10 ends equalizes out the advantage of who gets hammer to start a bit better than 8.
Also 8 ends is standard for curling, but 10 for international events and whatever national/provincial/state qualifiers for those events.
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Canada has about a billion dedicated curling clubs though right? I get the impression that’s the case. Outside of the very upper Midwest and NE the rest of the US has maybe like 30 dedicated curling facilities serving the entire rest of the country. A lot of us curl on hockey ice which sucks horribly that’s how much we love the sport. The sport is also shrinking in places like Scotland so it probably makes sense Canada is going through similar.
ETA-I googled it and Canada has literally 1000 or so dedicated curling facilities. That doesnt seem sustainable when most clubs need 100 or so members per sheet to break even. Let’s say the Canadian clubs average 4 sheets(probably low). You need 400,000 curlers to support that and the Google tells.me that Canada has 150,000 curlers.
The grand slams have already solved a lot of the issues that are boring. You get one blank max before you start losing the hammer for example. Everyone wants to watch the ends with lots of rocks in play so incentivizing that helps.
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10 ends makes for a tough watch even for avid curling fans though right? You can pretty much skip the first few ends as a viewer and watch the close games after the 5th end break and not miss much. The slams have made games more watchable by making them shorter and outlawing blanking more than 1 end. The Olympics would be well served to follow suit imo.
Team A is just an Olympic level curler throwing the stones without any sweepers.
Team B is WichitaDM throwing the stones with three Olympic level sweepers.
Does Team B have any chance?
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Honestly it would be closer than you would think but the Olympians still win with no sweeping. Good sweepers make your close misses good to sometimes great. Olympic level curlers are missing small a lot and the sweepers are sweeping their stones well enough to make small misses makes. So people at my level shooting 60% would shoot a drastically higher percentage with great sweeping. Probably not 80-90 but 70s. I basically play with bad to middling sweepers normally so it would be a huge change.
Even at my level we aren’t missing the broom by feet really ever although the misses are much larger than the Olympians.
Now I’ve played a team that won US club nationals which is basically the next level below actual US nationals and we got absolutely smoked only scoring one point with a draw against several and shook after 5 ends. So in no way shape or form am I any good really. But sweeping matters way way more than people think and swapping the sweeping from the good team to the mediocre would absolutely have a huge effect.
Also for those that think curling is boring it’s the rare sport where it gets more boring the better the players are imo. Go watch two teams shooting 60% against each other on YouTube play at some random bonspiel and its absolute chaos for large portions of the game. I play 8-10 streamed games a year probably. The next time I play one I can post a link and you guys will see what I mean. I prefer watching my friends bonspiel games over the Olympics where no one misses.
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I also learned about “shooting percentage” in curling after seeing that used as a stat and the math didn’t support that they had shot enough rocks to support say a 96% when they’d only thrown like 12 stones.
Figured out that throws are rated on a 0-4 scale. So when you say you’re shooting a 60%, are you rating your own throws from 0-4 every time and keeping track of it? Seems subjective, is there some sort of guideline there?
TIL the Hughes’ are Jewish (via their mom). Interestingly Jack’s wiki page mentions being bar mitzvah’d and celebrating Passover, but Quinn’s has no such mentions.
Yes 60% on a 0-4. I only go back later and grade my streamed games. I don’t do it in real time and wouldn’t suggest someone try. So that doesn’t mean I’m making 60 percent of shots it means I’m averaging a 2.4/4 over the course of a game on all my shots. It is subjective and you are supposed to round up. So if you are debating whether the shot is a 2 or a 3 you are supposed to give someone a 3.
There are also actual rules for grading each type of shot(guard, draw, hit and roll, double takeout, etc) so it’s less subjective than you would think. Here is a link to the page with the pdf on how to score each shot if you are curious:
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Very interesting, ty for that.
Obviously I know nothing about the nuance of advanced curling strategy, but it felt to me watching the men’s and women’s games that we flamed out on that we kept getting ourselves in trouble where we’d endlessly throw guards with the hammer, while our opponents just packed the house with stones. But when it came to our better opponents, they’d just vaporize anything that we put in there instantly.
Found myself constantly saying stuff like “well there we go again, opponent is lying 4 and we have the hammer”.
Do you think there could be some kind of general strategy from the coaches (who seemed to oversee all teams) that might have been sub-optimal on the part of Team USA? Or did you watching that sort of agree with the meta strats that we were using?
Chess is probably even more boring, or at least less exciting, at the highest level. Many if not most games between top players end in draws with both players at 95%+ accuracy and neither having any advantage at all during the game.
Then you get stuff like between casual players with 24.9% vs 0 .9% accuracy and nonstop wild swings
I was specific to the playoffs. Short series formats early can induce some randomness. But the concentration of talent is having a narrowing effect.
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I actually think most winter Olympic sports would be much more fun to watch if the competitors were not so good. Frankly, a lot of them would be really awesome if the competitors were trying it out for the first time.
I pick up little things each Olympics. Apparently there are lot of detailed rules about not hitting guards in the first 4 stones of each end or something.
So for watching, I’m better starting when there are 3-4 stones left for each team per end.
In Manitoba and Saskatchewan everyone curls. In Toronto a lot of clubs are going under since property taxes / rent is 50x higher than a shack somewhere in a rural area. Most towns over 2k people have a curling club.
I don’t know how good he is, but I would take club champions or low level competitive curlers (ones who play cashspiels)with sweepers over Olympians without sweepers.
The issue with mid level club curlers is they will play with the rock a bit on release too, so pro curlers are consistent so the skip in the house and the sweepers have a great idea of how fast a rock is travelling and where it will end up before the even release it based on the speed of their slide. Olympian front ends might take a while to understand the speed of the rock if you slide out slow and push it more with your hand or vice versa.
It’s also the skip in the house reading the ice and telling them to sweep or not too. If a bunch of rocks are travelling down one side of the sheet only then the other side might get frosty and slow and can be hard to read, also the amount of curl can vary across the sheet too so rocks out wide might run very straight, but ones in the middle might swing a lot.
Pros are also used to throwing rocks that need to be swept, because you might as well use them. They throw a draw to the 8 foot (2nd ring) and let the sweepers take it to the button as they could probably sweep it from just outside the house to the T line whereas if you throw it back button there’s nothing they can do.
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I feel like AOC is missing the point,
I guess she’ll be in the Ski Cross in 2030. All the action with none of the danger. Also, multiple 40+ were in it.