Want to impress your friends at the next Olympics? Watch for a team that has the hammer and doesn’t use it wisely. Sometimes, the best play is to blank the end—score zero—just to keep the hammer for the next round.
It sounds crazy, right? But imagine you’re ahead by one point with one end left. You don’t need to score big; you just need to deny the other team a score. So you intentionally take a bad shot to blank the end. It’s the curling equivalent of a strategic soccer foul.
And then, in the final end, you have the hammer again. You can choose to score one point and win, or you can set up a beautiful, complex play. Choices, choices.
