This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, February, 2022
Most subscribers to this publication were born knowing how to read pairings sheets. But for the thousands of casual readers picking this issue off the shelf in the bookstore while waiting for your latte, this is an essential tutorial as you prepare to follow professional bowling in 2022.
Lesser sports, like football, merely say “Dallas at Washington” and expect fans to be able to make sense of it. In bowling, we devise intricate flowcharts and infographics to ensure no one will ever accidentally understand what they’re watching. We value hard work. We earn our fandom.
We must preface this by honoring the brilliance of the pairings sheet. In a sport that involves so many elements that can confuse outsiders, the pairings sheet amazingly condenses the chaos of qualifying into a legible format in a remarkably small space.
For this tutorial, we’ll use an example of one group from an actual pairings sheet from a real tournament at the highest level of the sport: the PBA. This is from the first round of qualifying in the 2021 PBA Players Championship East Region. We selected this particular group because (A) Davidson made it to the East Region Finals, (B) Troup won the whole thing, (C) Neuer got famous shortly thereafter, (D) “Ptq Qualifer6” is hilarious and apparently hails from Virginia.
The first thing we need to understand is these four players will be bowling together all day. This is called crossing with each other. The prominent 43-44 just to the left of Davidson’s name tells us where they’re starting. If you walk in for game one of qualifying, pick up a pairings sheet, say to yourself, “I’m a huge fan of Ptq Qualifier6 and want to watch him bowl,” you simply walk over to lanes 43 and 44 and this entire group will be there.
Great. Snag a good seat and strap in for the next four hours, right? No. After the first game, these people begin packing up their equipment and moseying to their right. Four different people come into view, unpack their equipment and start bowling on 43-44. What? This is a travesty. Where is the group you wanted to watch? This is the cross; they’re crossing the house. Why? Fairness.
Because each pair of lanes differs topographically from every other pair of lanes, the bowlers have to move throughout qualifying to ensure no one gets an unfair advantage of getting to bowl on a “good” pair all day and no one gets an unfair disadvantage of having to bowl on a “bad” pair all day. We should also note that designating a pair as good or bad rarely deals with actual stats but rather a rumor started by one player who had a good or bad game on a particular pair.
So, to approach fairness, the players bowl each game on a different pair of lanes. The bottom line on the pairings sheet explains this. You’ll see G1: 43-44, which we already know, then G2: 49-50. Now it starts to get intuitive. For game two, this group will be on lanes 49-50. Game three is on 9 and 10. And so on. This is also handy for late-arriving fans because if you show up after the event starts, you will have absolutely no clue which game they’re bowling, so you can cross-reference who is bowling on any particular pair with this bottom line to determine where they are and when it might end, pending a rolloff.
We should also note that while moving from pair to pair increases the overall fairness quotient, it doesn’t guarantee fairness. If you’re following a lefty throwing urethane or a high-rev righty chewing up the lanes or someone who doesn’t “play the lanes right,” then it is inherently unfair to you. But, as we know, the only true fairness in bowling is that of an unfair advantage.
In our sample group, we have a one-handed righty, a two-handed righty, a one-handed lefty and a total wildcard. Hearsay dictates it is utterly impossible to follow this group or to be in this group. Never mind that two of them made it to the regional finals.
Pairings sheets are impressively efficient and borderline genius in their ability to make sense of incomprehensible situations. And we haven’t even gotten to the poor pairings sheets tasked with corralling the complete confusion and prolonged qualifying rounds of a variable-skip format. Nor should we. Ever. Nothing, not even a pairings sheet, should be asked to make sense of that.