Winter Bowling: Sport Scoring
Sep 10 2008, 22:08 EDT [updated Sep 10 2008, 22:13 EDT]
The scoring system in the Sport/PBA league is slightly more detailed than in the normal leagues. The normal scoring is out of 7, 2 points for most team pins in each game and 1 point for overall team pins. The sport league has a more detailed scoring system that rewards the same things but makes blow outs less likely. In addition to the team points each pair of bowlers in the lineup (1st guy vs 1st guy, anchor vs anchor) get 1 point for beating their adjacent each game and 1 point for beating him in overall pins. On average for a large number of games this will be the same as the team points but it does feel more fair because for the one game where the team narrowly loses, the resulting point loss is also narrow.
So even though the scoring system is statistically the same over very large numbers of games it more accurately reflects reality for small numbers of repetitions (hence the feels more fair). The winter league is 35 weeks so I'd guess that counts as large-ish. No, I haven't done the math.