Apparently my home house recently got new pins, good deal.  However, new pins are notoriously a little harder to knock over.  The pinspots at this place are already pretty bad, and the mechanic never adjusts anything unless it affected him the night before.  I will admit I'm probably a little hyper sensitive to it, but I'm an ocd perfectionist with an efficiency addiction, and it makes absolutely no sense to me to ignore a factor such as a bad pin spot.  If I look down and see a bad pin spot, I'm resetting.  This is of course much to the displeasure of the people bowling with me, as waiting for the rerack takes a whole minute, or the mechanic taking it as a personal insult to his work (or lack thereof, and sometimes it's intended to be one).  Now, when one of them steps up on the lane and I tell them they have a deep 3 pin, they ignore me and proceed to leave the inevitable flat 10, which is of course perfect justification for them to whine about it after the fact, that's apparently perfectly acceptable. 

This being said, I'm not looking forward to tonight.  How picky are you all with your pinspots?  I only reset if it looks like there's a chance for it to affect the carry of the shot.  If it's a 3 pin issue (which most of the time it is), that's an instant reset, as well as a 6 pin, but if the 5 pin is a little off one side or the 4 pin is a little wide, I don't worry too much about it.  Not paying attention to pinspots just seems to me to be an impatient mistake.  People later will complain about the flat 10 that cost them 300, but never mention the fact that they saw it and decided not to hit the reset button and wait an extra 45 seconds.  I'm not going to risk something as simple, yet important, as a pinspot when there's money on the line, not even in league.  There's a lot going on in our scratch league, a decent night every week can pay for your league and then some, and I'm not going to let a deep 3 pin cost me money.  People rag on me for it a little, but this is a scratch league, people are supposed to care, they're supposed to be competitive, and the mechanic should really do his job during the day.  I'd adjust the pin spots for free if they'd just show me how to do it . .  But how big of a deal are pin spots to you guys? 

I'm fortunate to have 20/10 or 20/5 vision, so honestly I may be able to see the small details that other people just aren't able to see.  Yes, left or right is easy to spot, but simply deep is trickier, but something to look for is the pin brightness or shadow progression.  The pin deck lights are usually in front of the the headpin, which makes it appear the brightest, then as you progress through the rest of the pins, they get gradually darker as you follow the rows back towards the pit.  Compare each pin to its counterpart on the other side as far as brightness or the shadow goes.  If the 3 pin appears to be darker than the 2 pin (in a house with consistent or good deck lights at least), it's probably deep. 

I also don't think a whole lot of people ever look at the pins or factor the pin spots in.  I see several people get up to throw a ball not noticing that they're missing a 5 pin or a 9 pin, sometimes not even noticing they're missing one of the obvious ones like a 10 or a 4. 

Actually if it's a Brunswick model A, A-2, Jet Back etc... the pin light is a 4ft bulb, which covers the width of the lane. The pins won't be set back only if a problem exist with the spotting fingers! If they are loose they will tend to be more left to right and not back. There's two spotting fingers that when the deck shifts to set a new set of pins, the pin is setting on a roller that the pin rolls over and the fingers guides the pins and keeps the pin from falling over! If one of the spotting fingers is loose or missing the pin will wobble or fall over! I'm not sure of the AMF or Brunswick GS machines! Just my $.02, Bruce

Thanks for the comments!  Yeah at my house the deck light is a standard flourescent light, but distance from the light still changes shadows slightly.  And you're also correct, the biggest problems are left and right.  Had a 5 pin that was over an inch left last night one one lane, awful lot of stone 8's last night.  They're Brunswick machines, but they're not A2s, don't know what they are, but they're not the best.