Recently there have been quite a few newer people asking for help on their bowling, and we'd love nothing more than to be able to help. However, to give you the best possible answer and to help you the best we can, we need your help to paint us a nice "mental picture" of your bowling style and the conditions you face.

So before you make a new post asking, "hey, can you help me?", please try to answer these questions as best you can in your posts so that we can provide you with a much more unique and educated answer to your questions:

First, some basics:

• How long have you been bowling?
• What’s your gender? For some questions, this is important to know!
• What kind of ball do you normally use, i.e., plastic or reactive? If you don’t know, just tell us the company and model of ball (like Ebonite Total NV or Columbia White Dot).
• Do you have any physical handicaps, such as a prosthetic leg, amputated finger, etc.? Again, for some questions, this is important to know.

Also, if you prefer to go by a name instead of your nickname, let us know.

Now some rather advanced, but helpful things for us to know:

• Is your ball drilled fingertip (only get up to the first knuckle in the hole) or conventional (get to the second knuckle)?
• What kind of bowler are you; stroker (low rev), cranker (high revs), or “tweener” (somewhere between stroker and cranker).
• Your approximate ball speed, revolutions, axis rotation and axis tilt.
• Your preferred target area at the heads and the normal breakpoint you get from this initial target area.
• What kind of shot do you bowl on? For example, do you bowl on a house shot where the outside 10 boards are bone dry and there's a massive puddle in the middle, or something else?
• What does the oil pattern do and force you to do over the course of a set (breakdown, carrydown, make you move feet left/target left, feet left/target right, feet right/target right, feet right/target left)?
• What ball(s) are you using on this shot and how are they drilled (pin to PAP distances, relationship of CG or Mass Bias to Vertical Axis Line (VAL))? For this information, you might need help from someone who knows something about ball drilling.

Some of these questions are going to require a semi-knowledgeable person to help you, but even if you can "ballpark" some of these questions, that's better than nothing. If you're not sure about something in our list (for instance, axis rotation or PAP), don't be afraid to ask or be afraid to say you don't know (nobody expects everyone to know everything). Or, you can check out the glossary and see if you can find the answer yourself.

The more information you can provide to us up front, the better we can help you or if we're still unclear, we might be able to better pose a question to you to answer until we can get a fair idea of your game.