While most bowling lanes these days can keep score automatically, knowing how to properly score a game of bowling will likely come in handy at some point or another. Many regulars to bowling know the scoring already, but there are plenty of others who rely entirely on the automated systems that score one of America’s favorite activities. Now just imagine if you find yourself at a bowling alley that doesn’t use automated scoring, without anyone in a group that knows how to keep score?

Understanding the bonuses from strikes and spares is usually where things get tricky. To put things simply, a spare gives a player a one-ball bonus, in which the next ball rolled will count toward both the frame with the spare, as well as the current frame.

With a strike, it’s a two-ball bonus, meaning the next two balls (even if rolled over two frames), will be counted toward the frame with a strike.

One thing that makes this easier to understand is to know that when a strike and a spare happen in consecutive frames, no matter which of the two comes first, the result of the first frame will always be a score of 20. For example, if a spare is followed up with a strike, that means all 10 pins of the ball following the spare were cleared, adding those 10 extra pins to spare frame. If a strike comes first, to follow that up with a spare would have taken the two rolls that count toward the strike frame, again totaling 10 pins.

Much of it can be learned more in-depth by looking over a bowling scorecard and figuring out how a specific score got to be where it was.

Helpwithbowling.com has more on bowling scoring. Read the details here: https://helpwithbowling.com/how-to-keep-score-in-bowling.php