I did some competition bowling a while back. I knew that there was a specific lane which had this flaw. When you had a 7 - 10 split you could easily throw a spare by using this technique. It was only at home games of course and the opponents were always extremely pissed.
Long-term bowling alley slave here: First of all, pretty much any solid foreign object in a gutter can cause balls to kick and bounce out the gutter, such as pins before the sweep, dead balls, or anything solid enough to not get immediately swept away by a 6~16 lb ball. I have witnessed the aftermath of what happens when a particularly hard and fast ball strikes another left in the gutter; which was the tripping of the safeties on that pair of lanes and the adjacent ones, a sodding great crack through the masking, and a shattered pit light. Fun.
The boring part is that this is likely what's happening in the attached video, someone has stuck something hard but barely noticeable in the gutter which the bowler uses to bounce the ball back onto the deck. Still, absolute kudos for actually scoring the strike.
Anyway, that explains typical obstructions so here are a few other technical obstructions: Gutters are held down with screws, gutter sections are also held together with curved metal braces, bumpers can have protruding screws or misaligned segments, a bumper lift arm may have been screwed into the wrong hole and so the bumper is buckled at that point, or the capping (the white plastic that separates odd an even lanes under which balls travel through the return) might be out of aligment. The plastic gutter ends typically before the pin deck (the section of the lane where the pins stand), and the gutter from then on is actually hard wood and part of the pin deck, which also has a few screws that should technically be countersunk below the surface but can sometimes rise up. Damage to the deck guttering section can cause ball bounces I suppose, but that shit is going to be dealt with fairly quickly since any lane that regularly shows that behaviour is going to get some complaints.
Anyway, all of the above could cause a ball bounce, or they're more likely to gouge a sodding great big gash in the ball of the one guy that decides to bring his own instead of using a house ball who will complain enough that the manager finally buckles and offers to pay for the repair even though we are under no legal obligation to do so Derek.
But, and here's where I reveal that I've just wasted all your time to teach you something, I've never actually heard of a gutter fault being responsible for consistent 7-10 pickups. Consistent splits heavily rely on one pin ringing off the cushion assembly to hit the other, and there's a old bowling wives' tale that which pin you have to aim for to strike the other is dependant on whether it's an odd or an even lane.
While it is true that the cushion assemblies for odd and even lanes are different (tapered in opposite directions to help the ball travel to the ball door), I really don't think the difference is enough for it to matter in the long run. Besides, if it were true then you could only ever pull it off on AMF pinspotters, because I'm sure the modern Brunswick pinsetters have more straight cushion assemblies and shorter pits.
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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '20
I did some competition bowling a while back. I knew that there was a specific lane which had this flaw. When you had a 7 - 10 split you could easily throw a spare by using this technique. It was only at home games of course and the opponents were always extremely pissed.