Bowling Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
167 free Bowling trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
50 free Bowling trivia questions with answers. Bowling trivia for league night, a birthday party at the lanes or anyone who has ever argued about what a turkey is. This quiz covers the whole sport: the 5,000-year-old Egyptian game, why Martin Luther settled on nine pins, how ten-pin bowling dodged an American ban, the year the perfect 300 was written into the rules, and the White House lanes that were built for Harry Truman. It also covers the numbers every bowler should know, from lane length to pin weight to the 7-10 split, plus the legends of the PBA: Don Carter, Earl Anthony, Walter Ray Williams Jr., Pete Weber and Jason Belmonte. Candlepin, duckpin, five-pin and kegeln get their turn too, along with The Big Lebowski, Kingpin and Wii Sports. Questions run from easy to expert, each labelled by difficulty. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 167 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In ten-pin bowling, what is knocking down all remaining pins with the second ball called?
A spare
A spare is scored when the second ball clears every pin the first ball left standing; it earns 10 plus the pins from the next roll.
Q 02In bowling slang, what is a 'turkey'?
Three consecutive strikes
A turkey is three consecutive strikes, a name from 19th-century holiday tournaments that awarded a live turkey for the feat; four in a row is a 'hambone'.
Q 03How long is a ten-pin bowling lane from the foul line to the centre of the head pin?
60 feet
The lane measures 60 feet from the foul line to the centre of the head pin, a standard the American Bowling Congress fixed in 1895 and that USBC rules hold to within half an inch.
Q 04What is the maximum weight of a regulation ten-pin bowling ball?
16 pounds
A bowling ball may weigh no more than 16 pounds, a limit the American Bowling Congress set in 1895; the rules fix no minimum weight.
Q 05A regulation ten-pin weighs roughly how much?
3 lb 8 oz
A regulation ten-pin weighs between 3 lb 6 oz and 3 lb 10 oz, so roughly 3 lb 8 oz; the narrow range keeps pins toppling consistently when struck.
Q 06Which civilisation left the earliest bowling evidence, miniature pins and balls in a child's grave, around 3200 BCE?
Ancient Egypt
Egyptologist Flinders Petrie found the miniature pins and balls in an Ancient Egypt child's grave dated to about 3200 BCE, the oldest known bowling equipment.
Q 07Which religious reformer is credited with fixing the number of bowling pins at nine?
Martin Luther
Martin Luther, himself a keen kegler, is credited with settling on nine pins in the 16th century; before that the count varied from three to seventeen.
Q 08Which English king banned bowling for the lower classes in 1511 while remaining an avid bowler himself?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII's 1511 statute reserved bowling for the wealthy, yet the king had his own alleys built at Whitehall Palace.
Q 09Which English captain reportedly finished his game of bowls at Plymouth Hoe as the Armada was sighted in 1588?
Francis Drake
Francis Drake, vice-admiral of the English fleet, is said to have insisted on finishing his bowls on Plymouth Hoe before sailing out to fight the Armada.
Q 10Which 1819 Washington Irving story gave American literature its first mention of ninepin bowling?
Rip Van Winkle
In Rip Van Winkle, the thunder in the Catskills is Henry Hudson's ghostly crew playing ninepins, the game Rip joins before his twenty-year sleep.
Q 11The ten-pin game is said to have been invented in America to get around what?
City bans on nine-pin games
Ten pins were added, the story goes, to dodge city bans on nine-pin games, which several US cities passed in the 1830s because of the gambling that surrounded them.
Q 12Which organization set modern ten-pin rules in 1895, raising the top score from 200 to 300?
The American Bowling Congress
The American Bowling Congress, founded in New York in September 1895, standardised lane, ball and pin specifications and fixed the 300-point perfect game.
Q 13Before rubber balls arrived in 1905, bowling balls were made of which dense hardwood?
Q 21Australia's Jason Belmonte is famous for delivering the ball how?
With two hands
Jason Belmonte bowls with two hands, both palms behind the ball and no thumb in it, a style that brought him more PBA major titles than anyone before him.
Q 22Norm Duke became the youngest PBA Tour winner in 1983 at what age?
18
Norm Duke was 18 years and 345 days old when he won the 1983 Cleveland Open, the youngest winner in PBA Tour history up to then.
Q 23Who was the first bowler to convert the 7-10 split on television, in January 1980?
Mark Roth
Mark Roth picked up the 7-10 split at the 1980 Alameda Open; John Mazza and Jess Stayrook in 1991 and Anthony Neuer in 2021 are among the very few pros to repeat it on television.
Lignum vitae
Lignum vitae, a tropical hardwood so dense it sinks in water, was the standard ball material until the Evertrue hard-rubber ball appeared in 1905.
Q 14Which company began marketing automatic pinsetter machines in 1952, putting most 'pin boys' out of work?
AMF
The first mechanical pinsetter was invented by Gottfried 'Fred' Schmidt, who sold the patent to AMF in 1941.
Q 15Bowling lanes installed in the West Wing as a birthday gift honoured which president?
Harry S. Truman
The two lanes were a 1947 birthday present to Harry S. Truman from Missouri friends; he rarely used them, and the space later became the Situation Room under Kennedy.
Q 16The Professional Bowlers Association was founded in 1958 in which Ohio city?
Akron
Akron, Ohio, home of its founder, a local sports agent, housed PBA headquarters until 2000, when new owners moved the body to Seattle.
Q 17Which bowler, 'Mr. Bowling', was the first athlete to sign a $1,000,000 endorsement deal, in 1964?
Don Carter
Don Carter's 1964 Ebonite contract was reported as the first $1 million endorsement deal for any athlete; he was voted Bowler of the Year six times in the 1950s and 60s.
Q 18Which crew-cut left-hander, the first bowler to earn $1 million, has the PBA World Championship trophy named for him?
Earl Anthony
Earl Anthony, a crew-cut left-hander, won 43 PBA titles and in 1982 became the first bowler to pass $1 million in career earnings.
Q 19Who holds the record for most PBA Tour titles, with 47, and is also a champion horseshoes pitcher?
Walter Ray Williams Jr.
Walter Ray Williams Jr. won 47 PBA Tour titles between 1986 and 2010 and also claimed six men's world horseshoe-pitching championships.
Q 20Which bowler's outburst "Who do you think you are? I am!" went viral after his fifth U.S. Open win in 2012?
Pete Weber
The record he broke belonged to his father Dick Weber, who had won the event four times.
Q 24Which five-pin split including the 4, 6, 7 and 10 is the least-converted in professional bowling?
The Greek church
The Greek church, 4-6-7-9-10 or 4-6-7-8-10, leaves three pins on one side and two on the other; PBA conversion data rank it below even the 7-10 split.
Q 25A 'Brooklyn' is a ball that does what?
Crosses to the wrong side of the head pin
A Brooklyn crosses to the wrong side of the head pin, hitting the 1-2 pocket for a right-hander instead of the 1-3; New Yorkers call the same shot a Jersey.
Q 26A game of alternating strikes and spares always ends with what score, giving it a national nickname?
A Dutch 200
Alternating a strike and a spare every frame scores exactly 20 per frame, for a 'Dutch 200'; any game without an open frame is called a clean game.
Q 27'Sandbagging' in league play means doing what?
Rolling badly early to inflate your handicap
'Scratch' scores are the opposite: what you actually rolled with no handicap added.
Q 28A pin hiding directly behind another pin, such as the 8 behind the 2, is called what?
A sleeper
The hidden pin is a sleeper; the pair together is called 'double wood', and hitting the front pin flush usually takes the sleeper with it.
Q 29Oil is applied to roughly how much of a lane's length so the ball skids before it hooks?
The first two-thirds
A typical house pattern oils roughly the first two-thirds of the lane, about 38 to 42 feet, leaving dry boards at the back where the ball grips and hooks.
Q 30According to a 2008 USBC study, a ball ideally strikes the head pin centred where for maximum pin carry?
Board 17.5
The USBC ball-motion study found the ball carries best entering the pocket on board 17.5, about 2.5 boards right of the head pin's centre, at a 6-degree angle.