Improving Your Game - Strategy

Editor: unknown
Date: 2013-02-11

Posted: Feb 11, 2013
Contributed: Colin Sinclair

Strategy

Pretty soon we’ll be coming to my favourite time of the curling season. And my least favourite time of year for club curling.

It’s almost time for The Season of Champions… you know, when the Scotties, the Brier, The Canadian Juniors, etc. flood our TV and computer screens and all we do for days on end is watch and voice our (not so humble) opinions to the commentators and players who certainly can’t hear us and probably wouldn’t care if they did but damn it why don’t they listen to us! Deep sigh!

Oh, come on, if you’re a curler you know you do this too, and if you’re new to curling; you’ll know exactly what I mean by the end of March.

Now you may be asking why this is my least favourite time of year at the club… well……..

This is the time of year when every house league game in the country, no, probably in the world, slows to a crawl so that club curlers can call ridiculously difficult shots like they just saw on TV. This is something I have admittedly, but not proudly, fallen prey to in the past. I am drawing your attention to this early with the hope that any readers will remember who they are during this Season of Champions and call their games accordingly.

I’m not saying if you’re down a bundle in 7 or 8 and there’s a TV shot for the tie you shouldn’t try it. I’m just saying to keep things as simple as possible as often as possible. Here is a rule to live by:

PLAY THE EASY SHOTS WHENEVER YOU CAN AND MAKE YOUR OPPOSITION PLAY THE HARD SHOTS!

Write this on the back of your hand, tape it to your broom - lest you forget. Before you decide to call the angle raise take out double instead of the wide open draw please remember these words: Kevin Martin, Jeff Stoughton, Jennifer Jones, and Cheryl Bernard’s teams practice constantly, play a zillion games in a season, and when you see them on TV they’re usually playing on arena ice, with near perfect rocks which is completely different to what your average curler (you and me) has available to them. Not to mention the sweeping.

Now that you know about the epidemic bound to sweep (pardon the pun) our club in the New Year you can use it to your advantage. When you notice other skips painfully assessing angles for an outrageously difficult shot when they should just play the open hit you can snicker silently to yourself while you wait. Keep playing the easy shots and leaving your opposition attempting the hard shots and it will pay off.