Pin Bowling

Five-pin bowling is a bowling variant which is played only in Canada, where most bowling alleys offer it, either alone or in combination with ten-pin bowling. It was devised around 1909 by Thomas F. Ryan in Toronto, Ontario, at his Toronto Bowling Club, in response to customers who complained that the ten-pin game was too strenuous.


He cut five tenpins down to about 75% of their size, and used hand-sized hard rubber balls, thus inventing the original version of five-pin bowling. The balls in five-pin are small enough to fit in the hand and therefore have no fingerholes. At the end of the lane there are five pins arranged in a V.

In size they are midway between duckpins and ten-pins, and they have a heavy rubber band around their middles to make them move farther when struck. The centre pin is worth five points if knocked down, those on either side, three each, and the outermost pins, two each, giving a total of 15 in each frame.
Ten-pin bowling (or more commonly, just "bowling") is a competitive sport in which a player (the “bowler”) rolls a bowling ball down a wooden or synthetic (polyurethane) lane with the objective of scoring points by knocking down as many pins as possible.The 41.5-inch (105 cm) wide, 60-foot (18 m) lane is bordered along its length by "gutters”—semicircular channels designed to collect errant balls which also pose an obstacle to advanced bowlers, because a straight ball cannot be rolled on a regulation lane at the angle required to consistently carry (knock down) all ten pins for a strike.

Most skillful bowlers will roll a more difficult-to-control hook ball to overcome this. There is a foul line at the end of the lane nearest to the bowler: if any part of a bowler’s body touches the lane side of this line after the ball is delivered (rolled), it is called a foul and any pins knocked over by that delivery are not scored.