I’ve been waiting months to try out my ratings on a big-time curling event and finally the time has arrived. First up in the Calgary bubble is the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. Let’s talk about it. Format: This season, on account of many provinces not being able to hold playdowns, it’s an expanded 18-team extravaganza. […]
I do not know the history of desiring hammer in the even ends. Maybe it has been around for decades. Regardless, it seems to be conventional wisdom at this point that it’s really important to have hammer in the 6th end. The reason I am writing about this is that I was watching Matt Dunstone […]
In Monday’s semi-final of the Ashley HomeStore Curling Classic, Glenn Howard trailed Brendan Bottcher 4-3 going into the seventh end. With Bottcher sitting three on Howard’s final shot, Glenn elected to try and give Bottcher one instead of drawing for one himself. He was choosing to go into the final end down two with hammer […]
There’s been some momentum in recent years for curling to standardize game length to eight ends. The current protocol in curling is for national and provincial championships and associated qualifying to be ten ends and all other games to be eight ends. The debate to keep 10-end matches mostly comes down to the fact that […]
In any sport, as players get smarter and more skilled and as playing conditions improve, rules get changed. For good reason, too. The rules adopted during an earlier era of the sport were not created for the activity that the sport becomes years later. Curling, to its credit, seems to have been fairly progressive in […]
If you eavesdrop on a discussion of whether it’s better to be one up without last rock in the final end or down one with hammer, everyone agrees that it’s better to be leading. The numbers say teams win about 60% of their games when up one without last rock in the last end, so […]
There comes a time in one’s life when one must figure out what is luck and what is skill in curling. And what the hammer team controls and what the non-hammer team controls. These things are really the essence of sports analysis and if one wishes to do insightful curling analysis, they will have to […]
On the forecast pages, there are now links to players scores in that event. This what Peter De Cruz’s page looks like for last week’s event, the Adelboden International, which he won: This presentation is a little different, but it’s offered in the spirit of conciseness, if there is such a thing. You don’t need […]
The reigning women’s world champion, Team Tirinzoni, is competing in this week’s marquee event, the Adelboden International. The twist is that the event is a men’s event. As of last weekend (well, and still as of now), the team list on the event’s web site listed the 15 men’s teams and a ‘special team’ which […]
In most sports, the final score is an acceptable indicator of the difference in performance between two teams. There are games where garbage-time scoring affects the final score in a misleading way, but these cases are the exceptions. While some work has been done in other sports to better estimate the difference in performance between […]
