The Roaring Game – Curling
northandsouth.co.nz
northandsouth.co.nz
Each rink has a professional ice maker on staff whose job it is to maintain the rink for everyone to play on. Rinks usually need pebbling between games, so the ice maker or their apprentice is pretty much on staff the entire time people are using the facility. It seems to be a labor of love, spending hours and hours a day hunched over sprinkling water on a sheet of ice, only to have it all swept away in a matter of hours. You end up being known by name by the entirety of the club, and a lot of folks buy you a nice gift come Christmas!
Ice makers are indeed held to a challenging task and what you said is true - they're recognized across the club, on site, by basically every member and they more often get blame than praise for how the ice affects a game!
Coupled to that, the surface is very climate and soil dependent, so there are significant differences between grounds (especially between different continents!) even if they all had the same ground staff.
Wimbledon similarly has groundsmen who can almost kill grass without killing it. There, the ideal into have very short grass (8mm, according to https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/6667985/wimbledon-head-ground...) and a strong root system. Still, two weeks of tennis each year changes the courts from fully green to, at places, small dust bowls.
Relatively recently, football groundsmen have gotten more important, too. Top clubs want smooth grounds with short grass (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/silicon-val...)
Preparing the skis for the current condition based on temperature an snow texture is absolutely critical for success.
And every day is unique.
Sorry, kinda nerding out over seeing a curling article on HN.
I don’t think that follows. It wouldn’t surprise me if most viewers of figure skating aren’t watching it as a competitive event, making them uninclined to look up how the scoring system works.
I played high school and a bit of college curling, playing every position, skip, vice, second, and lead. Curling's a wonderfully social and elegant game requiring simple but incredibly deep mechanical technique. If you're ever in the position to give it a try, I highly recommend it. You'd be surprised how short the learning curve is, and since you'll probably play lead, you'll mostly just end up doing a lot of sweeping!
Up in Canada, it's tradition and courtesy for the winning team to buy the losing team a drink after the game. There's a certain club camaraderie and sportsmanship you see in curling which makes it very different from our other traditional winter sport.
I am addicted to curling.
But still the game say the the first game of USA man is a good example. You just play 1 abd hit another most of time. Unlike I still remember the team of Sweden in mix double both get 3 stones out in 1 game by both members.
I have to skipped the iPlayer all the time to get some interesting chess moment (> a few stones in the house) or action.
Some did. But so many boring moment and so many mistakes (each play only 2 stones is the reason?) …
Really need more chess and more action.
Not sure I am eve qualified as a watcher. But I heard in the commentary about the inclination people to watch mixed double and not the long game. At least it is not 5 day long like ashes.
You asked and let me try to second guess what is going on in the curling reform based on the mixed double success.
a) there are too many mistakes and too many times of simple I knock you out and you knock me out
You can see that in say yesterday Sweden vs Canada women say the Sweden 2nd player basically miss all her 2 play in the last round.
A bit like football or soccer which you have role. Not everyone is good at everything. More of the skip played say out of 8 each has to play once but for 4 of them they can be decided by the team.
2) same format as mixed double. Have power play abd other than that have fixed stones. To be honest I am not sure why double is so aggressive (as the uk 2nd play has demonstrated even long game one can play aggressively but seems not the atmosphere). But may be come down to this. Also instead of 10 down to 8 round.
3) Italy is good. So far so good. For double, you can sense it is well above the others. That is something. You need to have that kind. You need stars. Not sure how to fix this though
4) not sure I have much to say about time. They already changed the rule once (instead of total time now is in between play time). USA partially lost to uk due to time management ?
More time out. Not that help the Australian double — the horror your couch actually quit you the last minute and join Canada team to fight you instead. But 1 more time out is fine. They are not like other sport time out where it is just a rest. Even us the watcher know why the call. So complicated.
Btw I am a go player not a chess player. It is more like go than chess. You cannot move your stone and you mistake like go - put stone on the wrong places and kill/attack the wrong stones. I even suspect you need commentary more here. But not if the kind rugby and cricket. It is rule you do not know there which require commentary. Here what can be done is hard to think of. You can see the Canadian skip has out think the commentator in real time. That is the fun part.
I agree they are all prof. And I always agreed to Olympic Creed. But sometimes I wonder what happened why the uk skip cannot play the last stone well.
Anyway feel ashamed to watch it. But not easy to watch say world companion etc and hence this is a 4 year fix. Guess the medalist would like one say we will talk about human rights when we are back home.
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