And, admittedly, I’ve made some errors in Brain Games past. In all honesty, it tickles me to have such a bright audience that challenges these sorts of things. I’ve learned a lot with these!

Sorry ’bout that….

“even though he threw one nasty gutter ball and didn’t bowl _a single strike_ the whole match.”

is conducive to the “yes, because he threw more than one strike” ploy as per what Lore Sjoberg would call “the misunderstood word puzzles”.

1 2
0/ 9/
19

1 2
9/ 9/
19

completing the second through tenth frame in the same way would leave him with 181 and one bonus roll for picking up the spare. Nine more would be 190.

that could be from the 8 shots of Yeager I had at breakfast.

Now that most alleys automatically score the game, I think most people don’t know how to keep score. I think people get very dependent on the computer. Similarly, now that I play solitaire on the computer, I have forgotten how to set up the game with real cards.

My first computer program in High School was to score bowling given the number of pins knocked down on each throw. Quite a simple first program.

Here’s the breakdown:

/ means spare

FRAME SCORE DETAILS
1      0/     spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
2      9/      spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
3      9/      spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
4      9/      spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
5      9/      spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
6      9/      spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
7      9/      spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
8      9/      spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
9      9/      spare(10)+next ball(9)= 19
10     9/      spare(10)+final ball(9)= 19

If the gutter ball (the zero) were scored anywhere OTHER than on the very first ball, it would mess up the scoring. The only reason it doesn’t matter on the first frame is that the score on the first ball is NOT added to the score of a previous frame. So it doesn’t matter how he gets the spare on the first frame — it could be 0+10, 1+9, 2+8, whatever. But since we know he threw ONE gutter ball, the only way that could happen is if he threw 0+10 on the first frame (gutter ball, then a spare).

If he got the gutter ball anywhere in the match except for the first ball, then he’d miss the “extra” points for that spare. When you score a spare on ANY frame, you get 10 points for that frame plus the value of the next ball you roll (not the next frame, just the next ball).

So if he rolled a 9+1 spare in frame 1, and then a 0 for the first ball of frame 2, he’d only get 10 points for the first frame, not 19. (He’d get the 10 for the spare, but then zero would be added to that because of the gutter ball.)

Then his score would be

10+19+19+19… = 181.