The 2013 Strathcona Cup:
an analysis of the winning strategy

February 19, 2013

The last draws of the 2013 edition of the Strathcona Cup were played about three weeks ago and when all was said and done the Scottish “tourists” have all gone back home with the trophy after outscoring their Canadian opponents 2876 - 2620 in terms of the aggregate number of rocks over the course of 426 draws played from one end of Canada to the other. The Hudson Legion Curling Club had the distinction of hosting two of those draws and we can proudly say that our curlers won both of them.

By winning this year’s tournament, the Scots can now claim having won the Cup 10 times compared to the 11 wins by Canadians since the inception of this friendly competition more than a century ago. All the results and additional information, including a very interesting diary that the visiting curlers had kept during the event, can be found at the official web site devoted to the 2013 tour which can be found at www.strathconacuptour2013.co.uk

We captured the game results from the above website and analyzed them in order to get a clearer picture of the strategy that the Scots used to come out victorious. An overview of that analysis can be seen in the table below:

Analysis of results by game outcomes   Analysis of results by points scored Tour Scotland wins Canada wins Ties Tour Scotland rocks Canada rocks West 61 74 7 West 854 864 Central 63 60 19 Central 928 847 East 68 63 11 East 1015 837 Total 192 197 37 Total 2797 2548

Note: the number of points scored calculated using the results posted on the Strathcona Cup web site does not match the official results because some game results from the East tour are missing.

It is encouraging to see that in terms of game outcomes, the Canadian teams had actually won more games than the Scots, especially in the West tour. What this indicates is that in order to understand how the “tourists” played to win the trophy we need to analyze the individual game results and more specifically the winning margins. Using the Tableau Software data analysis application available on the internet we have prepared the interactive graph shown below which displays the number of wins for each country grouped by how many points they won their games.

As it is easy to see, of the 197 games that Canada won, 92 were decided by only 1 or 2 points and only 22 games were decided by 7 points or more. On the other hand, of the 192 games that the Scots won, the winning margin was 1-2 points in only 55 cases. However, in 50 of their wins, the winning margin was 7 points or more. In other words, when the Scots lost they usually lost by a small margin but when they won, they won big. That’s the same strategy that guarantees success in the annual Grand Match.

It’s also interesting to point out that amongst the 15 teams from Scotland that took part in the event, only three were responsible for most of the winning margin. Team 3 on the West Tour, Team 2 on the Central Tour and Team 4 on the East Tour combined contributed 188, or 75% of the 249 point final margin of victory.

Congratulations to the Scottish curlers and we look forward to the next round of this great event.