Strategy and Tactics
A Case Study with Scoring Metrics
A look at the 2025 OUA Women’s University Curling Championships In my previous article I outlined some basic curling scoring metrics, namely hammer efficiency, steal defence, steal efficiency, and force efficiency, and how they are computed for any particular team in a specific event. These four measures are routinely reported in the Curl Coach app and in Curling Zone event results. According to Curling Zone’s Gerry Geurts, the hammer efficiency metric was based on an idea first proposed by former Canadian champion and Olympian Linda Moore, who proposed that what percentage of time a team with last rock was actually able to score two points was a good measure of a team’s ability. Gerry, along with colleague Dallas Bittle, took that idea one step further and created the other metrics along similar lines. Subsequently, Hammer Factor, Without Hammer Factor, and a Combined Team Index were proposed that simply combined two or more of these elementary metrics.  In this article, I’m
Hammer efficiency, steal defence, and other metrics
In addition to player and team shooting statistics, which are often displayed on curling TV telecasts, another set of statistics common to curling are scoring metrics that summarize a team’s ability to capitalize on last rock advantage, steal points in ends where they don’t have last rock, and their ability to defend against team(s) when the opposition has last rock. These are relatively rudimentary performance metrics, but they can offer some insight to a team’s performance. If one is using the Curl Coach app to chart games those summary scoring metrics are shown on the main Competition page within the app – regrettably these statistics are not duplicated in the generated Competition Report PDF. An example of these statistics captured with Curl Coach appears at right. In addition to the base statistics shown for this competition: number of games played, wins and losses, average points scored for/against, etc. there are a number of additional metrics, such as Hammer Efficiency (called
Book review: What’s your Call?
This delightful book, published in October 2022, is a collaboration between Scotland’s Doug Wilson and long-time Alberta skip (and Curling Alberta board member) Mickey Pendergast. In addition to the book, Doug runs the Daily Curling Puzzle group on Facebook, which boasts 23.5k members and offers frequent strategy puzzles for education and comment. What’s Your Call is a unique book in that it couples a particular on-ice scenario from an actual competitive game with a video clip that shows the setup and then the actual shot attempted by that particular team in that game. For the most part, game scenarios are taken from Canadian Season of Champions games so as to avoid geo-blocking from World Curling events. The book contains 50 such real-life scenarios. Unlike many older volumes on strategy, the scenarios are taken from a variety of fairly recent matches and so the 5-rock FGZ rule is in effect (but alas, not the more recent “No-Tick” rule change adopted this
Book review: A Pane in the Glass
Bill Tschirhart has been involved in coaching the sport of curling for many years. I was first introduced to Bill in 1990 when he was coach of the University of Waterloo varsity curling teams, which was Bill’s first coaching position. Since then, Bill has held coaching positions provincially and nationally, coached at both national and international events, and at one time was Curling Canada’s national development coach at Curling Canada’s National Training Centre (NTC) in Calgary. Over the years Bill has published a number of articles about coaching the sport of curling, both in print media and on the web, and in addition launched an online blog a few years ago. Today, Bill can be found on the airwaves with his Pane in the Glass Podcast, which can be found through most podcast channels including Apple. Contents The short essays in A Pane in the Glass are grouped by topic: Coaching, Technical, Team Dynamics, Strategy, Physical Preparation and Nutrition, Mental
Tac-tic-tee by Rock Science
Tac-Tic-Tee (Tactic-Tee, not Tic-Tac-Tee) is a curling strategy game that centers on shot selection. Players of the game pretend that they are skipping a team in their club championship final. A play situation involves the layout of the stones as diagrammed on one of the rock-position cards, supplemented by the specific circumstances for the shot: which colour is your team throwing, which end is it, which player is throwing, how keen and/or straight is the ice, what is the score, what the are abilities of your teammates, and so on. With each situation, and given the stones in play, you then select from a list the best possible shot to call. Once the shot is selected, the scenario booklet lists the potential choices, an analysis of each potential shot, along with a score. If you selected the “correct” shot, you earn 100 points, whereas with a disastrous call you will lose 100 points, with other choices in-between. After a certain
Shot selection and strategy
Strategy and tactics are two terms often used to describe the choices that a team can make during an end, or during a game. Former National Training Centre coach Bill Tschirhart describes strategy this way: Strategy is the shot called after considering a variety of factors in light of a pre-determined game plan which results from an overall philosophy. Tactics, on the other hand, relate to the factors that determine the outcome of the particular shot: What turn do we play? What weight do we play? How much ice do we take? How does our sweeping effect this shot? How does the specific player affect this shot? Strategy and tactics are inter-related; they represent a continuum of choices from the high-level (how does our team want to control the last two ends of play?) to the low-level (precisely how do we place the broom so that we can make this double-takeout?). Paul Webster, the current National Training Centre coach for