What's Your Call? Curling Strategy and Tactics in 50 Real-Life Puzzles

"My main curling problem is time" says Doug Wilson, an Over-50s curler in Scotland. "Coming late to the sport, I needed a cheat sheet, someone to break down the basics of tactics and strategy for me, isolating some key fundamental principles and helping me move up the skipping learning curve - fast! While Ferbey, Martin, Pendergast and co. learned all this stuff by osmosis over decades of play, I don't have that luxury. "Looking to get educated, I took coaching courses, expecting some good lessons there. Not so much. I watched hundreds of hours of curling on TV and YouTube. It was very entertaining, but the commentators talked over my head. And then I bought books. Curling for Dummies was a gift from my wife - she said it was written for me! Sadly, almost no tactical tips."So finally, after being inspired by a seminar put on by Coach Alan Hannah of Team Mouat, I started the Daily Curling Puzzle Facebook group at the start of covid, taking real game situations, posting them up on Facebook, asking for people's solutions, and posting the video link a day or two later. Essentially, I was trying to crowd-source a curling brain, and over 17,000 mad curlers have joined in the effort to educate me. It's been great and we have almost three-hundred puzzles now posted, with detailed discussions of why the pro called what he/she called. "This book is our effort at distilling out the key underlying principles of curling tactics in the five-rock era. They codify the game of chess, I reckoned - we should be able to do it in curling. It has been a tougher challenge than I thought, and maybe that's why not many others have tried. I hope we've advanced the subject matter a bit, and I hope that that helps curlers of all ages and abilities move up the learning curve faster - before they run out of time."A native Canadian but living in Fife, Scotland for the past thirty years, Doug learned to curl in Scotland in his late 30s. He's had several successes - winning his rink and province championships a few times, and making it to the semi-final of the Scottish Pairs (two players, eight rocks thrown, regular rules) and final of the Scottish Seniors. Sadly, he had no idea what he was doing.

Mickey Pendergast is the two-time defending Canadian Masters champion, twelve-time Tour champion, and two-time Alberta runner-up, one game away from the Brier. A long-time competitive curler growing up playing in the curling hothouse that is Alberta, Mickey is now finding form, beating Al Hackner (the Iceman) to win his most recent Masters title. He also coaches several competitive men's teams in Alberta. He credits much of his success to competing against former world champions like Kevin Martin, Randy Ferbey, Pat Ryan, Ed Lukowich and all the others that seem to grow on trees out there. Mickey has always been know for his outstanding grasp of strategy. In reviewing his team's chances against Martin, Ferbey, Koe and the rest in the 2007 Alberta Provincials, the Calgary Herald acknowledged that "no one will outskip Pendergast.""Figuring out how to play against those guys, and sometimes beat them, made us a much better team," he says. "And now working on these puzzles with Doug, what I find interesting intersting is how these conversations helped to clarify and crystallize many of the strategy basics that had become instinctual to me through the decades that I've played. By having to explain the rationale behind various calls, I was forced to put into words the ideas and concepts that had become more like gut feelings to me over the years."