I hope not....because I'm even worse at pinball than I am at bowling.Originally Posted by vdubtx
And those were the rules to gain entry into the tournament...which is already in the 2nd round.
And there wasn't really anything "unorthodox" in the rules other than using your starting average as counting towards your ending average. And that was done to stop sandbaggers....so the sandbaggers all complained about it. But really, it's not much different than bowling in a league that uses a book average for the first 3 weeks. I just modified that same approach taking into account that this entire "tour" (including finals tournament) is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of a typical house league. We simply don't have the luxury to allow people to "establish".
Most tournaments handle this by just using your entering average and not adjusting it...which is what we're doing for the Finals. I was just worried that some of the averages we were using, since they weren't all USBC sanctioned, would be "off"...and I was correct about that. Every single person in the tournament (like 17 people) increased their average over 6 months with only ONE exception (I think JAnderson).
Now, I attribute much of that to the rule change made after week 1 where we went from random center assignments to "selected centers". The goal behind the random centers was not only to get people to explore different centers around them..but also to provide the bowler with a more realistic, high stakes, "feel" because they were out of their element. It would force them to travel 25 miles and bowl in a place they most likely have never been inside of...much like tournament conditions. In that first round, scores were fairly low, averaging 179 compared to the starting averages of 176. In the second round after everyone picked their own centers....the average was 194 and the average for rounds 2-5 was 191. 3 players improved their starting averages by > 20 pins in 18 games or less.
Now it 'could' have been that everyone tended to sandbag in round 1, averaging only a few pins higher than their starting average. But I think the 10-15 pin per game jump in later rounds was more likely due to more comfortable center assignments.
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