Lawton Looks Unbeatable

The Stephanie Lawton rink defeated the Cindy Ricci rink 9 - 5 in eight ends in the page one playoff at the Saskatchewan women's curling tournament.

Never in the entire tournament has Lawton had to throw her last rock!

(trial posting from my iPhone)

Addendum: that worked all right. Maybe I can live-blog the draws tomorrow on my iPhone? Hmmm. I wonder if there is any Rogers service in Outlook....

Peel Your Own Rock??? intriguing strategy

I'm sure it has happened before, albeit infrequently, but in the tie-breaker between Folk and Holland at the Saskatchewan Scott Tournament of Hearts, Holland purposely peeled one of her own rocks.

The setting was this: Holland was up by one in the tenth end with the hammer and had one rock in the rings. Everything else was clear, as Folk's attempt to hide behind that one rock had barely coasted through the rings. So rather than leave Folk anything to freeze to, or anything to hide behind, Holland just peeled her own rock, leaving Folk with an empty house for her last rock.

Sure as shootin', Folk drew to the button with her last rock, and then Holland peeled that rock for the win. It sure was fun to watch that process.

Addendum: I didn't make it to Outlook today. I'm still thinking of going tomorrow. I've been watching the tie-breakers on the webcast site (see the posting below this one). As I've tried to say before, it is remarkably good for having only two cameras and no replays.

Saskatchewan Women's Curling Available on the Web

For those of you who would like to watch the playdowns to determine which women's team will represent Saskatchewan at the Scott Tournament of Hearts, there is live coverage available as a webcast here. The site is often very slow to load because it is being overwhelmed by viewers and others looking for information, but the coverage is a pleasant surprise in quality of picture and quality of commentary.

If I have a chance, I'd like to go to Outlook, SK, this weekend to watch the last two days of the tournament. If I go, I'll try to report live from there from time to time.

Addendum: There are several teams in this tournament whose names you will recognize. There are lots of good curlers in Saskatchewan. Let me add that the webcast really is quite good for this type of thing in a province with such a small population. The curlers in the feature games are miked, and there seem to be several different camera angles. Also the resolution is acceptable. The server overload and database problems seem endemic to curling (see our comments in recent years), but overall this is an impressive bit of webcasting.

I'm living in Regina for the next few months and looking forward to enjoy a lot of curling while I'm out here, including the Men's World Championship.

Update: The Saskcurl website is seriously overloaded, but using the direct link to their webcast sometimes lets you avoid that problem. Here is a one way to reach their webcast directly:

Free video streaming by Ustream