Why It’s Almost Impossible to Make a 7-10 Split in Bowling | WIRED

in professional bowling about 60% of the shots are strikes but what about the rest of the shots there are over 1000 possible spare configurations and players convert the hardest less than one percent of the time so what's the most difficult spare of all well there are a lot of notorious spares out there but today we're gonna be looking at the most notorious of all the 710 split now look some of you may have noticed that this episode breaks with our format a little bit because unlike previous feats that we've looked at people have actually hit 710 splits here's the thing nobody on earth can hit a 710 split predictably or reliably and that's because that split is even harder than it looks so today we're gonna look at why converting the 710 split is really truly almost impossible to find out what it takes I played a few frames with a professional bowler I believe the 710 is the hardest spare split conversion to make in bowling tried hacking the game with a bowling robot and crawled inside the jaws of a pin setting machine to find out what really makes the 710 split the most difficult spare of all this has been turned completely off which I am grateful for but first I went bowling I've made the 710 three times in my lifetime and I'm 43 years old I've been on tour for going on 19 years that is 10 time national titleholder Wes Malott we met up with him at the u.s. bowling Congress in Arlington Texas do you have any pro tips on how to how to convert this thing well I'll tell you one thing in order to make two you gotta hit one or in other words accuracy is essential come on it's also not my strong suit come on it's hard to hit the one at least for me it is Malad can hit whatever pin he wants almost every time but there's more to converting this pair than accuracy and to fully appreciate why it helps to understand the anatomy of a bowling lane it's 42 inches wide and 60 feet from the foul line to the head pin that's pin number one the nine remaining pins are numbered like this each pin stands 12 inches away from its neighbors creating a pattern of equilateral triangles two gutters run along side the lane and trap the ball if it strays too far left or right removing it from play bowling just boils down to angles when the ball and pin collide the pin bounces in a direction perpendicular to the tangent plane that intersects with the point of contact so if you hit the pin here it'll bounce here hit it here it'll fly here and if you hit it here it'll go this way that means that in order to send the 7 pin flying across the lane and into the 10 pin or vice versa in theory you need to hit it right here here's the problem it is impossible to get a bowling ball far enough outside the 7 or the 10 pin without it first falling into the gutter there's just not enough room that makes the 710 split the only spare in bowling that can't be converted with ball and pins alone to pull it off you actually have to bounce the 7 pin or the 10 pin off the machinery behind the pins and the more power on the shot the better when the lot goes for the 710 split he throws at about 22 miles per hour that's harder than he usually does and he often gives it a little bit of forward spin so the ball won't hook and lose speed but there's one more essential ingredient for converting the 710 split luck even if you hit the pin hard enough and even if it heads toward the pin setter at a good angle there's just no telling how it's going to ricochet without some kind of lucky bounce and the machinery in the back end you're just not going to convert it and that's because this isn't like banking a shot in pool for starters the pins have that causes them to bounce around unpredictably but you also have to consider the barrier behind the pins it's a curtain not a wall which means that it moves and anything bouncing off of it is going to ricochet around even less predictably and some of those curtains move more than others here's what I mean by that okay so unless you work at a bowling alley you've probably never been back behind here this is a pin setter it's what collects and sort of repositions all the pins every time you're bowling and the piece that we want to look at is in here okay so this is an older-model pin setter it's anchored in two places once up here at the top and again down here along this more solid bumper section when you're trying to convert the 710 split the goal is to bounce either the seven pin or the 10 pin off of these surfaces and into the opposing pin now what you might have noticed when I touch it is that this curtain has some give to it and that movement actually reduces the energy of the pin bouncing off of it which makes it tougher to ricochet into the other pin here's the thing on newer model pin setters this curtain moves even more and when we were at the u.s. bowling Congress we actually got to see what one of those pin setting curtains looks like on these newer mechanisms this curtain is only attached at the top and so it swings completely freely like a doggy door and then the pin instead of bouncing all of that energy just gets absorbed into the curtain all of which means that in the end when it comes to the 710 split your best bet is to hit either pin as hard and as consistently as possible and then just hope for the best and when it comes to consistency no bowler on earth is as reliable as this one meet Earl that was mildly terrifying Earl is our staff bowler here in the equipment specs department he's a robotic arm and he throws bowling balls very very very well Earl can put a bowling ball pretty much anywhere you want at up to 24 miles per hour and it's pin rates as high as nine hundred rotations per minute that's triple what pros put on their shots and once you've dialed in all your parameters Earl can roll the same shot over and over and over normally the US Bowling Congress uses Earl to test equipment but today we're gonna use it for an experiment the goal to see if Earl can hit a 710 split come on Earl I'm changing the trajectory from one point seven to one point two to increase our chances of hitting the sparrow we decided to let Earl Bowl on a lane with an older model pinsetter with a fixed curtain we tried bouncing into the side at an angle towards the middle of the curtain and even got the pin to double bounce off the ball and while some of our shots looked like they might have come close to converting the spare we never managed to actually pick it up Earl might be powerful and consistent but not even a robot can engineer luck so if you bring all of these factors into consideration you wind up with a conversion rate on the 710 split of just 0.7 percent but there is a spare that players hit even less often this is data journalist Ben Blatt a few years ago he analyzed close to half a million frames from the professional bowling Association to try and figure out what the hardest shot in bowling really is so you analyzed close to half a million frames what did you find there a conversion that was picked up least often is a shot that she has a nickname called a Greek church it was picked up about 0.3 percent of the time compared to the 710 split which is about 0.7 percent of the time so they're obviously both extremely hard to pick up but the Greek Church sophistical II was converted much less than the 7/10 flipped if you've never heard of the Greek Church here's what it looks like for right-handers it's when you leave the 4 6 7 9 and 10 pins and it's the mirror image of that pin arrangement for lefties it's called the Greek Church because if you look at the pins head-on and use your imagination they look a little bit like the spires of an old cathedral to convert it you need to hit all the pins on one side while sending at least one of them Alaine to knock over the remaining pins it's a highly technical and very risky shot if you miss which you probably will you earn far fewer points than if you go for the three pins you know you can hit that second strategy is called going for counts and bowlers typically do it when they encounter difficult spares if you're in a game time scenario strategy more often than not calls for just picking up the three on the right most of the time yes you're going for a count and you're going for the three on the right but let's say you're going for all five pins is the Greek Church actually harder than the seven ten not according to malotte I think the seven sounds harder than a great Church because the Greek Church you can shoot at it and you've got a pin that can slide across to make the other pens a seven-ten they're even farther apart and it's virtually impossible because the lane is only so wide you can't hit that side of the pin and get it to slide over to the seven pen to prove his point millat agreed to try converting the Greek Church he struggled at first it is after all a really difficult shot but it only took him about a dozen attempts to finally convert the whole spare and he came pretty close three or four times we saw similar results from early once it was dialed in the robot was able to convert the Greek Church about 40% of the time but neither our human bowler nor our robot one could convert the 7/10 so if the professionals still think the 710 split is harder than the Greek Church why did it come up less often in Blatt study again it boils down to strategy on the 710 split it's the same shot whether you're trying to knock over one pin or two but on the Greek Church its two different shots if you go four counts you'll probably pick up three pins but if you try to convert the spare you're going for these two pins right here and there's a good chance you'll walk away with just one we're maybe even none even though converting the Greek Church is technically easier it is almost never worth it to try in the game it's virtually impossible almost impossible to be able to slide over and hit both of those pins on it which is probably why it showed up less in the study than the 7:10 the point is there is an important distinction between the rarest shot in bowling and the most difficult a title that still belongs to the 710 split because remember without that pin setting machinery behind it you cannot convert the 710 split so unless that machinery changes in some way to bounce pins more reliably or predictably the 710 split will remain almost impossible [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 7,402,117

Rating: 4.8715825 out of 5

Keywords: bowling, robotic arm, robotics, robots, sport science, robbie gonzalez, pba, 7-10 split, wes malott, pro bowling, spares, greek church, earl the robot, bowl, bowling 7 10 split, 7 10 split, wired almost impossible, bowling almost impossible, 7-10 split bowling, how to make a 7 10 split, how to make a 7-10 split, 7-10 split attempt, bowling robot, bowler, pro bowler, bowler split, bowling split, split in bowling, bowling splits, bowling how to make a split, split bowling, wired

Id: EMoSsCDgZys

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Cokecan4z]

havent they seen alley cats?

[u/anondando]

As someone who doesn't give a fuck about bowling, I found that to be pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[u/Firinmailaza]

Because they're really far away

[u/Solo_Wanderluster]

I'm in the 7-10 split club!