Just got back from Baton Rouge and thought I'd finish the thread I started. Well, I stuck to my game plan to play outside. If very sticky approaches hadn't caused problems the first game each day and allowed me to concentrate on playing the lanes instead of not getting hurt, I could have settled in quicker. That being said, I will say you can play outside. You're armswing must not go outside of you're target, it must stay in line. I started with a matte finished original Inferno but quickly changed to my new Ebonite Big Time, which gave me a real good look on the lanes.

If I could have avoided brain lock for about three stretches over the nine games I would have easily averaged around 200. Instead was in the 180s which was as good or better than most bowling on the lanes near us. I will say the lanes were extremely oily outside as advertised, but not nearly as dry inside as I have experienced in the past, especially in S&D. The backends seemed weaker in S&D than in the past also.

I'm glad I decided to play outside and wish the operator error hadn't happened, but I'm very satisfied overall with how I bowled.

I thought this year was a little different in that I didn’t find the back ends as jumpy as in the past and overall the lanes played tighter. Still the most successful bowlers are not going very far away from the pocket.  

The ABC pattern usually is long enough that there is no free hook on the outside. Any shot thrown right would not recover and a shot cut short or left would overreact and would miss the head pin left. There simply was no room for error outside. Plus the penalty for bad shots was severe.  Bad shots at best missed the headpin and at worst split/washed out.

At Billings the gutter had a little extra friction and coupled with HPL back ends it was a playable shot. But using the proavilane this year this didn’t appear to be an option.