u/CincyCurling

Many here might not have noticed that this year's official rules of curling have greatly limited a team's ability to play with 3 people.

(If you don’t know the new rule, a quick way to state it is you can only play 2 ends with 3 players.  If you cannot bring in a 4^(th) player after those 2 ends, you forfeit the game)

I’m curious to know how your club is handling this, or if they are ignoring this rule?

If they are ignoring it, are they ignoring this rule across the board in all leagues, or are they implementing this rule in your club’s competitive league(s)?

We are trying to get our upcoming Mixed Doubles Event registration setup on Curling Zone. We are having troubles getting anyone to respond via the methods that we used in previous years.

So if anyone can help me get in contact with Gerry or anyone else who you can think could help, please DM me (don't put their contact info in a response here because no one would want that).

The way I understand the concept of triples is that it is intended to be a game that leads to learning for new curlers (though obviously many experienced curlers love the game as well). My limited experience with playing is that most teams have one more experienced player (typically the third skip) and then 2 newer curlers in the other two slots.

Since the game is played with 6 stones not 8, my question is why don't we pre-position a couple of stones as guards before the end starts with the spare rocks?

Give the hammer team a corner guard and the other team a center guard. To me this sets up the end to be more of a productive experience, showing newer curlers how effective guards really can be.

I know that you can say that the skip can just call a guard with lead rocks in an end. But my thought is that a lot of younger curlers play triples, and they might not yet have enough consistency to properly execute a guard, so this just makes sure that it happens.

I will also add that you already have marks in the ice from mixed doubles on where the guards should be placed, so that is not an obstacle either. And since you are only playing 6 rocks, you have one "dead" rock for each end to place as the guard, turning each end effectively to a 7-rock end.