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I went bowling with a group of friends on Saturday night for the first time in years. Although bowling is something I enjoyed very much as a kid (I was in a league for many years), it's not a sport that I have continued to participate in as an adult. Anyway, my friends and I went to the same bowling alley I had frequented in my childhood. I like the place because the owner is pretty "old school" and has been resistant to change over the years. So imagine my surprise when I walked in on Saturday night to find computerized scoring systems at every lane!

When I got to the counter I asked the owner what made him finally give in. He said that he was losing business because he didn't have automated scoring. Apparently, there's a whole new generation of casual bowlers who have never had to learn how to keep score. The owner added that when families come out to bowl, they are not interested in figuring out how to keep score. They just want to bowl and have fun. He had to get the scoring computers or risk going out of business.

I can see his point, but it still bothered me a little bit. Keeping score in bowling is not rocket science. Anyone can learn how to do it in just a few minutes. Even with automated scoring, you should still make an effort to understand how the scores are generated.

A bowling game is made up of ten separate frames. On a scoring sheet, the ten frames are represented by ten squares, labeled 1 through 10, which are connected horizontally across the page. Each square also has a smaller square within it, at the top right corner. The bowler gets two chances in each frame to knock down all ten pins.

To keep score, you simply write down the number of pins the bowler knocks down in each frame. The score for the first throw of the frame is written just to the left of the small square-within-the-square, and the score for the second throw is written directly inside the small square. So, if the bowler knocks down six pins on the first throw, and three pins on the second throw, you would write a 6 to the left of the small square and a 3 inside the small square of the. Then you would write a 9 underneath those numbers (all within the larger square of the first frame).

If the bowler knocks down all ten pins on his or her first throw, it's called a strike and is denoted with an "X" in the small square in the top right corner of the larger frame square. A strike is scored as ten points plus the combined total of the bowler's next two throws. Say that in the next frame the bowler knocks down five pins on the first throw, and then four pins on the second throw. Continuing with our hypothetical score from above, the bowler would now have 28 in the second frame. We get this number by adding 10, 5, and 4 to the original score of 9 from the first frame. Then we would add nine more points to this total (because of the throws of 5 and 4) for a running score of 37 in the third frame.

If the bowler successfully knocks down all ten pins in two throws, say with throws of seven and three, it's called a spare and is denoted by writing a 7 just to the left of the small square-within-the-square and a "/" mark directly inside the small square for the appropriate frame. A spare is scored as ten points plus the total number of pins knocked down in the bowler's next turn. So if the bowler knocks down eight pins in his or her next turn, you would add 18 points to the bowler's running score.

The tenth frame is a bit special in that you have an opportunity to earn extra turns. If you get a strike on your first throw in the tenth frame, you earn two bonus throws. If you get a spare in the tenth frame, you earn one bonus throw. However, if you don't get either a strike or a spare, you don't earn any bonus throws.

That's all there is to keeping score in bowling. Pretty simple, isn't it? Now the next time you hit the lanes, you will know exactly what the computer is doing!