For those of you who don't follow international bowling, the world championships have been alternating between the men and the women. The men have their turn this year, and will start next month at Dream-Bowl Palace outside of Munich, Germany. Click here for the official site of the tournament.

I started the thread today because the USA announced their team today on Twitter: Patrick Allen, Bill O'Neill, Rhino Page, Chris Barnes, Tommy Jones, and Wes Malott. I hope the USBC gets permission from the German tenpin federation to stream from the WMC, because I really enjoyed watching the World Women's Championships last year.

You should all visit the site. Dream Bowl is a fantastic setting. Modern with all sorts of amenities. 52 Brunswick Anvil Lanes, 2 state of the art Kegel machines. A bunch of pool tables and an 18 hole indor mini-golf course. The description is available in English...just click on the British flag icon. http://www.dreambowl.de/ Prices are a bit more than we are used to at first glance. But they price the lanes by the hour instead of by the game so it is possible to get quite a few games in for the base price. The pictures of ther center are really nice.

Correction: I may have misled you in that I said that the Dream Bowl had an English site...I was wrong. The English is found on the WTBA Tournament site that Rich mentioned in his post. However, if someone would like a translation of any of the descriptions from Dream Bowl let me know. Sorry. I sometimes go into automatic mode when reading German and forget to look for a Flag icon.

Saw the latest update of the site, and there's going to be a feature subscribers of PBA.com Xtra Frame will be familiar with: live scoring. It's a start, anyway.

I've been looking through the list of rosters and noted one big surprise on the Australian squad: Jason Belmonte was left off. Other than that, no real surprises from the other nations...Mika Koivuniemi and Osku Palermaa are both on the Finnish squad, and most of the Korean team from two years ago will be returning, meaning, if two years ago has anything to do with it, the USA will have its hands full in the team event if it comes down to the US and Korea.

Forgot that there was another surprise, from the German hosts: Kai Günther, the silver medalist in singles two years ago, is only an alternate this time.

Just saw on their front page: Bowlingdigital will have live streaming of all playoffs (medal rounds in singles, doubles, trios, and team) and the Masters (match play) competition.

The oil patterns:

Atlanta (38', ~2.5:1)
Mexico City (45', ~2:1)

Atlanta will be used exclusively in singles, Mexico City exclusively in doubles, and both patterns will be used in trios and team, with the top qualifiers choosing the pattern in the medal rounds in trios and team. I'm not sure how oil pattern selection for the Masters match play competition will work.

Competition begins tomorrow with the singles event.

The fireworks in this World Men's Championships got started when Pasi Uotila of Finland threw the first 300 game in the third game of singles squad #3. He leads the event after the first day, followed Ernesto Franco of Mexico, Nobuhito Fujii of Japan, and [censored]-Chul Jang of Korea. The two American lefties, Rhino Page and Patrick Allen, bowled singles today, standing currently in 31st and 67th, respectively. The other Americans bowl their singles event tomorrow. Mika Koivuniemi, representing Finland, will also bowl singles tomorrow.

Found it funny his name had to be censored. Just like Long Duck [censored] from the movie sweet 16.