Bowlers' hot hands

Earlier analysis of basketball data debunked the common perception that players sometimes have "hot hands." That analysis, however, did not control for several confounding influences. Our analysis of professional bowling indicates that, for many bowlers, the probability of rolling a strike is not independent of previous outcomes and the number of strikes rolled varies more across games than can be explained by chance alone. For example, most bowlers have a higher strike proportion after J consecutive strikes than after j consecutive nonstrikes, and this difference becomes more pronounced as j increases. from 1 to 4.