Bowling Trivia
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204 free Bowling trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 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 204 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
Three consecutive strikes make a turkey, and the first of them then scores the maximum 30: its own ten pins plus ten for each of the next two balls.
Q 03How long is a ten-pin bowling lane from the foul line to the centre of the head pin?
60 feet
60 feet is measured from the foul line to the centre of the head pin; step over that line while delivering and the ball counts as rolled but scores zero.
Q 04What is the maximum weight of a regulation ten-pin bowling ball?
16 pounds
16 pounds is the legal ceiling and the rules set no minimum; because every ball must be almost the same size, a lighter ball is simply a less dense one.
Q 05Roughly how much does a single regulation ten-pin weigh?
3.5 pounds
3.5 pounds is the target weight for each pin, give or take two ounces, so a full rack puts about 35 pounds in the path of a single ball.
Q 06Which civilisation left the earliest known bowling set, stone pins and a ball buried in a child's grave?
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt: in the child's set, the stone ball first had to roll through a little archway made of three pieces of marble before it reached the nine stone pins.
Q 07Which religious reformer is credited with fixing the number of bowling pins at nine?
Martin Luther
Martin Luther is credited with settling on nine when games used anywhere from three to seventeen pins, and is said to have built a lane beside his home for his children.
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 listed bowls among the unlawful games, and a tougher act of 1541 kept bowls illegal for working people, except at Christmas, until 1845.
Q 09Which English captain reportedly finished his game of bowls at Plymouth Hoe as the Armada was sighted in 1588?
Francis Drake
Francis Drake's unhurried game is probably legend, and if it did happen he may simply have been waiting for the tide to turn before the fleet could sail.
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 the ghostly crew of Henry Hudson playing ninepins; Rip helps carry their keg, drinks from it and sleeps for twenty years.
Q 11Ten-pin bowling is said to have been invented in America to get around what?
City bans on nine-pin games
City bans on nine-pin games, aimed at the gambling around them, were supposedly dodged by adding a tenth pin, yet ten-pin alleys were already known, and even regulated, before the best-known ban, of 1841.
Q 12The American Bowling Congress, which standardised ten-pin rules, was founded in 1895 in which city?
New York
New York hosted the founding meeting in Beethoven Hall, called to end years of rule disputes that pitted its bowlers against everyone to the west.
Q 13Before hard-rubber balls took over in the early 1900s, bowling balls were made of which dense hardwood?
Lignum vitae
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 22Which bowler became the youngest PBA Tour winner, at 18, in 1983?
Norm Duke
Norm Duke was 18 years and 345 days old and less than a year into his professional career; starting as the fifth seed, he beat all four bowlers ranked above him.
Q 23Who was the first bowler to convert the 7-10 split on television, in January 1980?
Mark Roth
Mark Roth did it at the 1980 Alameda Open; because the two pins stand as far apart as pins can, even professionals convert the 7-10 less than once in a hundred tries.
Lignum vitae, a tropical wood dense enough to sink in water, made durable balls, but they chipped and lost their shape, so hard rubber replaced them.
Q 14Which company began marketing automatic pin-setting machines to bowling alleys in 1952?
AMF
AMF bought the patent in 1941 from Gottfried Schmidt, who had built the first working machine in his garage, and put production models into alleys in 1952.
Q 15Bowling lanes installed in the West Wing as a birthday gift honoured which president?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman got the two lanes from fellow Missourians for his 63rd birthday; a poker player rather than a bowler, he knocked down seven pins with the first ball and rarely came back.
Q 16The PBA was founded in 1958 in which Ohio city, long known as the Rubber Capital of the World?
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 deal was reported as the first $1 million endorsement for any athlete, in a decade when top bowlers earned more than football's stars.
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 tried a few tour events in 1963 without cashing a cheque and spent six more years practising before turning professional, yet he won that championship a record six times.
Q 19Which PBA great is also a six-time men's world champion at pitching horseshoes?
Walter Ray Williams Jr.
Walter Ray Williams Jr. was a horseshoes champion first: he won world titles as a junior, years before he turned to bowling, and added six men's world championships later.
Q 20What did Pete Weber shout on winning the 2012 U.S. Open?
Who do you think you are? I am!
'Who do you think you are? I am!' was aimed at a young fan who had heckled him, moments after Weber struck on his final ball to win a record fifth title by one pin.
Q 24Which split proved the least-converted leave in professional bowling in a study of 447,000 PBA frames?
The Greek church
The Greek church, five pins said to look like a cathedral's spires, was converted far less than once in a hundred tries, rarer even than the split most bowlers call the hardest.
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
A Dutch 200 comes out exact because every frame scores 20: each strike counts 10 plus the spare's two balls, and each spare 10 plus the strike that follows.
Q 27'Sandbagging' in league play means doing what?
Rolling badly early to inflate your handicap
Rolling badly early to inflate your handicap pays off later, when those extra pins are added to honest scores in the games that matter.
Q 28Which part of a ten-pin lane is normally oiled, so that the ball skids before it hooks?
The first two-thirds
The first two-thirds or so is oiled, which protects the surface and lets the ball skid; the remaining boards are left dry so that it can grip and hook into the pins.
Q 29Which 2007 film ends with a killing in an oilman's private bowling alley?
There Will Be Blood
There Will Be Blood closes in Daniel Plainview's basement lanes, where he beats a preacher to death with a bowling pin; the crew restored a real two-lane alley at Greystone Mansion to film it.
Q 30Why was Glenn Allison's 1982 900 series refused certification?
Illegal lane conditions
Illegal lane conditions were the ruling, upheld on review in 2014, so the first certified 900 went to college bowler Jeremy Sonnenfeld, in Nebraska in 1997.