Predicting the outcomes of 9-pin bowling matches

Sports analytics and prediction play an increasingly important role in modern sports by providing insights that enhance performance, strategy, and decision-making. Bowling is a precision sport in which players roll a ball along a lane to knock down pins. The sport comprises multiple disciplines practiced internationally, with 9-pin bowling being among the most widely played. In competitive 9-pin bowling, team competition is a prominent format. Team matches consist of parallel individual duels. The final match outcome is determined by both the win-loss outcomes of individual duels and the team’s aggregate number of knocked-down pins. This paper presents a two-level predictive framework for 9-pin bowling: one model predicts individual player performance, and another predicts team match outcomes based on those individual predictions. The models were evaluated using match data from the second half of the 2022/2023 season of the Croatian Men's Bowling Super League. Individual performance was predicted with an average deviation of less than 4%, while the winning team was correctly predicted in over 75% of matches. Beyond these strong results, the proposed models are, to the best of our knowledge, the first developed specifically for predicting outcomes in 9-pin bowling.