4 new members at a nearly packed DUMBO event

For those of you just joining us "DUMBO" is the DaNang, Vietnam bowling group. We are not very serious about the sport... well, most of us aren't. Also, not very many of us are actually any good but we just go there to have fun and then party afterwards. It's a good time: DUMBO stands for "Danang underground mental bowling organization" or something like that, I don't really remember, we just picked a word that started with D that was as weird as we could come up with and then filled in the blanks.

This week we had a few new members join us from Hoi An and I think that despite being pretty terrible they had a lot of fun. One thing that we do for the lessor skilled people is that when they do something great we give them a lot more applause and encouragement than we would for someone who is actually good at it and we expect them to pick up strikes and spares.

There are only 12 lanes at the local bowling alley and I absolutely refuse to put more than 3 people on a lane because if we do it will take too long. We reserve all the lanes and we need 2 of them to only have 2 people on them because these are the championship lanes. Therefore if we do some quick math with the 4 for the two reserved championship and then 30 for the remaining ones we can accommodate a maximum of 34 people. This of course is based on all the lanes actually being in working order which is frequently not the case.

We had 25 people turn up this week and there was a lot of excitement for the overall championship because one of our better bowlers, a Norwegian, finally had his chance at taking away the strap. One of the rules is that the current champion can choose any lane they want for their title defense to take place in and our current champion, realizing that the Norwegian would probably be practicing all week on the traditional lane 8 that is reserved for championships, changed his mind at the last minute to be on lane 1, which is against the wall and one of the lanes that we will only use if we absolutely must.

Now this might not look like a ton of people, but it is actually a lot more than this bowling alley will normally see at one time. This is why they reserve the entire bowling alley for us every Thursday and they will tell anyone, including local Vietnamese people, that they cannot bowl during this time until I determine how many lanes we are going to need. I am not a jerk, so if we don't need all the lanes I will position us so that other people can play as well. One thing that we will not do though, is bowl directly next to anyone that is not part of our league. This is because the "courtesy rule" is not observed for the most part in Asia, and this can be very distracting for our veteran players such as myself.

Going into this week the current high scores for men and women were 182 and 149, respectively. In my second game I started out on fire and then had a lull in the middle where i left 2 frames open (no strike, no spare) and this puts a serious dent in your overall score. I got a total of 5 strikes in this game and 4 of them were doubles(back-to-back strikes.) By the end of the game I was bowling on 2 strikes and if I got the 3rd, not only would I have been the new high score holder, but I also would have gotten the "gobbler" award and the nigh score of the month both on the same ball - a feat that has never been done before. I got 9 pins on my last strike attempt and of course, it was the STUPID 5 PIN that was left standing.

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The 5 pin is the sole standing pin after a direct and almost perfect hit so frequently in ours and any other league that I have taken to shouting out "stupid 5 pin!" every time this happens. If you come to one of our events you will hear me shout this dozens of times because for some reason it just happens to be the case. Despite sitting in the dead center of all the other pins, this pin is the sole remainder for all of us frequently.

So the stupid 5 pin resulted in me getting a 176, which I am still proud of but had it fallen, I would have been around 185.

Later on I would find out that me NOT getting that 3rd strike maybe wasn't such a bad thing because one of the other lanes that was lagging behind the others due to 2 people that bowl slower than most had a person on it that got both a turkey and a final score of 193. So had I won the "gobbler" and the high score for March, they both would have been taken away from me just a few minutes later.

So the new top score for the month of March is 193 and I reckon it will remain that way until the end of the month.

The Premiere league scores were like this: 193, 176 (me), 155, 143 and 141. Normally we have the lowest score get relegated but since one of the people that was in the Premiere League didn't make it for 2 weeks in a row they were auto-relegated instead.

The Division 2 scores were pretty impressive as well for the most part with 183 (wow), 146, 139, 125, 120, 108, and 99. There are other scores as well because I did say that 25 people attended but you don't go into the register until you have shown for many weeks in a row that you are truly intending to be one of us. It's too time consuming.

As always we carried on to one of our local pubs where we were treated to a BBQ (free) and tons of beers (not free). It was a great time and I think I speak for everyone when I say that a great time was had by all.

If you are in the Danang area and want to join us please come and do so. We meet at a the Lotte Mart Speed Bowl bowling alley on the top floor of the facility every Thursday at 1030AM. Plan to hang around until at least 3pm and make a bunch of friends in the process. It's dead cheap

That is our bill for 25 people to bowl 3 games (some bowl 4) games each. It's a grand total of 2,145,000 VND, which isn't even $100. Try to pull that off in Europe or North America for you and 24 of your friends! This is one of the main things I love about living in Vietnam: Everything is so friggin cheap!