18 Comments on “Dots On Bowling Lanes Explained! How to Line Up Properly to Bowl Your Best.”

    1. Depends on if your a lefty or righty, usually if you’re right handed your right foot, if your left handed your left foot

    2. It really depends on your comfort. I’m a righty and line up with inside of left foot. There’s no right or wrong just consistency.

    3. @Anthemius Augustulus III So I seen a video from JR Raymond and he explained the rule of 7 some people were saying left foot and vice versa. His diagram had the left foot on 17 and going to 10 etc….

  1. Question for the lefties: since there’s only 39 boards on a lane, so do you call the first board (from the left) as board 1 or 2? Or do you call it as board 39 and have a completely opposite alignment with the righties?

    1. Why would a lefty ever call the board closest to the left gutter the 2 board?

      For a lefty the board closest to the left gutter is the 1 board, and for a righty the board closest to the right gutter is the 1 board.

      The only board that both righties and lefties give the same name to is the 20 board.

      Since the naming of the boards is for a mental model why would you care what is going on in the mind of an opposite handed bowler.

      It is important that your mental model agrees when you are trying to communicate with a fellow bowler about a specific location on the lane and you apply math to the naming system.

      For example when someone makes the claim (which I disagree with) that the pocket is the 17.5 board. Where exactly is the 17.5 board? Is it the center of the 17 board? Or is it 17.5 boards from the gutter?

      If you claim it’s the center of the 17 board, then where is the 1/2 board?

    2. @Mike White chill bro, I got confused for a sec due to the odd number of boards on a lane. Just realized that what the lefties and righties see are an exact mirrored image. Thanks for the explanation!

    3. @Bryant Tan I agree that lefties are a “weird breed”, I just don’t think they are “start with 2 weird”

  2. It’s not good to assume the middle dot on the approach will line up with the middle dot on the lane.

    It’s been a number of years (on wood lanes) but I’ve bowled (once) at a place where they were off by a couple of boards.

    Who knows what goes in the minds of people who do installations.

  3. Dear Mrs. O’Keefe,
    I would really love a video of you going into detail on how to line up, aim, and correctly deliver a spare shot for the 10 or the 6-10.
    Thank you very much,
    Sincerely,
    Jason

  4. Because of the pros and their videos I’m almost up to a 200 average. Appreciate you all!

  5. I’ve ran into the different dots one time and it completely threw me off. I couldn’t get lined up right all night. It was just bowling for fun so it wasn’t a huge deal, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it and it annoyed me.

  6. Yes, but how far are the dots to the foul line? Some centers have ghosted dots that I use, some dont, so I have to guess.

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