What makes curling great is that 60 year olds can compete with 20 year olds and women can compete with men. But that also means that once you’ve made it as a competitive curler, you can be there for a long time if you’re motivated to do so. And that’s apparent when you see just […]
I probably should just have a running post with provincial previews. Note to self for the future. But one can make the case the this event deserves its own space. After boldly declaring that the Alberta women’s provincials would be the most wide open provincial event, I am proven wrong a few days later. This […]
There are a couple of provincial events going forward this week and I, for one, am thankful. (Just don’t test anyone and I’m sure we’ll get through it fine.) I coded up the brackets and simulated each event one million times and I have probabilities to talk about. Allow me to write a few words […]
There hasn’t been a lot of written content here, recently. That’s partly because the curling season is falling apart again. The Canadian Mixed Doubles Olympic Trials have been cancelled and USA Curling cancelled nationals. The BC Championships were reportedly cancelled but now it seems like they might be back on. But it looks likely a […]
Well, this is awkward. By virtue of her 8-1 performance in the Canadian Olympic trials, Team Fleury moves to #1 in the doubletakeout.com women’s ratings. But that one loss was in the finals to Jennifer Jones, who will represent Canada in the Olympics. Which means the best team in the world will not be at […]
The Canadian Olympic trials start on Saturday in Saskatoon, punctuating four years of the best Canadian curlers hurting the feelings of friends and reorganizing teams in order to position themselves for a run at a trip to Beijing in February. This is one of the best events on the calendar. Considering the strength of the […]
In the Canadian Olympic pre-trials last weekend, Krista McCarville trailed Mackenzie Zacharias 7-3 heading to the tenth end. The game wasn’t televised but the tenth end looked like this in text form: Even with lead Sarah Potts apparently hogging her second shot, Team McCarville scored four – and then stole one in the extra end […]
Not much time for me this week so I’ll just leave you with some probability tables based on the latest ratings for the first slam of the season, the Masters. (Naming the slams after golf tournaments is my least favorite thing about the slams, BTW.) It’s a triple-knockout format leading to an 8-team playoff. Here […]
The last couple weeks we’ve talked about the choices made by teams on their first shot of an end in the very specific case of when hammer is down one. But let’s expand that. Here’s the guard percentage for non-hammer in each end for various leads: The only decisions top teams really make on the […]
Last week we looked at the tendency of the team throwing the first stone to guard and how that is strongly related to whether an end is even or odd. In this post, we’ll look at the tendency of the hammer team in these circumstances. Let’s get right to the graph. (This blog is going […]
