjoy bowling and karaoke and that is what I am going to talk about specifically here at this blog.

I have bowled since I was 5 years old and my father ran the local bowling alley in the town that I grew up in. I quit bowling in high school and picked up league bowling with my father while I was still in college. I have been bowling in leagues for more than twenty years and have just recently switched to bowling only one night a week.

I still love to bowl, but I have found with the creeping on in years, as well as the drastic changes in technology and the rising prices of bowling in a regular league that one night a week out with the boys will suffice for me. I bowl on Tuesday nights at AMF Yukon Lanes in Yukon, Oklahoma.

My team is a 5-member Men's team and three of the other four members and I have bowled together for the last 10 years or so. We have finished anywhere from first (several times) to dead last. (Just last year) We are normally pretty competitive with the other teams in our league, but with the advancing ages on our team, as well as the decreasing ages in our league, it seems that we have struggled to keep up with the competition for the last few years.

We are not professional bowlers and do not claim to be. I am strictly a one night per week bowler at this point and have no aspirations of ever bowling on the Professional Bowlers Tour. That being said, I have carried as high as a 221 average for an entire season (just 2 years ago) and am currently averaging around 208 for the season this year.

The highest series I have ever bowled is 795 and I have shot 300 exactly one time in my life. Unfortunately, it was on a saturday night shootout tournament at the bowling alley and was not sanctioned. Since the elusive 300, I have shot 299 a total of 9 times and several other 290+ games. I've left a solid ten pin on 7 of those games when I had 11 in a row and have become extremely frustrated with that particular pin in the last few years.

I am right handed and I throw an older Ebonite Vortex currently. It is probably 4 or 5 years old now, but I have had tremendous success with it and I love it's flexibility to different lane conditions and the versatility it provides me in just one ball. It tends to go a bit longer than my other bowling balls and the reaction is more tapered and not quite as violent as some of the newer reactive resin balls on the market. I still throw a 16 lb. ball, but as I have gotten older, I have certainly begun to think of moving down to a 15 lb. ball in order to have more control thoughout the night.

My typical shot is over the 15 board and out to about the 5 board before starting to hook back into the pocket. Obviously, the shot varies from night to night and some nights it breaks down faster than other nights, but for the most part, that is where I start out. When I was younger, my adjustments used to consist of staying close to where I had been at the start and simply throwing the ball harder to get it to hold the line to the pocket. As I have gotten older, it is harder and harder to throw the ball fast enough to hold the line once the lanes break down. Also, nowadays, the harder you throw the ball, the more violent the snap toward the pocket is on the back end, so, consequently, the more single pins you leave even if you are consistently hitting the pocket.

I throw my regular hook at all spares, except for the ten pin, where I move left and throw directly at the ten pin across the lane. Unfortunately, I have left so many of these in the past few years, I have become quite proficient at picking them up now. I would venture a guess that I am somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% on ten pins, which could still improve, but is more than respectable for a league bowler.

That is probably more bowling information than anybody should be forced to read about another bowler, so, if you made it this far, you will be surprised to learn that there are even more weird things about me.

My wfie and I run karaoke in our spare time at bars and clubs. We started out singing together about 12 years ago and travelling to and fro before the kids were around to different karaoke shows on a weekly basis. We also started buying a few of our own discs and this led to an addiction that is almost as bad as poker and bowling.

Eventually, we decided to put together our own system and start trying to run shows for ouselves, rather than attend other shows and make them more money. We bought our system and were off and running, starting out with a show here and a show there, soon we were working as many as four nights a week until 1:00 in the morning, following a full day at work. That lasted just long enough to make the down payment on our house and we have since gone into semi-retirement from the karaoke business.

We still run shows on a fairly regular basis, but we are very particular about which shows we do and where we will play. We have over 21,000 songs to choose from in our system and we recently upgraded our player to a CAVS digital system. It is an extraordinary little piece of equipment that is simply a computer with a remote control and all of our songs stored on the hard drive. No more fumbling with discs, skipping discs or dropping discs on the ground causing breakage. Now, we just punch in a song number on the remote and presto! Your song appears on the screen. I wish we would have had this machine 10 years ago, because it sure saves a lot of work when hosting a show.

Now you know more about me than you probably wanted to know, but if you made it this far, I appreciate you stopping by. I won't be posting here on a daily basis, for sure, but stop by every now and again, you just might find something interesting. For even more useless information about me, stop by my other blog, Low Limit Grinder.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

G