Curling 101
What to know before you stand on the ice. About ten minutes.
What to know before you stand on the ice. About ten minutes.
Granite, 38 to 44 pounds. Nobody picks one up. You push it and let the ice carry it. Each team throws eight in an end, two per player.
Before play the ice is sprayed with water droplets that freeze into small bumps, called pebble. The stone rides on the tops of it. Pebble is why sweeping works, why a stone curls, why street shoes are banned, and why you keep hands and knees off the ice: body heat melts it, and so does grit off a sole.
One foot slides and one foot grips. The club gives you a slip-on slider for one shoe and a gripper for the other.
Two jobs. You sweep with it, and you lean on it for balance while you deliver.
A stick that clips onto the stone's handle so you can deliver standing up instead of sliding out of the hack. It is in the rules of the sport. If your knees are a question, use one.
A game is two teams of four. Eight people on the ice, sixteen stones between them. Two games run side by side on the two sheets.
Each team throws in a fixed order: lead, second, vice, skip. Everyone throws two stones, in the same slot every end, and the teams alternate. The skip runs the team and calls every shot from the far end. The vice calls while the skip is throwing.
You throw from a foothold called the hack at one end toward the rings at the other. The rings are the house, twelve feet across, with the button at the centre. Right-handers throw from the left hack, left-handers from the right.
The thick line fifteen feet in front of the house is the hog line. At your end you must let go of the stone before you reach it. At the far end the stone has to cross it completely or it comes off.
Everyone throws two stones and everyone sweeps. The only person who never sweeps is whoever is calling the shot from the far end.
An end is the unit the game is built out of, like an inning. Both teams throw all eight of their stones, the score is agreed, and that is one end. Only one team can score in an end. Our games are four ends, and the final is five.
The team throwing the last stone of an end has the hammer, and it is a real advantage: the final say on a house that is already full. In the first end it comes down to a coin flip between the two leads. After that, scoring hands the hammer to the other team.
That one fact explains most of what the two teams are doing. The team with the hammer wants a crowded house, so they throw guards and keep things messy. The team without it wants the ice clean, so they hit stones out and try to hold the other side to one point. Your skip calls all of it; none of this is on you to work out.
Only one team scores in an end. The team whose stone is closest to the button is that team, and they score one point for each of their stones closer than the other team's best one. A stone has to be touching the house to count.
The rings are a measuring aid, not point values. A stone on the outer ring beats one on the inner ring if it is closer to the button. When two stones are too close to call, somebody fetches a measure, an arm that pivots on the button, and it settles it.
Club scoreboards work differently from the ones on television, and almost everybody reads them backwards the first time.
The one part of this page worth watching rather than reading. Four things to look for: how the feet are set in the hack before anything moves; the pull back, then the push out, slower than you expect; the hand turning the handle at release, which is what makes the stone curl; and the sweepers staying beside the stone, not in front of it.
Discover Curling, by World Curling and Curling Canada. It covers the delivery stick as well.
A throw is three things: the line you send it on, the weight you put behind it, and the turn you put on the handle. Your skip hands you the line and the turn before you throw. Weight is the one that is yours, and it is learned by throwing stones, which is what the practice time is for.
A stone curls in the direction it is spinning. Sweeping makes a stone go farther and straighter. It cannot make it shorter, and it cannot make it curl more. When somebody is shouting at you to sweep, they have judged the stone is short or curling too much.
The calls are Sweep, Yes, Yup and Hard, and they all mean the same thing: brush, now. The volume is about distance. Whoever is calling is a hundred feet away. The broom the skip holds out is a target: aim at the head of it.
There is no referee at club level. Players call fouls on themselves and agree the score between them. The rulebook opens with a passage called the Spirit of Curling, printed before the first rule:
"Curlers play to win, but never to humble their opponents."
Every one of these has a plain remedy. Beginners break all of them and nobody makes anything of it.
Everything above is true of curling anywhere. This part is true of one building, and it comes from the club.
The one below is ours. It says you have read this page. It is not a substitute for the club's own release.
Put your name in and confirm you have read it.