Get your Brier auction on
Before the modern era of lucrative sponsorship deals, Olympic funding, expense accounts and private jets (teams have those, right?) curlers had to fight for every dollar. The odd carspiel win might pay a few bills, but those events were few and far between. Winning the average bonspiel might cover the cost of the hotel, food and beverage, and hopefully leave enough cash to pay entry for the next event. Ask some curlers of a certain age about money in curling, and they will tell you it was in the Calcutta.
What is a Calcutta? According to Wikipedia it’s an open auction held in conjunction with a golf tournament, horse race, or similar event. The members of Augusta National held Calcuttas before The Masters back in the day. In 1934 Bobby Jones went for over $10,000 in the first Masters, when the purse was half that amount. Growing up around curling in Winnipeg, I knew Calcutta meant gambling long before I discovered it was a city in India (from where the name is derived).
Let me explain the process. Before a curling bonspiel or playdown event, a Calcutta auction might be held. Bidders could be players or fans or locals who were just looking for some action. Quite often a team might bid on themselves in hopes to win the event and the bigger prize from the Calcutta. Because there is no minimum investment required, you could sneak in a low bid as an unknown and then take a big prize home. This worked wonders if you were a young team from out of town.
My early Calcutta story had me far from home, forking over a couple of twenties to help buy our junior rink at the St. Claude men’s bonspiel back in the late 1980s. For a 17-year-old in high school, that was a lot of beer money. None of us recall winning, but we do remember earning enough in the Calcutta to pay for the revelry that weekend.
The Moncton 100 (1990) is considered the richest bonspiel in history, but that might not be the case. Alberta farmer ’spiels of the 80s used to have massive Calcuttas. You might see a $200,000 pot for minor events in places like Picture Butte and Taber. Wealthy farmers came to the rink with bags of cash. To wager, you could be a player or a farmer. Many were both. Some would buy themselves for a few thousand and try to upset the bigger teams.
One friend of mine grew up on a farm and as a teenager, he was recruited to curl for some of these gamblers. It taught him to play with pressure at an early age and thickened his skin from the verbal barrage received from a miss. He recalled receiving a $2,000 bonus from one syndicate investor who made a healthy return from his play.
Many a Canadian prairie ranch is said to be a few sections larger than their neighbor, largely from the winnings each winter in the local Calcutta.
So now that you know what it is, maybe you’d like to run your very own Calcutta? Watching the recent 2021 Scotties on Zoom with a couple of mates, we hashed out a plan for the upcoming Brier that I thought others might want to try out. It’s modified from being truly “open” and is more akin to a fantasy sports auction. A true Calcutta allows for unlimited wagering, but without a cap, the stakes might quickly get too rich for some of our crew. Feel free to modify these rules according to your own situation.
With 18 teams in the upcoming 2021 Brier, we allowed for six syndicates to bid on a roster of three teams each. Each syndicate will have $100 to invest in the auction. We don’t have the budget for a trained auctioneer, so we’re choosing a round robin format.
Like our long-ago rotisserie baseball league, one syndicate will name a team and starting dollar amount and then each syndicate will, in order, either bid or pass. All bids will be in increments of $1.00.
Everyone is trying to secure the team that will ultimately win. Sounds simple enough… “Gushue for $95.00,” right? Wrong. Only half of the pot will go to the syndicate whose team raises the Brier Tankard trophy on March 14; the other half will go to the syndicate whose three teams have the most combined losses.
Yes, there is a chance one group could take home all the cash, but it will require some careful planning, shrewd bidding, and a little luck. Bonne chance!