Improving Lane Play Skills – Part 3

Over the first two articles in this series, we discussed the skills you need to develop for better lane play. This included both the physical abilities and how to look for the information you need to make better decisions. To continue our discussion on this topic, we’ll look at the practical applications and how to practice your lane play so that you can improve your ability to adapt to tournament conditions.

Developing your strengths

To start, you really need to understand your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to lane play. You should spend about 75 percent of your time on mastering your strengths. The other 25 percent of the time can be spent your improving your weaknesses.

This sounds counterintuitive, but here’s why: it’s very rare that you will win when you are playing to your weaknesses. The higher the level of competition, the closer the level of ability between the players. There is not much to separate the winners from those that don’t make the cut on any given day in terms of their overall ability. The question often rests on being able to maximize your strengths in the given environment. Very small details will decide who wins, including things like how quickly you can make your adjustments or the exact amount of loft being used.

While lower levels of competition will have more disparity in terms of skill sets, it’s still true that mastering your strengths is more important than improving your weaknesses. Those who are best able to use their strengths to adapt to the conditions will rise to the top. So when developing your lane play skills, you need your strengths to be amazing.

Weathering the storm

When you find yourself using skills that aren’t necessarily the best part of your game, improving those skills can help you save some pins in the short term, but you ...