What does "weight" mean in curling?

Weight is how hard the stone is thrown, expressed as the distance it would travel — not as effort. A curler calls weight either as a number from 1 to 10, where 7 stops on the button and 10 on the back line, or as a stopwatch time between the two hog lines.

What is a good hog-to-hog time for draw weight?

About 13.3 seconds for a draw to the button on medium ice. Keener ice gives a longer split for the same spot and heavier ice a shorter one, so the number is a property of the sheet as much as of the shot — which is why teams time the first few stones of a game.

Why do the guard weights step three feet and the house weights two?

The house divides itself: the front, back and middle of each ring are two feet apart, so 4 to 10 land on lines that already exist. In front of the house there are no lines at all, so three numbers spread evenly across the fifteen-foot guard zone at three-foot steps.

Why do takeouts not have a number?

The numbered chart stops at the back line because that is where the house stops. A takeout is defined by the fact that it would keep going and leave the sheet if it hit nothing, so those weights are named — hack, board, control, normal, peel — rather than numbered.

CurlTi.me/Learn/Weight by number

Calling weight by number

Weight is the one thing a curler actually chooses, and it is called as a number. The numbers are not a difficulty scale — they are places on the ice, and once you see that, the whole system reads itself.

Last updated 2026-08-16

Weight is a distance, not an effort#

The single most useful thing to understand about curling is that "weight" does not mean how hard you push. It means where the stone would stop. A curler asking for more weight is asking for the stone to finish further down the sheet, and the amount of muscle involved is nobody's business.

That framing is what makes weight callable at all. If it were an effort you could only learn it by feel, and you could never hand it to a teammate. As a distance it has a number, and the number can be spoken across fifty metres of ice.

The numbered scale#

The scale runs from 1 to 10, and every number is a place. The house does most of the work of dividing it up: the rings put lines on the ice two feet apart, so 4 is the front edge of the house, 7 is the button, 10 is the back line, and 5, 6, 8 and 9 land on the eight- and four-foot lines either side of the tee.

Every called number, marked where the stone comes to rest. Point at one to see it in the table below.

Point at a row to find it on the ice.

Call	Stops at	From the hack	Hog to hog	What it is for
1	A deep guard	111 ft	16.48 s	A deep guard, well out in front. Hard to draw around, easy to leave useless.
2	A guard	114 ft	15.58 s	The standard guard. Far enough out to hide behind, close enough to matter.
3	A tight guard	117 ft	14.87 s	A tight guard, right off the rings. Protects the front of the house without blocking your own draw.
4	The top of the house	120 ft	14.27 s	The front of the rings. Counts, but only just.
5	The top of the eight-foot	122 ft	13.92 s	Top of the eight. The workhorse draw when something has to sit in front.
6	The top of the four-foot	124 ft	13.60 s	Top of the four. Close to the middle and still coverable.
7	The button	126 ft	13.31 s	The button. The default answer to "where do you want it?".
8	The back of the four-foot	128 ft	13.04 s	Back four. Behind the tee line, close to the middle, awkward to remove.
9	The back of the eight-foot	130 ft	12.78 s	Back eight. Deep and safe from anything drawn in front of it.
10	The back line	132 ft	12.55 s	The back line. The last position that scores, and a foot from being gone.

Once you have the symmetry, nothing needs memorising. The button is 7. Every step of one is two feet. So a 9 is four feet past the button — the back of the eight-foot — and you worked that out rather than recalled it.

Why the guard numbers step three feet#

In front of the rings there is nothing to measure against: fifteen feet of blank ice between the hog line and the front of the house. Two-foot steps would need eight numbers to cross it and none of them would land on anything you could see. So the guard zone gets three numbers at three-foot steps — 3 is a tight guard just off the rings, 2 is a guard, and 1 is a deep guard close to the hog line.

The numbers in between#

Nobody writes 6.4 on a chart, but it is a shot a curler can genuinely ask for — a foot in front of the button is a real place and a real instruction. The scale is continuous rather than ten fixed calls, which is why CurlTi.me puts a fine control between the number buttons rather than making you pick one of ten.

The other way: a stopwatch#

The second way to call weight is a time. Somebody at the delivering end starts a watch as the stone crosses the near hog line and stops it as it crosses the far one — 72 feet of travel — and reads off a number in seconds. That is the hog-to-hog split, and it is the language teams use to talk about the ice.

It runs backwards from the numbered scale, which catches everybody out once: a bigger time is a lighter stone. A 13.3 is a draw to the button; a 12.5 will run to the back line; a 16.5 barely reaches the guard zone.

The other stopwatch convention

Some teams time from the back line to the near hog line instead — about 3.75 seconds at draw weight. That measures something different: the stone is still being carried during that stretch, so it times the delivery rather than the slide. Both conventions are in use and both are right; they just answer different questions.

Why the same number takes a different time#

Here is the part that turns the stopwatch from a gadget into an instrument. The number 7 always means the button. The time a 7 takes does not, because it depends entirely on how fast the ice is.

Sheet	Friction	Its own draw to the button	A stone thrown at the calibration sheet's button weight
Club	×1.10	12.72 s	stops at 117.5 ft — 8.5 ft short of it
Normal	×1.00	13.31 s	stops on the button
Championship	×0.85	14.37 s	stops at 142.4 ft — 16.4 ft past it

Throw the identical stone on club ice and on championship ice and it finishes nearly twenty-five feet apart. That is the whole reason teams stand at the far end with stopwatches during the first end: they are not measuring the thrower, they are measuring the sheet. Once you know a button draw is taking 13.9 seconds on this ice tonight, you know what to call for the rest of the game.

Ice speed, and what to expect from a sheet goes into how much a sheet varies, how it changes during a game, and how to read one from a single stone.

Above the scale: the takeout weights#

The numbers stop at 10, because the house stops at the back line and there is nothing left to name. Everything harder than that is a takeout, and takeouts are defined by the fact that they would keep going. So they get names instead, and the names are places too — just places past the end of the house:

Where each named weight would put a stone on an empty sheet. Hack weight stops at the far hack; board weight reaches the back boards; the three hardest weights would leave the ice altogether.

Weight	Would stop at	Hog to hog	What it is for
Back Line	132 ft	12.55 s	The lightest weight that reliably removes a stone. Yours is likely to stay in the house.
Hack	138 ft	11.93 s	A soft takeout. Enough to clear, gentle enough to control the roll.
Board	144 ft	11.40 s	The everyday hit. Removes the target and leaves your stone somewhere predictable.
Control	175 ft	9.54 s	The standard modern takeout. Still curls, so it can be thrown around a guard.
Normal	198 ft	8.65 s	A firm hit. The target goes; so, usually, does yours.
Peel	274 ft	6.91 s	Maximum weight. Travels almost straight, which is why it is used on guards.

Those names are not arbitrary and they are not modern inventions — why the weights are called what they are traces each one back to the thing on the ice it is named after.

Which weight to throw#

Roughly, and with a great deal of argument available about the edges:

Draw weight (4–10) — when you want the stone to stay. Everything about position play is drawn.
Guard weight (1–3) — when you want to block rather than to score.
Hack or board weight — a controlled takeout. Heavy enough to remove a stone, light enough that yours might stay in the house afterwards, which is what a hit-and-stay or a hit-and-roll needs.
Control weight — the standard takeout in most modern play. It curls a little, so it can be thrown around a corner, and it still clears cleanly.
Normal and peel weight — when you want the target gone and you do not care what happens to your own stone. Peel weight travels almost straight, which is precisely why it is used on guards: there is no curl for the other team to have planned around.

Heavier is not safer. A harder throw curls less, which means it is less forgiving of a missed line, and it arrives with enough energy that a thin contact sends both stones somewhere nobody intended. There is a reason control weight is called that.

Calling weight on CurlTi.me#

The game takes weight the same two ways the ice does: pick a number from 1 to 10 and nudge the fine control between them, or set a stopwatch time directly. Switching between the two carries the value across rather than resetting it, because they are the same axis expressed differently.

Every split time on this page comes out of the game's own physics rather than from a chart somebody typed in, which is why they are given to two decimal places: they are computed, not remembered. The friction law underneath is µ(v) = 0.00662 + 0.00231/√v — friction that rises as the stone slows, which is the correction that makes real curling timings reproducible at all.

Throw a few The shots, and what each is for