I have been part of a good club team where this did work. I was surprised when my skip deployed it. His thought was that peels later in the end created corner guards with their shooters. When we had the centre guards...they did not make great come arounds on the centres.... And when they tried to peel once they nosed the centre to drive our rock into the house for a counter and left us with a centre guard still and a couple of corner guards on previous peel attempts. We scored three to win by one. But I haven't used it again, nor seen anyone use it against me.
Nice video! A few extra thoughts for how we think about this situation on our team. When you're down a decent number of points (say >=3 or 4) to teams on tour, it becomes very difficult to come back and you've likely lost the game already. If you try to chip away at the lead with deuces and forces, it can still take 5-6 ends to be in a winnable situation, even if you play the rest of the game perfectly. So then the best strategy is to go all in for a big end, which requires junk. If your opposition happens to come up light on their first rock to top four we figure that they'll usually peel that guard and we'll be left with two corners + a rock buried at best (assuming they don't choke the guard). Likely only a deuce out of that, not ideal. So really we'd like to keep them from peeling that guard, so we throw a centre on it and hope that they miss some shots down the line, or we make some pistols. Here's an example of it working for a score of 4: ua-cam.com/video/vOdHQL1GMXc/v-deo.html (action starts at 1:31:22)
Curling is a flawed sport. In no other sport is one team so favored as it is in curling! The team that gets the hammer through superior draws to the button gets the hammer and then is at least 60% likely to win the game! This is ridiculous!! If I got such odds in Vegas I could make millions in short order! The game needs to be changed to the shuffleboard format where if you do not score you lose the hammer! This would make the game far more exciting and competitive! And no more boring blanking of ends! I have watched curling and played for decades and this is a no-brainer! Bob
I have been part of a good club team where this did work. I was surprised when my skip deployed it. His thought was that peels later in the end created corner guards with their shooters. When we had the centre guards...they did not make great come arounds on the centres.... And when they tried to peel once they nosed the centre to drive our rock into the house for a counter and left us with a centre guard still and a couple of corner guards on previous peel attempts. We scored three to win by one. But I haven't used it again, nor seen anyone use it against me.
Nice video! A few extra thoughts for how we think about this situation on our team. When you're down a decent number of points (say >=3 or 4) to teams on tour, it becomes very difficult to come back and you've likely lost the game already. If you try to chip away at the lead with deuces and forces, it can still take 5-6 ends to be in a winnable situation, even if you play the rest of the game perfectly. So then the best strategy is to go all in for a big end, which requires junk. If your opposition happens to come up light on their first rock to top four we figure that they'll usually peel that guard and we'll be left with two corners + a rock buried at best (assuming they don't choke the guard). Likely only a deuce out of that, not ideal. So really we'd like to keep them from peeling that guard, so we throw a centre on it and hope that they miss some shots down the line, or we make some pistols. Here's an example of it working for a score of 4: ua-cam.com/video/vOdHQL1GMXc/v-deo.html (action starts at 1:31:22)
Curling is a flawed sport. In no other sport is one team so favored as it is in curling! The team that gets the hammer through superior draws to the button gets the hammer and then is at least 60% likely to win the game! This is ridiculous!! If I got such odds in Vegas I could make millions in short order! The game needs to be changed to the shuffleboard format where if you do not score you lose the hammer! This would make the game far more exciting and competitive! And no more boring blanking of ends! I have watched curling and played for decades and this is a no-brainer! Bob