Each time EJ Tackett steps to his lane to throw a shot in the upcoming Professional Bowlers Association World Championships, he’ll be thinking about more than just ball spin or angle.

Tackett has won the last three world titles, and there’s a convincing case that he’s currently the best bowler on Earth. While his ability to throw a consistent ball is certainly key to his success, there’s another factor he and his fellow PBA pros are paying closer attention to during matches: lane oil patterns.

Most of us amateurs have never thought about the thin layer of oil that coats the surface of the bowling lane—unless someone at our local bowling center slips and falls on it hilariously. But at the highest levels of the sport, lane oil is a foundational element of tactics and game-planning. The oil is applied in a distinct pattern that reduces the friction of specific parts of the lane, allowing a well thrown ball to slide across certain areas, then grab ahold of the surface and curl when it’s supposed to.

But lane oil patterns aren’t always identical. Oil distribution can change over the course of a game, and in fact the starting pattern is intentionally redrawn for various PBA events, forcing pros to adjust on the fly.

“All of us as professionals are playing a guessing game by watching our bowling ball go down the lane,” Tackett tells me. “And trying to figure out where the oil has moved from and has moved to.”

Tackett says understanding and reacting to lane oil patterns has become one of the single most important skills for a pro bowler in recent years.

Technology plays a growing role in the way lane oil is understood and applied. And as the tech has continued to improve, the sport’s powers that be are increasingly relying on those advances to keep the top pros guessing.

Back when bowling lanes were made from actual wood like maple or pine in the 1970s and earlier, lane oil’s primary purpose was protective. It provided a lubricating barrier between ball and wood, helping reduce the wear and tear on both.

During that era—and even into the early 1980s when synthetic lane materials began replacing wood—lane oil drew the ire of serious bowlers due to the inconsistency of how it was applied. There was no method for ensuring standardized oil applications; sections of lanes would often have too much or too little oil. Bowlers would essentially be blind to the lane’s conditions until partway through a game, after enough balls had been thrown to get a gauge of which areas were light or heavy on oil. Maybe certain bowlers enjoyed the randomness, but it was untenable for professionals.

John Davis, at the time a mechanic who oiled lanes for his local bowling center in Arizona, was the first to address this issue. He invented a lane cleaning tool in the early ’80s to address lanes that were often cleaned inconsistently, allowing oil to pool or run as a result. By the early ’90s, he had started a company named Kegel that had perfected what’s known as Sanction technology, which is still used today. The bowling equipment giant Brunswick, the other major player in the space, uses similar technology in its Max lane machines.

“It looks almost like an inkjet printer,” Chris Chartrand, Kegel’s CEO, says about the Sanction tech. “You have this head that travels back and forth, and it applies that stream on whatever board we want to apply it to.”

The technology has kept improving. Kegel used to produce two separate machines, one for lane cleaning and one for oil; now both steps are handled by a single machine. More recently, the machines have become battery-powered, removing issues of power cords stretching across lanes.

Lately, Kegel has been steadily improving its automation, to the point where today’s machines do the entire job without any human intervention.

The lanes you and I bowl on as amateurs are oiled very differently from the ones pros use.

At your local bowling center, public lanes are oiled in what’s referred to as a “high” ratio: The level of oil present in the middle of a lane is eight to 10 times higher than what’s on the outside. At the far left and right of the lane, many public bowling alleys have no oil at all.

“On a normal pattern at your normal bowling center, there is some autocorrect,” Tackett says. Because the edges of the lane have very little oil, shots that drift to either side will slow down; if the ball has been thrown with the proper spin to guide it back toward the middle of the lane, it will curl more effectively on the drier surface. “It makes it easier to hit the pocket.”

(By “the pocket,” Tacket means that sweet spot at the front corner of the standard 10-pin configuration. For right-handed bowlers that’s the space between the first and third pins slightly right of center; for lefties, it’s on the left side.)

In the pros, though, the patterns are far tougher. Instead of 8:1 or even 10:1 ratios of oil in the middle of the lane to the outside, the PBA uses ratios of 3:1 and under—even as low as nearly 1:1 in some cases. Learning how each board is oiled at the start of a match allows the pros to map their ideal shots. “You have to be a lot more precise, not only with where you're placing the ball on the lane, but with your speed that you're throwing it and the revolutions that you're applying to the ball,” Tackett says.

Oil patterns also vary in terms of their length up the 60-foot lane. Many common patterns run for the first 40 feet before the oil tapers off near the pins, but several variations exist.

As lane oil technology has improved, understanding and adjusting to lane oil patterns and ratios has become an outsize tactical element for professional bowlers. Tackett likens it in some ways to golf.

“An oil pattern basically adds water and trees and bunkers,” he says. “It’s adding obstacles to the lane.”

The PBA, the sport’s governing body, likes those comparisons. Rather than using the latest advances in lane oil tech to standardize lanes across every PBA competition, the organization takes the opposite approach, intentionally using varying conditions across different events to challenge top bowlers.

“It forces players to think, adapt, and create, which is how we test greatness,” says Tom Clark, PBA commissioner, via email. “It’s what makes the sport more exciting, interesting, and entertaining every single week.”

The PBA has a library of 20 lane oil patterns for the 2026 season from Kegel, which use varying ratios, lengths, and even specific oil formulations, each of which has its own character. A different pattern is used at virtually every event through the season. For instance, the PBA Tournament of Champions on the week of April 20 used the “Don Johnson 40” pattern, named for famed bowler Don Johnson, with the “40” signifying the length of the pattern in feet.

Players are given an oil pattern graph for each event ahead of time. They’re also given a test lane at most events to get a feel for the pattern before competition begins. From there it’s up to them to understand how the oil will be altered across a given event.

That’s where the golf comparisons break down; while sand traps and water features are fixed, conditions on a bowling lane continue to fluctuate as the match goes on.

“Bowling balls are porous, Tackett says, and “every time you throw a ball down the lane, it's removing some of that oil off of it.” You may see a bowler lining up at the second arrow near the lane’s edge at the start of a match, Tackett says, because that’s the best place to throw from to get the ball to curve into the pocket. “And then by game six, he's playing the fourth or fifth arrow more in the middle of the lane instead of out toward the edge, but throwing his ball across it almost to that same spot where he started.”

Tackett’s parents have owned a bowling alley since he was 5 years old, and he’s been drilling into bowling balls since about age 12. But even with that background, he says he didn’t really start considering lane oil patterns in his game until he was 15 or 16. That’s a stark contrast to today, he says, where kids who are serious about the sport are learning about this variable by age 7 or 8.

Bowlers have to consider not just the oil ratio and type of oil used but also the kind of ball they’re using and even the material the lane is made of. Older lanes will have “micro scratches,” as Tackett terms them, that create more friction with each ball thrown.

Pros have virtually no assists in this process. An app called Specto, which uses lidar to track a ball’s precise location as it rolls across a lane, can be somewhat helpful in allowing bowlers to visualize recent shot paths and estimate oil movement based on them. But individual players are not allowed to use Specto during matches; pros get access to it only during certain PBA event finals, when Specto data and visualizations are used for TV broadcasts. They have to rely on intuition honed over years of experience.

When I ask Tackett to rank lane oil evaluation and adjustments as a skill in the pro bowler’s arsenal, he places it “very high.”

He says he really started to focus on lane oil over the past few years. Not coincidentally, that’s the same period in which he has won three straight world championships.

“I've been able to make a move or make a ball change just one or two shots faster than most everyone else,” he says. “But if you do that one or two shots faster every single game over the course of 40 games, that's going to add up.”