A Surprise Win

I’m not crowing. It was probably a fluke of nature; but, if my recounting of my bowls experience is going to be complete, I must note it. Playing mens’ pairs with the buddy who got me into bowls, we won an open provincial tournament!
 In the province of Ontario in Canada, the draw puts winners against winners so it is not possible to just get three easy opponents. So that doesn’t explain it. It was just a combination of simultaneous good play by both of us and a string of luck. However, the outcome was impressive. Since each match was just 12 ends, the maximum score was 18 with anything more just plus points yet our scores in the three successive matches were 18+4, 18+1 and 18+3!

As I have noted elsewhere, I have only played in a few open tournaments this year, because the pressure to perform well gives me butterflies. In fact this is just the second open tournament I have played in 2017 and this probable fluke is not going to change my decision. The important thing is to have fun and playing at my regular club level and practicing regularly gives me more peace of mind. I know that all the books say to compete against the best if you want to improve but apparently, this regime is good for me.

Proper Visualization of the Course of Your Lawn Bowl: the Final Secret to Controlling Weight

Barry Pickup says, “Study the track your bowl takes en route to the head. Learn that track, memorize it. Learn to visualize that track before you deliver a bowl. A properly delivered bowl will always follow the same track unless deflected by a foreign object or uneven green. Learn that track well and you are a long way towards bringing a bowl to rest exactly where you want it.”

Before a high-performance lawn bowler delivers a difficult shot, you will often see him or her standing about halfway down the rink looking at the head or walking backwards towards the mat. What is going on in that person’s mind?

I think after examining the head from near the forward ditch, the expert bowler has already made up his/her mind what shot to try. This close up looking from the direction of the mat most probably relates to the visualization of the shot. From the mat, the crucial details of the last few meters traveling of the bowl cannot be visualized. Often the bowl has already disappeared from view among the other bowls.

Before starting to roll your actual bowl, you should have rolled an imaginary bowl and followed it on its path all the way to its final resting place. It may seem like a waste of time. You may be put off because it seems no-one else is doing this. I resisted for five years! There is no obvious logic in it; but, it will improve your weight like nothing else will.

Head Reading at Lawn Bowls: The Entry Port Motif

An entry port on the right-hand side leading to the yellow jack: the rink runs from lower left to upper right

The chances for a successful draw to the jack are improved when the port configuration of bowls is present. A port is a funnel-shaped passage, ideally, that leads towards the jack at the same angle as the normal angle of draw of your bowl. The funnel shape is marked at two or more places by bowls so that if the delivery is either wide or narrow but a touch heavy it will be deflected back and funneled in the direction of the jack.

Ports are not visible from the mat. They need to be identified by the team member directing the head. Because it is the bowler who knows the bias of his own bowls best, the bowler often needs to be called to the head to confirm the wisdom of what is being proposed.

Head Reading at Lawn Bowls: The ‘Jack or Bowl’ Motif

The Motif Approach to Head Reading

To a pedantic person, a lawn bowl's head is an area encompassing all the bowls in play and the jack. Pragmatically, the head comprises all the bowls in play likely to be or become significant, the jack, and the rink area around them. To illustrate the difference: when your skip tells you to stay back of the head, he or she doesn't mean you need to be on the bank just because there are a few bowls, four meters behind the jack (though you should not stand in a way that would obscure them).

 A motif is defined as a main element, idea, feature, etc. The main cultural areas where the word is used are art, literature, and music. I am going to extend the term to identify any common, significant feature in a lawn bowl head. Enumerating the motifs displayed in any lawn bowling head along with an understanding of their significance for the selection of your tactics for that head will be my approach to lawn bowling head analysis.

 Before I can analyze a head in this way, I must identify each of the common motifs. I will start, in this blog, with the ‘jack or bowl’ motif and continue the examination in later blogs.

’Jack or Bowl’ Motif

I will define an approximately jack-high opposing bowl that is sitting shot, with 5.5 inches or less distance between it and the jack as the ’jack or bowl’ motif.

For us ordinary mortals, this arrangement of the jack and one bowl lying shot is unlikely to be defeated with draw bowls. However, because the distance between the jack and bowl is small enough that it is also unlikely that you can roll a bowl between them without disturbing one or both, an on-shot delivered at this target has a heightened chance to move either the jack, the opposing bowl, or both, because this target is substantially wider in cross-section than a jack or bowl sitting isolated.  Therefore aiming to hit this cluster has an improved chance for success.

The closer this space between the jack-high bowl and the jack is to the actual width of your own bowl when it is on its running surface, the sooner the attack should be considered because your opponents will realize that this setup presents a big opportunity for your side to get rid of their shot bowl and will try to alter the situation by placing receiving bowls at the back, blocking your planned on-shot, or tickling the jack into a more secure location. Nevertheless, in a pairs, triples, or fours game, hitting the jack or bowl motif is best left to the team player most experienced with run-through shots.  The most likely strategy of the side owning the shot bowl is to get other bowls behind the jack in a catching position or to cover any re-spot position(s).

When it is the opposing lead that creates the ‘shot or bowl’ situation, a good strategy is to direct your own lead to get one of his/her bowls into the head so that it widens the target. What is anathema in the situation is for your lead to be short blocking your subsequent drive or on-shot. If your lead has two bowls remaining when the ‘jack or bowl’ situation arises, first ask for a bowl 1-2 meters behind the jack and then ask for the next bowl jack-high to widen the target. The first bowl will help provide a better sense of the correct weight; the second will make use of this knowledge to set up the target for destruction.

How Many Lawn Bowls Matches are Won by Six Points or Less?

....Quite a large percentage, right! Well how many matches contain within them a six point conversion? ....Or two three point conversions?  What I am getting at is that a lot of matches swing on the skip making a few big shots with one of those final bowls.

My co-blogger, John McKinnie who writes Bowling for Gold, makes the point in a recent offering that some shots deserve more careful preparation than normal. Forget that some people, like Ryan Bester, bowl so fast that you would think he doesn't prepare at all. I am talking about mortals!

Particularly if the shot required is something other than a draw shot, I think one needs to really methodically go through a check-list in preparation; not to increase your nervousness or increase the tension but to settle oneself and make sure you have brought to mind everything you have learned.

I skipped a team that won a competition at James Gardens on Saturday. The difference we won by could be accounted for by last shot or second-last shot conversions. Among these, I scored on three out of four drives where we were down at least three in each head. Yes, I was also lucky in some of these outcomes, after lucky after I hit the head, but those successful shots ' gave our side a chance' in those ends.

The moral: practice those rescue shots and then take a few seconds to prepare before trying to performing them.

When Winning with it, Don’t deviate from your Lead’s ‘Natural Length’

This afternoon I played an in-house social game of pairs on grass at the Etobicoke Lawn Bowling Club. My lead was on fire. We had the mat most of the afternoon and I kept calling for a jack 23-24 meters in front of the mat placed at the T line(in Canada the hog line is at 21 meters!). This I gathered from her performance was my lead’s ‘natural length’ under the rink conditions that day. Besides bowling consistently, she delivered the jack dependably to the 23-24 meter length and, since we were doing wonderfully, I never changed anything throughout the match.

When the match was over I said to her in the clubhouse, “That length seems to be very comfortable for you.”

She astounded me by replying, “But I like to change it for variety.”

Bowls is challenging enough. Don’t do the opposition favors. If your side is out-bowling them at your lead’s natural distance, let them struggle to win an end so as to have a chance to change things. Then, you will get your variety. If your side is out-bowling the opposition with a certain mat position and jack length conditions, your success improves your confidence and, consequently,  further improves your bowling; at the same time, your success creates doubts in your opponents’ minds and damages their bowling.  

An Open Letter to New Bowlers after Open House

A Real Game

Last Saturday, I was one of the club coaches at the James Gardens Open House. I met quite a few new people who all could become pretty good bowlers. All seemed to enjoy it. They realized, “I can do this.”

But many, maybe most of them, I predict are going to quit after their first real game. Not because they can’t roll a bowl up close to that little white ball but because they haven’t learned the terminology, the etiquette, the hand signals, the team member responsibilities or the basic rules yet. And if they don’t learn these things before they try to play a real game with experienced club members, they are going to be embarrassed or even spoken to unkindly;( even though we try to prepare our members to look out for the ‘newbies’).

 That first day Open House instruction is intended to answer the question, “Could you play a reasonable game of bowls.”

We aren’t burdening beginners with all the rules and responsibilities stuff. That we save for the subsequent lessons. But if these tyro bowlers think they can learn the rest watching bowls on Youtube, they are on the way to problems. Top bowlers on the tube speak little (since it is usually singles). When it is a team game, they know their signals. There is a dashed line down the center of the rink to help center the mat. They have a special official to center the jack. The score is kept for them and they don’t need to rake bowls. All in all, no help for a prospective novice lead bowler.

So if new folk want to enjoy bowls, they need to learn the details; the non-physical stuff  That is what volunteer coaches teach in lessons after that first one. However, no matter what I write some people won’t come out for it. For them I have tried to write down a bit of this theory and practical stuff. I have augmented a Wikipedia article.

Lawn bowls is, almost always, played on a large, rectangular, precisely levelled and manicured grass or synthetic carpet surface known as a bowling green which is divided by imaginary lines into narrow parallel playing strips called rinks. The game can be played between two individuals or between teams of two to four. In the simplest competition, singles, one of the two opponents flips a coin to see who wins the "mat" and begins a segment of the competition (in bowling parlance, an "end"), by placing the mat and rolling the jack to the other end of the green to serve as a target. Once it has come to rest, the jack is aligned to the center of the rink and the players take turns to roll their bowls from the mat towards the jack. The object of the game is to finish each game segment or ‘end’ with bowls closer to the jack than the opposition

A bowl may curve outside the rink boundary into the rest of the green on its path, but must come to rest within the rink boundary to remain in play. At the front and back of the long narrow playing surface are ditches. Bowls delivered into the front ditch are dead and are removed from play, except in the event when one has "touched" the jack on its way. "Touchers" are marked with chalk and remain alive in play even though they are in the ditch. Similarly if the jack is knocked into the ditch it is still alive unless it is out of bounds to either side. When this happens at our club the jack is "respotted"on the center of the rink two meters from the front ditch and the end is continued. After the competitors have delivered all of their bowls (four each in singles and pairs, three each in triples, and two bowls each in fours), the distance of the closest bowls to the jack is determined (the jack may have been displaced) and a point, called a "shot", is awarded for each bowl which a competitor has closer than that opponent's bowl that is nearest to the jack. For instance, if a competitor has bowled two bowls closer to the jack than their opponent's nearest, they are awarded two shots. The exercise is then repeated for the next end, bowling back in the opposite direction on the rink. A game of bowls is typically a preset number of ends.

A new lawn bowler at James Gardens LBC will at first be a participant in a game between teams of three players each. The new bowler will deliver the first three bowls for his or her side. The team leader called the “skip” will ask the new bowler to try to deliver each bowl as close to the jack (the white ball) as possible. Once the lead has rolled three bowls (s)he has no further responsibilities in that ‘end’.until all the bowls have been delivered and the score on the end is determined.

Each player on the team has particular assignments to promote the flow of the game. Besides rolling three bowls, when his/her team has possession of the mat, the lead is required to both place the mat and center it, at whatever distance from the back ditch the skip decides, and then roll the jack to the length the skip calls for  At the completion of an end, if his/her team losses the end the lead rakes the bowls together behind and to the right of the new mat position. If his/her team has won the end, the winning lead immediately collects the jack and starts setting the mat for the next end.

If the new bowler bowls a bowl that is close to being out of bounds it is his/her job to signal to the skip whether that bowl is inside or outside the rink.

Open House in Canada: Bowls Advertising

It’s almost May and May is the month for Open Houses at the lawn bowling clubs in Canada. In May clubs offer the general public a chance to discover that lawn bowling is fun. What’s it like? It’s sort of alley bowling with sunshine. It’s sort of curling with grass instead of ice (and no sweeping!) It was a fascination for Francis Drake, historically, and hundreds of thousands of Australians, today.

It can keep you flexible and trim. Literally anyone can play. People in wheelchairs play. People who are legally blind play. If you have a bad back or bad knees, there is special equipment to help deliver the bowl. The best bowlers in the world are in their twenties and thirties but there are advantages to being short, stout and having big feet! (A firm foundation and low center of gravity are advantages.) There are advantages to being patient and tactical.

Finally it is environmentally green and financially affordable.

Any club will welcome new bowlers and lend them bowls to get started. Now is the season to invite friends and acquaintances to have as much enjoyment as you are having!

The decapitated man on the left is now minister of immigration The bowler is the soon to be former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada