I've been to Cal Bowl on three different occasions and have noticed shortcomings on all three of my visits. Not to take anything away from the entertainment factor of Cal Bowl because I've enjoyed my visits there overall (and others have as well), but I wanted to mention some flaws good and bad that you will likely run into if you choose to bowl here.
The good flaws:
1) It is possible to throw a gutter ball and knock down pins at the same time. Once, I hit seven pins after the ball bounced out of the gutter. Another time, I saw a bowler in the next lane over get a spare after the ball had entered and exited the gutter. She didn't even see it! She walked away thinking no pins were hit.
2) A couple occasions on my first visit, I knocked down 9 pins on a frame, and then while the knocked down pins were being removed from the lane, the 10th pin somehow gets knocked down during the carry up and carry down. "What the...okay...now how am I supposed to convert THAT?!?!?" I thought to myself. Trying to convert a spare with no pins to hit, all I could do was a flair for the dramatic: rolling the ball backwards between my legs into the gutter. Still, I got a spare...somewhat undeservingly, but hey I'll take it!
The bad flaws:
1) After the first throw, the rake arm comes down to sweep away the pins that were knocked down. However, on a few occasions, the arm will stay down until you hit the reset button, which would reset the original 10 pins back to their original positions before your second throw. If you knocked down at least one pin on the first throw, this could cause problems in determining your score for the frame. This leads to #2:
2) Sometimes, the scores aren't right; the electronic scoreboard will say you knocked down x pins when really you knocked down more than x or fewer than x. Several times, I've seen bowlers get awarded with 1 pin knocked down when really they bowled a gutter ball. On another occasion, I saw a bowler knock down a total of 17 pins in one frame, but get credit for only 8; she hit 9 pins on her first throw, the #1 bad flaw happened, and she hit 8 pins on her second throw.
Their pizza and salad are pretty good! Whenever there were leftover slices, I always pounced on the opportunity! I couldn't stop eating! They also had plenty of napkins so that all my subsequent frames wouldn't result in gutter balls.
If you're looking to bowl for fun, you don't care about the scores that you get, and you don't care for the flaws that will affect your bowling scores, by all means, come to Cal Bowl. However, if you're looking to bowl competitively in an environment similar to that of the PBA, look somewhere else. read more