Down Three, in Curling Danger …

Down by three so late in the game, and letting the other folks lie three on top of the four-foot—you’re in danger of going home early. It’s time to pull this one out of the bag. But how?

When I start an end, I’ve learned to keep two thoughts in mind. The first is “Given the score and number of ends left, what are we trying to achieve?” In What’s Your Call?, the strategy guide Mickey Pendergast and I published last year, we encourage teams to agree to their ideal, acceptable and unacceptable outcomes for the end. These are kind of magical questions: keep them in mind and they’ll guide you for all eight shots, helping you make faster and better decisions. Try it … it’s true.

The second thought I have is “What style of end helps us achieve those goals?” Are we up a few shots in the game and want to keep things clean and simple? If we’re in defensive mode, we want both teams to be throwing heavyweight shots and not leaving our opponent any places to hide.

But if we’re behind and need to score, we want to a junky style to create ways to protect our stones so they can score later. We want us and our opponents to be throwing nice soft-weight shots to leave lots of rocks in play.Thinking about how an end develops when we’re trying to score with hammer, we throw up corner guards with our first stones so they can then be used to protect rocks in the rings that might score later. Our opponents—the team on defence—can’t remove those so they use their first three shots to take up a position in the middle. In essence, we’re playing out some rope, letting them use their first three rocks to set up a fortress in the middle while we set up some protection off to the sides. We’re taking on some risk and hoping we can make it pay off later.