I love curling.

No, I’m not joking.  I genuinely love curling.  I think it’s awesome.  But for some reason, whenever I try to tell people how awesome curling is they smile at me waiting for me to say that I’m kidding.

What is it that is so hard for people to believe?

My money’s on the brooms:

But if you can get past the admittedly, slightly funny, furious sweeping, you’ll find a exciting and very strategic sport.

Curling is basically a lot like shuffleboard crossed with horseshoes, with some added complexity that only ice can give you.  First of all you have the sport’s namesake: curling.  Yes, they can make that heavy-ass granite stone curl.

The key is the sweeping.  All that rubbing by the broom creates heat via friction, which momentarily melts the ice, and allows the stone to move with less friction.  So, in order to make the stone curl, you combine a nice spin by the thrower with some good sweeping on one side of the rock’s path, which makes it preferentially “curl” in that direction.

All this skill is matched with a heavy dose of strategy.  In order to score in curling, you must be closer to the center of the target, called the “button,” than your opponent.  Every rock that is closer to the button than your opponent is one point, however you must be inside the larger target, which is called the “house,” in order to qualify for a point.

There a several different types of shots in curling.  Obviously, there’s scoring shots, called “draws,” but there are also “blocking” shots, which are used as protection against “takeout” shots, which are used to knock out other stones from the scoring area.

The game itself is broken up into ends, which are a lot like innings in baseball.

Curling, is exciting, suspenseful, strategic, and full of finesse.  Please watch a game. You won’t disappointed.

Tags: awesome, curling, Winter Olympics

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Some Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.