[HN Gopher] The Roaring Game - Curling
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The Roaring Game - Curling
Author : frumpish
Score : 27 points
Date : 2022-02-11 16:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (northandsouth.co.nz)
(TXT) w3m dump (northandsouth.co.nz)
| honkdaddy wrote:
| Very interesting article. I had no idea curling was big in New
| Zealand!
|
| I played high school and a bit of college curling, playing every
| position, skip, vice, second, and lead. Curling's a wonderfully
| social and elegant game requiring simple but incredibly deep
| mechanical technique. If you're ever in the position to give it a
| try, I highly recommend it. You'd be surprised how short the
| learning curve is, and since you'll probably play lead, you'll
| mostly just end up doing a lot of sweeping!
|
| Up in Canada, it's tradition and courtesy for the winning team to
| buy the losing team a drink after the game. There's a certain
| club camaraderie and sportsmanship you see in curling which makes
| it very different from our other traditional winter sport.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Still trying to find a place to do curling. I watched bbc they
| have mini-curling (only little rock) but no sweeping. Just for
| fun. Good game of "chess". Wonder how it compares with bowling
| green.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Also- it's a _lot_ harder than it looks. Give it a try, but you
| _will_ be sore after a couple of hours if your body isn 't used
| to the motions used in curling.
| Someone wrote:
| FTA: "During each Winter Olympics, Google searches for curling
| exceed those for figure skating, making it the most popular sport
| for that period."
|
| I don't think that follows. It wouldn't surprise me if most
| viewers of figure skating aren't watching it as a competitive
| event, making them uninclined to look up how the scoring system
| works.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| The problem exhibited so much in the mixed team so dramatic but
| the man and women team is so boring I think they have to fix it.
|
| I am addicted to curling.
|
| But still the game say the the first game of USA man is a good
| example. You just play 1 abd hit another most of time. Unlike I
| still remember the team of Sweden in mix double both get 3 stones
| out in 1 game by both members.
|
| I have to skipped the iPlayer all the time to get some
| interesting chess moment (> a few stones in the house) or action.
|
| Some did. But so many boring moment and so many mistakes (each
| play only 2 stones is the reason?) ...
|
| Really need more chess and more action.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| Something I learned from the article that I didn't realize before
| is that the surface of the ice used isn't smooth; they pebble it
| on purpose in order to give it the texture required for the stone
| to curl. Apparently, getting the right texture is difficult
| enough that it takes an experienced professional to get it right,
| and they haven't had satisfactory results trying to automate it.
| Wild peek into something that I didn't even know was a thing!
| honkdaddy wrote:
| This is completely true! It also varies a _lot_ between clubs,
| with curlers describing different rinks as being "straight" or
| "curly", with the latter being more densely pebbled and thus
| prone rocks curling more. Some of the better players I curled
| with had notebooks full of points they'd remembered from each
| rink they'd played. As one would imagine, the home team
| advantage is enormous in amateur curling.
|
| Each rink has a professional ice maker on staff whose job it is
| to maintain the rink for everyone to play on. Rinks usually
| need pebbling between games, so the ice maker or their
| apprentice is pretty much on staff the entire time people are
| using the facility. It seems to be a labor of love, spending
| hours and hours a day hunched over sprinkling water on a sheet
| of ice, only to have it all swept away in a matter of hours.
| You end up being known by name by the entirety of the club, and
| a lot of folks buy you a nice gift come Christmas!
| addaon wrote:
| What other sports have a non-participant with such a critical
| impact on the experience and results? Soaring comes to mind
| with tow pilots, for one.
| fifilura wrote:
| Maybe I am misinterpreting the question slightly, but I
| wanted to highlight nordic skiing, where each team has a
| team of ski-waxers.
|
| Preparing the skis for the current condition based on
| temperature an snow texture is absolutely critical for
| success.
|
| And every day is unique.
| have_faith wrote:
| Bowling alley waxing seems very similar
| joezydeco wrote:
| Seems like there's plenty of allowance for variation in the
| air pressure of footballs (American NFL). So much so that
| we ended up with Deflategate in 2014:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflategate
| pmyteh wrote:
| Cricket is somewhat like this. Preparing a 'good' pitch
| (not too green or uneven, which favours bowlers, but also
| not too flat and lifeless) is hard. And in the longer forms
| of the game the pitch seriously deteriorates over the days
| the game is played. So a good groundskeeper also has to try
| to arrange a pitch that degrades gracefully.
|
| Coupled to that, the surface is very climate and soil
| dependent, so there are significant differences between
| grounds (especially between different continents!) even if
| they all had the same ground staff.
| Someone wrote:
| From what I can understand the challenge with cricket
| pitches is that you don't want grass on the surface, but
| you need strong grass roots, to prevent degradation as
| balls are hurled into a small part of the pitch at high
| speed hundreds of times.
|
| Wimbledon similarly has groundsmen who can almost kill
| grass without killing it. There, the ideal into have very
| short grass (8mm, according to
| https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/6667985/wimbledon-head-
| ground...) and a strong root system. Still, two weeks of
| tennis each year changes the courts from fully green to,
| at places, small dust bowls.
|
| Relatively recently, football groundsmen have gotten more
| important, too. Top clubs want smooth grounds with short
| grass (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/s
| ilicon-val...)
| rjsw wrote:
| Alpine Skiing. The person who picks where to put the poles
| to ski around, and at higher levels of competition the
| person in charge of how the snow is prepared.
| codyb wrote:
| I'd imagine almost all games do? Most courts and pitches
| require a decent amount of maintenance.
| jat850 wrote:
| What's interesting is that several things can affect the
| sheet of ice and make sheets even within the same building
| behave differently. Often if sheets on the end of the
| building have an outside wall, you'll see the outside sheets
| behave different from the middle sheets of ice. The same
| thing can happen depending on how cold it is outside. It's
| grown more scientific in recent years, especially at the
| professional level.
|
| Ice makers are indeed held to a challenging task and what you
| said is true - they're recognized across the club, on site,
| by basically every member and they more often get blame than
| praise for how the ice affects a game!
| jat850 wrote:
| I'm sure along with discovering this, it also gave you an
| explanation for the science of sweeping which is also super
| neat and to the casual observer, not a well understood part of
| the game. At the micro level, the abrasive texture of the
| brooms is melting pebble (not entirely, just temporarily along
| the sweeping path) and affecting distance, deceleration, curl.
|
| Sorry, kinda nerding out over seeing a curling article on HN.
| mhb wrote:
| I think you will enjoy _Making Championship Curling Ice_
| https://youtu.be/50cSDUIDMuM
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