Candlepins for Dollars

[xiphias]

So, this past Saturday night, I saw something on television actually worth watching.

Bowling.

See, here in New England, we have this sport. It's called candlepin bowling, and it's been said that "candlepin is to ten-pin as baseball is to softball."

Around here, the kind of bowling that you all outside of New England call "bowling", we call it "ten-pin."

Candlepin bowling is like ten-pin except:

Candlepins look like this:

while ten-pins look like this:

A candlepin ball is about 2 and a half pounds (1 kg), and is 4.5 inches (about 11 cm) in diameter. A ten-pin ball is between 10 and 16 pounds (4.5 kg to 7.25 kg) and is about 8.5 inches in diameter (22 cm).

With the ten-pin ball being bigger, AND the ten-pin pins being bigger, ten-pin is much easier than candlepin.

In addition, in candlepin, fallen pins are left in play. This makes the game more challenging and adds a little more strategy: you can attempt to use the fallen pins to knock over standing pins.

To level things out somewhat, in candlepin, you get three balls per box rather than two, as in ten-pin. Nonetheless, the scoring is the same: a strike is all ten pins down with one ball, a spare is all ten pins down with two balls. All ten pins down with three balls is a ten-box, and scores ten points, but doesn't give you any extra points as a strike or a spare does.

In ten-pin, a perfect 300 game is a thing of beauty, and is rare, like a hole-in-one in golf. A perfect 300 game is something that people will talk about for years.

But in candlepin, there has never been a 300 game, ever. That shows you how much harder it is.

Anyway, there have been a pretty good number of candlepin bowling television shows over the past fifty years. But there hasn't been one on broadcast television in the Boston market for the past decade. (There's apparently one on cable, and there's one in Augusta, Maine on broadcast.)

But there is one now. Channel 56 just started a show, Candlepins for Dollars, 6 pm on Saturdays.

It's a lot of fun.

I totally forgot how much fun candlepin is to watch. I mean, if you're watching professional ten-pin bowlers, petty much anything they throw is going to be a strike or a spare. In candlepin, you're excited when someone clears a ten-box, and even a seven or eight is pretty good. Actually seeing a strike in candlepin is genuinely exciting.

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I don't think I've ever met her in PERSON.