who gets the hammer in curling

In curling, the hammer is the team that throws the very last stone in an end, and that is considered a big strategic advantage.

Who gets the hammer to start?

Before the game, the hammer is usually decided by a short pre-game challenge called the Last Stone Draw (LSD):

• Players from each team throw stones toward the button (the center of the house).
• Officials measure how close each team’s stones end up.
• The team with the better (closer) overall draw gets the hammer in the first end.

At lower levels or in casual play, some leagues instead use a coin toss or similar simple method, but official events mostly use the Last Stone Draw system.

Who keeps or gains the hammer during the game?

After the first end, the hammer moves based on who scores :

• If you score in an end, you lose the hammer next end.
• If you do not score , you get or keep the hammer next end.
• If the end is blank (no points scored and at least one stone was in play), in traditional men’s/women’s curling, the team that had the hammer usually keeps it into the next end.

So, the team that did not put points on the board in the last end gets the hammer for the next one, which is why teams sometimes choose to blank an end on purpose to keep last rock.

Mixed doubles wrinkle

In mixed doubles, the basic idea is the same—hammer = last stone—but the exact transfer rules can differ a bit:

• The team that loses an end usually gets the hammer next end.
• However, if the hammer team ends with a blank (no stones in the house), they can be forced to give up the hammer, even though they didn’t score.

Why everyone cares about the hammer

Because last rock gives you the final say on the scoring for that end, teams with the hammer usually:

• Try to set up ends where they can score multiple points.
• Accept “giving up” a single point when they don’t have hammer, if it means they’ll get the hammer back.
• Sometimes deliberately blank an end (take out their own scoring stone) to carry the hammer into a later, more important end.

In a nutshell:

• Start of game: team that wins the Last Stone Draw gets the hammer.
• During game: the team that doesn’t score in an end gets (or keeps) the hammer for the next end.

TL;DR: Who gets the hammer in curling? The team that wins the pre-game Last Stone Draw starts with it, and after that, the hammer always goes to the team that didn’t score in the previous end.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.