Down Three, in Curling Danger

What type of game are you guys playing here?

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?

Here’s the situation:

• It’s the eighth end of 10

• You’re red

• You’re down by three

• You have hammer

• It’s your second’s second shot

• There’s five feet of swing

C’mon skip, give us a shot that shows you’re not completely cooked. What’s your Pro Call and Club Call—and why?

The “Solution”

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.

Now sadly, error is part of our game so playing one style or the other won’t guarantee us our desired outcome. We all miss and rocks end up in different spots than where they were intended, and we need to adjust our plans. At this mid-point in the end, we are not playing tic-tac-toe or even chess here, where almost every move ends up in the right spot.

Instead, it’s more like stacking the deck. If in the early and middle parts of the end we can create situations—Mickey calls them shapes—that favour us, then good things are more likely to happen later. If the shapes favour the other guys, then bad things are more likely to happen later.

(Later in the end with skip’s shots, it’s a little more like tic-tac-toe because with just a couple of rocks to go, we can be a bit more definite.)

So let’s take a look at the puzzle situation that occurred as Krista McCarville (red) battled against Kerri Einarson (yellow) in the final of the 2022 Scotties. Down three with just a couple of ends to play, McCarville needs to be scoring a lot. And to score a lot, she needs hiding spots—guards and pockets. She’s got a nice corner guard set up but yellow (Einarson) has three rocks hovering over the four-foot. That’s not good.

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.

At some point in the end, we need to yank the rope and start to clear up the stuff in the middle so our rocks out on the side can score. The question is … when to do that? Do it now, with five shots to go? Or let the rope run a bit more and play one or more “set up” shots?

And how much do we clear? If this was the second end, we’d probably eliminate risk now by hitting to make sure we get at least a single point and don’t give up a steal. Here in the eighth and down by three, we’re more desperate and might be willing to let things run a bit, letting that situation in the middle sit so we can hide some rocks or create a pocket to help up manufacture a chance to score more than a single point.

So our choices here with five rocks to play are ...

(1) don’t address the centre yellows, yet, and play the come-around or freeze in the Y2-Y3 pocket

(2) completely address the centre yellows now and try the triple takeout, or

(3) semi-address the yellows by moving them around a bit and controlling your shooter.

For me, I don’t like hitting in this situation. We’re desperate to score a few and need rocks in play to create hiding spots and backing. Throwing big weights lets them throw big weights (if we cleared the centre yellows, they’d do their level best to clear both corners) and we’re going to have a much clearer deck in a second. That shape doesn’t favour us scoring a bunch.

Mickey makes one other point about removing the yellows now: “To score three or more, it helps to have two areas of ‘action’ going on. 

Think about it: just as two corners on either side of the sheet can set up a three, corner guards and a pocket in the centre can do the same thing. We can get a bunch of rocks in the rings protected and well separated with no doubles available, and those are the conditions that point to a big score. But playing the big weight takeout here removes one area of action and makes your job that much harder.”

The straight come-around feels pretty risky to me too, although Mickey says he doesn't mind it. I’m thinking that if we don’t get shot rock out of it, Einarson might change gears, throw a centre guard and now we’re really up against it. We might never dig them out.

How about the freeze into the pocket between Y2 and Y3? I kinda like this and it’s Krista McCarville’s first call. It lets us sit one protected in the rings—Einarson can’t remove it in one shot—and we can then bring our corners into play on our next. That’s starting to look like the shape that makes a three-ball more likely.

Finally, there’s the 3-in-1 that McCarville coach Rick Laing, one of the smartest guys in the game, suggests. “Getting rid of those yellows is a two-shot play,” he says, and thinks they need to get started now. Getting rid of one yellow so it’s then just one more shot to remove the remaining two, creating a pocket to protect another red later, and rolling the shooter under the guards ... three good outcomes from one throw. A great call.

It doesn’t work out quite as planned—the shooter rolls too far and into the open—but McCarville uses that pocket on her next, gets her opponents throwing soft-weight shots and uses those two areas of action to set up a makeable chance for three on her last.

FYI ... the puzzle scenario starts at 1:38:35 in the video below.

So getting back to the USPs, what principles can I take away from this to help my game?

1. Know what I'm trying to achieve this end—my ideal, acceptable and unacceptable outcomes. Use these to guide my calls as the end develops.

2. Know what style and shape of an end increases the likelihood of me achieving my goal. A soft-weight end with lots of rocks in play can help me score a few. A clear, open, big weight end can help me prevent them from scoring a few.

3. How much rope do I need to extend given the situation? Do I play one more set-up shot in my effort to score a multiple, or do I yank the rope back in and clear up the centre to make sure I get at least one and don’t give up a steal? If it’s going to take several shots to dig them out of the centre, maybe I should start sooner rather than later.

4. To score three-plus, it helps to have two areas of action going on so the opponents can’t clear too many of my rocks with one shot.

FYI, Mickey and I go through these and many other USPs in What's Your Call? Pick it up on Amazon whererever you are.