How many ends in curling game

Tick shot: When the four-rock rule is in play, this shot is used to nudge a guard out of the way but keep it in play. Sometimes this is done by accident when a team is looking to peel but hits the opposing stone at the wrong spot. Freeze: Drawing on top of a stone and making the shooter difficult to eliminate from play. Split: A precise shot where the shooter looks to hit a guard promoting both it and their thrown stone into the house so they both count as points.

Wreck: When a stone accidentally makes contact with another stationary stone the thrower was hoping to avoid. Jam: Attempting to take out a rock but it makes contact with another stone and it stops to stay in play.

Flash: A rock that is thrown through the house; either a draw that is heavy or a hit attempt that goes untouched. The curling brush consists of a fibreglass or carbon fibre shaft with a fabric head used in a sweeping motion perpendicular to the path of the rock to clear debris from the ice and help maintain the trajectory of the stone. Rocks are sensitive to the ice conditions and can pick up debris from the ice — known as a pick — which can veer the rock off course.

Sweepers will ease up with the hope the rock will lose speed. Sweepers will brush harder to attempt to drag the rock to the desired point. The clock ticks down while the team is deciding which shot to make. Yes, they do. The World Curling Tour features tournaments all over the globe and runs roughly from August to the end of April. Teams earn points toward a ranking system. Curling is considered a semi-professional sport with most curlers holding down full-time careers elsewhere.

The best teams manage to juggle a job, working out at the gym, family time and being away for over a dozen or more weeks while on tour. Yes and no. While it may appear some curlers are wearing normal pairs of kicks, they also wear different soles on their shoes: one for their sliding foot and a gripping sole on the other.

They started wearing them during the Winter Olympics in Vancouver to stand out from the crowd. Clearly, it has worked.

Throwing rocks at houses A curling ice sheet is roughly feet long by 15 feet, seven inches wide; about the length of a hockey rink with some room to spare. The sweeping warms the ice and reduces friction, allowing the stone to travel farther and straighter. A mixed doubles tournament!

Mixed doubles curling teams consist of just two players — a woman and a man — instead of the usual four players per team. Matches are eight ends long, not 10, and the two players alternate throwing five stones per end instead of eight: one player throws the first and last stones, while the other throws the second, third, and fourth rocks.

Mixed doubles adds a wrinkle. The team with the hammer decides where the stone is positioned; if the team places its stone as the guard, however, the other team gets to take the last shot of the end. In a perfect world, would curling power plays involve broomstick fighting and a penalty box like they do in hockey, rather than moving rocks around?

But a more genteel game will do just fine. Mixed doubles scoring is the same as the traditional curling game. The team with the most stones closest to the button earns the points in that end.

This year is no exception. Write to Sean Gregory at sean. Each house consists of four rings which help define which curling stones are closest to the centre, commonly known as the Button. A team scores one point for each of its own stones located in or touching the house that are closer to the centre than any stone of the opposite team. Only one team can score in an end. This is called a blank end.

The teams take it in turns to deliver their stones from the Hack at one end of the sheet to the house at the opposite end. Players must release the stone before the Hog Line for the stone to be considered in play. Stones which do not pass the hog line at the scoring end of the sheet are removed from play. When an end is complete, the next end is played in the opposite direction. After all stones have been delivered to the scoring end of the sheet, the players themselves calculate the score.

Curling is played over ten ends, however in some formats and competitions this may be reduced to eight ends. Teams can concede their game earlier than the defined number of ends according to the rules of the competition. The teams with the most points at this stage wins the game.

Before a game of curling begins, teams decide who will have what is called the Hammer or Last Stone Advantage. In championship curling this is decided by a draw to the button with two players from each team delivering a stone as close as possible to the centre of the house — one stone is delivered clockwise and the other counter-clockwise — and the distance from the stone to the centre being measured.

If a team has the last stone advantage, it means they can deliver the final stone of an end and have an advantage to score at least one point and potentially win that end. When a team scores, they lose the last stone advantage and the hammer passes to the opposing team for the next end.

Teams generally try to score more than a single point in an end and will, therefore, sometimes blank an end, ensuring that no stones are lying in the house after the last stone is played. This means they get to keep the hammer for the next end.

Live events like sports and the Oscars are able to capture more eyeballs for sponsors in the moment than scripted television. Originally there was a desire for curling to be shorter in order to fit a broadcasting window of less than three hours, but now that may not be the case. Extended airtime from a high stakes end game could conceivably garner more advertising than an eight-end contest. There appears to be many reasons and most top players have put their support behind the move.

The physical toll has been mentioned by some, though the corn sweeper of yesteryear who battled blisters and lathered on RUB A may chuckle at that notion. Many have pointed to the Mixed Doubles becoming a breakout hit at the Olympics and its swift play as a contributing factor in its appeal.

Granted, this would not be a dramatic change, given curling is predominantly played as eight-ends today. The question remains: Should the sport move to eight-end games for the Olympics and World Championships? For any sport, two of the most influential considerations for any change must be fairness of competition and entertainment value. Sport is often attempting to find a balance between determining the most deserving champion while also aligning with the considerations of fans and sponsors who want to watch and appreciate the spectacle.

These two factors are often in competition. The very nature of one final game to determine a champion produces great drama, but it can also be argued that this does not always deliver the most deserving winner. Barry Fry of Manitoba won the Brier with a record, while Rick Folk of Saskatchewan and Larry Pineau of Northern Ontario were both two games back at ; there was no playoff format and nothing for CBC to televise on the weekend.

To many players at the time, it was considered the most equitable method to crown a champion. But the result became a Sunday televised event, an historic upset and one of the most memorable moments of curling lore—recently trumpeted in a Netflix sport series —rather than a trophy ceremony on a Friday evening. A two, three or four-end game would also be heavily skewed to the team starting with hammer. If curling was played over an infinite number of ends, the better team, barring injury, would always win and the longer a team is given an opportunity to establish its authority over its opponent, the higher likelihood a victory is the result.

A heavy underdog will have a better chance in a game of one single end, especially if they are starting with hammer … and this leads into our first question: Is an eight-end game a fair contest when compared to a end game? We will only look at results for the season, using the five-rock free guard zone rules exclusively. This is perhaps counter to thinking that a team with hammer has an advantage in the shorter game.

These numbers may be affected by better teams starting with hammer more often. A shorter eight-end game appears to increase the chance of victory for the team starting without hammer, even if it is only a slight difference.