Registered: Feb 2013
Location:
Posts: 812

Watched some of curling from Duluth. Unfortunately mostly take-out take-out take-out so pretty boring. Two questions
1. Is Duluth ice always this straight?
2. Are all the take-outs a function of the straight ice or is that the future of competitive curling? Hope it was due to the ice because otherwise there is little reason to keep watching curling on tv/internet.

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Registered: Sep 2002
Location: US - CT
Posts: 1431

My sources tell me that the ice was curling more than normal. Barely two feet on draws, hard to play aggressive when it is very hard to bury behind a guard. Rocks 3/4 buried were unhittable from what I saw. Not fun to watch for sure.

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Registered: Mar 2009
Location:
Posts: 695

I thought it was great a couple of 60 year old skips made the final four including Hackner coming in second.

Good run by the Junior ladies.

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Registered: Dec 2011
Location: Superior, WI
Posts: 2

Having played in the Duluth Cashspiel, I thought the ice had plenty of curl to it. (Most skips were taking over three feet to draw the pot, with their broom in the middle of the 8-foot.) There were a number of instances where draws would overcurl by a full rock around to the other side of a guard. There were some of our games where it would start to flatten out and get unpredictably swingy in front of the house, but otherwise I thought the ice played generally well.

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Registered: Dec 2014
Location:
Posts: 26

I thought the curling was pretty poor from most of the teams.

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Registered: Dec 2014
Location:
Posts: 26

Junior ladies had to make a run after a poor 3-2 showing. And were only a few brushes away from giving away the final. Not impressive IMO.

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Registered: Dec 2005
Location: St. Thomas, North Dakota
Posts: 2613

Uummm...yeah...lots of negatives you can come away with out of Duluth.

Their ice does appear to lose movement when the outside temps drop to frigid. Hackner's Senior team making the Finals may be an indictment on the rest of the field. Would have like to see Lilla, Vukich and Dropkin The Elder do better. On the gals' side, it would have been cool to see Bert do better. The gals' field wasn't all that strong. The first five ends of the Heater McCormick/Currie quarterfinal was super bad curling.

Still, lots of positives.

Junior teams of both genders doing very well; especially all four female Junior teams. Heater and his crew could have been in a trap situation (with a Slam just completed and Curling For TV coming up right after) but hung tough and made enough of the key shots. TESN seemed to draw a good following. They usually do when the Tiny Terrorists are playing and/or Specks is commentating.

There's lots of good things happening in USA curling.

Ben Tucker

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