by Melissa Gilbert

Created on: August 26, 2009   Last Updated: September 25, 2009

Almost anyone whom has decent basic math skills can keep score. Learning to keep score is not too hard to learn if you have the time and patience. A perfect score is three hundred. It is the one score that everyone aims for, but not everyone is able to bowl it. Still, it does not keep people from keep trying.

A bowling game consists of ten frames. Each frame, you have two chances at knocking all of the pins down. If you knock all of the pins down with the first ball, it is called a strike. If you knock all of the pins down with two balls, it is called a spare. If you bowl three strikes in a row, it is called a turkey and if you get anything more than three it will have bagger in the name. If you bowl four strikes in a row, it will be called four bagger. The same goes for anything beyond that.

Now that we got the basics down, it is now time to explain to you how scoring works. Do not expect to know how to keep score right away. It takes practice but before you know it, you will become a expert at keeping score. As I had explained before, you have ten frames to try to score three hundred. Let's take a look at the very first frame and pretend that you the bowler had bowled a strike. So we have a strike. In the little box, you have put in the letter "X" in there. The little box is usually on the upper right side of the box. Since we had a strike, we can't count what our score is yet.

Now let's go to the second frame. The player bowls a nine and a spare. You put a nine right next to the little box which should be on the left side of the box. For the spare part, all you have to put in is a diagonal line. You just go from the top right to the bottom left to create that line. Now we can go to the first frame and put the score in.

In order to figure out the score for strikes, it is ten plus the next two balls. For spares it is ten plus the first ball. Since the first frame the player rolls a strike and then rolls a spare, the total score for the first frame is twenty. If they had bowled three strikes in a roll over three frames, it would have been thirty.

So we have twenty for the first frame and on the second frame, the player bowled a spare. We do not have a score for the second frame yet because the player had bowled a spare. The third frame, they bowl a five and a four. That is a total of nine. You take the ten plus the five which equals fifteen. Now, you add that to twenty and you get thirty five as total score so far for the second frame. Then, we add nine to the thirty five for the third frame. So, thirty five plus nine equals forty four.

Hopefully by now, you get the gist of it all. Let us now go down to the tenth frame. The tenth frame is a bit different than the rest of the game. If you bowled a spare, you get one extra ball to throw. If you bowl a strike, you get two extra balls to throw. If you do not get a strike or spare, you are done with the game.

Remember, it will take time to learn to keep score. Once you do, you will never forget how to keep score. Even though most bowling alleys these days have the electronic scoring, it is still very helpful to know how to keep score in case of a breakdown or malfunction. Knowing how to keep score, may come in handy when you least expect it. You never know, you may end at a bowling alley that does not have electronic scoring. You will have a leg up over people whom were never taught how to keep score in the first place.

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