300

April 24, 2017 3:49 PM

How fast can a bowler roll 12 consecutive strikes and achieve a perfect game? For Ben Ketola, the answer is 86.9 seconds.
posted by chavenet (22 comments total)

Holy shit! That's impressive.
posted by Fizz at 4:08 PM on April 24, 2017

Neat.

I'll confess to getting curious about the peanut butter thing, and, well, it was a thing.

The strikes were more impressive, though.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:18 PM on April 24, 2017

Is that a common rolling technique?
(I know nothing about bowling but I've never seen this particular move.)
posted by bigendian at 4:18 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

Before clicking the link, I envisioned the guy just throwing balls with fierce speed to get the fastest time. So I was a little thrown at how he shuffled and looked down to check his feet placement every time.

In retrospect, I should have known better. This is Bowling. There are rules.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:24 PM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

Two-handed bowling is a bit rare at the professional level but it's not disallowed. In the last decade or so Jason Belmonte somewhat popularized it in the US.
posted by muddgirl at 4:26 PM on April 24, 2017

[Insert Big Lebowski joke here]

I'd also be curious to know from bowlingfolk what the state of the art in ball technology (and marketing) is. He was referencing using alley-issued balls for two of the attempts vs. the more...preferred (I guess) brand?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:26 PM on April 24, 2017

That is almost certainly the only time I've watched someone bowl a complete line in a game I was not myself participating in (and quite possibly the only time even counting those games - after all, you occasionally have to go order yourself another beer).

My favorite part was the way he sped to get each new ball; with it being such a short distance, he was running but with such short paces that it looked like how a toddler would run.

What a cool thing to have done!
posted by solotoro at 4:35 PM on April 24, 2017

I will pay real money for an iPhone/Apple Watch app that uses the pedometer to figure out when I'm readying my roll and plays the Fred Flintstone "tippy-toes" sound effect on my approach.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:43 PM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

Try it in duckpins now.
posted by sonascope at 4:54 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

[Insert Big Lebowski joke here]

Neat trick, but how does that constitute a game? He got one strike and then wandered off and faffed around on some other lanes, never to return. He gets credit for the first strike, but after that?

Mark it zero!
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:10 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

OVER THE LINE!
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:12 PM on April 24, 2017

Hush hush camera dude you're going to jinx it!!
posted by not_the_water at 5:21 PM on April 24, 2017

Why did he run all the way back to the far left-hand lane at the end? By the time he finishes at the far right-hand lane, it looked like the pins had reset (and balls returned) at all the other lanes except the one immediately to his left. He could have just run over two or three lanes to the left instead of going all the way back, no?
posted by mhum at 5:22 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

And he could have shaved off some seconds by just going back to lane 9 after he finished the 10th frame!
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 5:22 PM on April 24, 2017

Interesting to me were #4 and #6- he actually looked back at those, as if he wasn't sure they were going to work.
The others he didn't bother to check, like, 'I know that one's in.'
posted by MtDewd at 5:34 PM on April 24, 2017

I agree that the lane ordering is wrong, but that opens up the chance of doing it right and breaking the record again. The article says he did it in 86.9 seconds when the old record was just under 111.
posted by madcaptenor at 5:36 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

Clearly you're not a golfer.

(Seriously, this was awesome.)
posted by 4ster at 5:41 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

Unfortunately, I believe it's not a legal game unless you screw around entering funny names in the computer for 10 minutes, so this is not an official record.
posted by officer_fred at 6:50 PM on April 24, 2017 [16 favorites]

I wonder if it would be easier, or harder, to achieve some score that's not 300 in the same amount of time. Say, 267.

You'd have to have a plan for what you'd get on each shot, and lots of the shots would be different. You'd have the opportunity to adjust if you messed up and got an unplanned score on a particular shot, but you'd have to do some pretty fiendish math pretty quickly to do it.

But that might make it too interesting to be considered bowling.
posted by gurple at 8:20 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

"But that might make it too interesting to be considered bowling."

We went bowling with our kids early on a Sunday the other day, because it was cheap to go Sunday morning, and there was a solo dude in the lane next to us who was clearly practicing for a top-level league and he was AMAZING. He'd bowl himself a 7-10 split on purpose and then bowl down the 7-10 split, over and over and over. The amazing part wasn't that he could knock down the terrible splits, but that he could bowl terrible splits on purpose, with freakish precision. We spent about two hours there, and he'd been at it for quite a while before we got there, and kept going after we left. So I think that's like EXACTLY how bowling works!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:19 PM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

So I think that's like EXACTLY how bowling works!

I think I'm already firmly in the Shitting On Other People's Hobbies category, in this thread, and so I'm being very uncool at the moment. It must be acknowledged that I'm a Bad Person.

But, yeah. You just described the central puzzle of bowling, for me: the things that you do require unbelievably honed skill but are very small in number. Dude spends several hours training the same two shots to a staggering level of perfection. Probably he does that kind of thing several times weekly, rotating between a relatively small number of pairs of shots.

*shrug* Different strokes.
posted by gurple at 10:23 AM on April 25, 2017

I agree that the lane ordering is wrong, but that opens up the chance of doing it right and breaking the record again. The article says he did it in 86.9 seconds when the old record was just under 111.

The previous record holder did it in a 12 lane alley too, which makes the 86.9 seconds in sub-optimal conditions even more impressive.
posted by howling fantods at 10:49 AM on April 25, 2017