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How curling competitions work
If you have ever watched the end of a curling championship and wondered why the team that just lost is still in it, this is why.
Last updated 2026-08-18
The round robin, and what it decides#
Almost every serious curling competition begins with a round robin: every team plays every other team, once. At a world championship that is a dozen or so games over about nine days, two or three a day, which is a genuinely punishing schedule for a sport played standing on ice.
What the round robin decides is seeding, not the title. Its job is to produce a ranking, and the top four (sometimes six or eight) go into a playoff. Everything about the playoff structure is designed to make that ranking matter without making it decisive — which is a real tension, and the Page system is curling's answer to it.
The Page playoff#
Used across North American curling and at many international events. It is the reason a losing team is still alive, and it takes one diagram to understand.
In words:
- The 1 v 2 game. The winner goes directly to the final. The loser is not eliminated — they drop into the semi-final.
- The 3 v 4 game. The loser is out. The winner advances to the semi-final.
- The semi-final. Loser of 1-2 against winner of 3-4. Winner goes to the final.
- The final.
A meaningful round robin. Finishing first or second earns you a defeat you are allowed to survive; finishing third or fourth earns you nothing but a place. That gap is what stops teams coasting once qualification is secure, which is the disease of every format that seeds a straight knockout.
It is worth noticing what the system costs, too. The team that finishes first can be beaten twice by the same opponent and lose the title, which is fair; but a team that finishes fourth can win three games and take it, which several people think is too much reward for a mediocre week. Curling has decided it prefers drama, and given how much of the sport's audience arrives once every four years, that is a defensible choice.
The other brackets#
World Curling publishes the exact bracket for each field size in the Rules of Competition. The common ones:
| Field into the playoff | Structure |
|---|---|
| Four teams — the Olympic system | Straight semi-finals: 1 v 4 and 2 v 3, then a gold medal game between the winners and a bronze medal game between the losers. Note this is not the Page system: at the Olympics, losing a semi-final means playing for bronze rather than getting another shot at gold. |
| Six teams, one group | A qualification round of 4 v 5 and 3 v 6; the winners meet the first and second seeds in the semi-finals. Then gold and bronze medal games. |
| Six teams, two groups | The same shape with cross-group qualification games — A3 v B2 and A2 v B3 — feeding semi-finals against the two group winners. |
| Eight teams | Quarter-finals seeded 1 v 8, 4 v 5, 3 v 6 and 2 v 7, into semi-finals, then gold and bronze medal games. |
If you are watching the Olympics rather than a Brier, there is no second chance. Lose the semi-final and you are playing for bronze. The Page system's generosity is a domestic and world-championship habit, not an Olympic one.
Ties, and the Draw Shot Challenge#
Round robins produce ties constantly, and curling settles them with something no other sport has: a skills measurement collected all week.
Before every game, after pre-game practice, each team throws two Last Stone Draw stones to the button — one clockwise, one anticlockwise, by different players. The immediate purpose is to decide who has last stone in the first end: the team whose stones finish closer gets the choice. But the distances are also recorded all week, and the average of them, with the least favourable discarded, is the Draw Shot Challenge.
That is the primary tie-break for round-robin ranking. Its consequences are quietly excellent:
- Teams have a reason to throw a serious draw before every game, including games that cannot affect their position.
- The tie-break is a measure of skill rather than a coin toss or a goal-difference proxy.
- A team can be eliminated on the second decimal place of a draw thrown six days earlier, which is brutal and completely transparent.
There are rules for abusing it, too: if a member of the delivering team touches their own moving LSD stone, the distance is recorded as 1.996 m — the radius of the house, effectively the worst possible legal result — rather than being rethrown.
Bonspiels and club play#
Triple knockout#
The standard weekend bonspiel format, and it is built around a social constraint rather than a competitive one. Teams have driven several hours and taken a weekend off; sending half of them home after one game on Friday evening is a bad way to run a tournament that depends on people wanting to come back.
So: three brackets. Everyone starts in A. Lose once and you drop to B; lose again and you drop to C; lose a third time and you are out. Every team is guaranteed three games, most get four or five, and the winners of the three brackets play off. It is not the most accurate way to identify the best team and it is not trying to be.
Club leagues#
The format most curling is actually played in. A weekly draw, usually eight ends, teams either fixed for a season or drawn afresh. Standings are typically kept on wins with some tie-break on ends or points. It is a social structure with a competition attached rather than the other way round — running a club goes into what makes one work.
The ladder, club to Olympics#
| Level | What it is | Who plays |
|---|---|---|
| Club league | A weekly draw within one club, usually eight ends, often with a mixed or open format. This is where the overwhelming majority of curling actually happens. | Everyone |
| Club and open bonspiels | Weekend tournaments, frequently run as a triple knockout so that every team is guaranteed several games rather than being sent home on a Friday night. | Everyone |
| Regional and provincial playdowns | The qualifying ladder into a national championship. In Canada this is genuinely brutal — the provincial field is deep enough that reaching the national is harder than winning many countries’ nationals. | Competitive teams |
| National championship | The Brier and the Scotties in Canada; national championships elsewhere. Winner usually represents the country. | The best teams in a country |
| Continental championship | The European Curling Championships and the Pan Continental Curling Championships, which together decide most world championship places. | National teams |
| World championship | Men, women, mixed, mixed doubles, juniors, seniors and wheelchair, each their own event. | National teams |
| The Olympics | Ten teams in each of men’s and women’s, ten in mixed doubles. Qualification runs off world ranking points accumulated over the preceding seasons plus a qualification event. | Ten nations |
Two things about this ladder are unusual for an international sport. It is continuous — the same person can start in a club league and, in principle, climb it without ever leaving the club system, because there is no academy route that bypasses clubs. And the hardest single rung is not at the top: for most of the last seventy years, the hardest curling tournament in the world to win has been the Canadian national championship.
Sources#
- Primary The Rules of Curling and Rules of Competition — play-off systems, C8 and C9 World Curling, 2025The published brackets for four, six and eight team playoffs, the Last Stone Draw procedure, and the Draw Shot Challenge including the 1.996 m penalty.
- In defence of curling’s Page playoff systemOn what the format is trading off, from someone who thinks the trade is a good one.
- It’s playoff time Curling CanadaThe Page system as used at the Brier and the Scotties.