Continuing with our curling opening book series, we look at how the hammer team can respond when the non-hammer team has thrown a rock into the top of the house with their first rock. Patreon: / chessonice Merchandise: chess-on-ice-m...
One variant I've encountered is trying to nose hit the top four rock with leads first and then plan a corner guard on the leads second shot. This ensures a worse stone in the house from the non hammer team, and therefore less threat of steal. As an added bonus the guard zone is in play for the corner guard, but not for the other teams upcoming guard which can be immediately peeled if desired. (As added bonus the hit on first stone is pretty safe, rolling out doesn't really worsen the outcome while the other team hitting can't roll out or get a bad position)
I'd love to help you with your mic placement... try to put the mic out from under your nose. You want it to hear you, and you want to be close to it, but you dont want it in the way of your "plosives" - plosives are any sound you make that includes a small blast of air, like a P or a B or a CH... or any other time wind blasts out of your mouth. You can hear many many many of them in your VO. Forgive me, but I find these sounds very distracting. You can also use an EQ in your editing software, with a "high pass" filter at around 100Hz. Thanks, and good luck!
I can talk more about these shots in a future video! The early freeze is an attempt to play very aggressively, but usually doesn't accomplish much if you need to score: it's a pretty difficult shot, and the other team can hit or just lightly bump it to get rid of the backing, especially since you are trying the freeze so early in the end with lots of rocks remaining.
Any other considerations when non-hammer teams goes back 4 instead of top 4? I want to play it the same way, but I see a lot of skips try the freeze-tap.
I talk a bit about the option of freezing in my next video (coming soon!). The short version is that trying the freeze in the back four with the hammer feels a bit better than freezing to a top four shot, but practically it's still not great. Not only are you voluntarily playing a tough shot to create a tiny scoring area in the four foot (and likely behind the tee), but even if you make the freeze and the opponent doesn't want to just play to your stone and try to steal/force, it's so early in the end that they can always tap/hit to remove the backing at their leisure. I'd stick to the standard options for the most part.
