Opening the House: Datasets for Mixed Doubles Curling

TL;DR

This paper introduces comprehensive datasets for mixed doubles curling, enabling detailed strategic analysis and performance modeling, which were previously limited due to scarce data access.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale, detailed datasets for mixed doubles curling, including data extraction methods and initial analytical insights.

Findings

Identified key differences between mixed doubles and traditional curling.

Demonstrated the dataset's utility for strategic and performance analysis.

Provided initial insights into shot success rates and scoring patterns.

Abstract

We introduce the most comprehensive publicly available datasets for mixed doubles curling, constructed from eleven top-level tournaments from the CurlIT (https://curlit.com/results) Results Booklets spanning 53 countries, 1,112 games, and nearly 70,000 recorded shots. While curling analytics has grown in recent years, mixed doubles remains under-served due to limited access to data. Using a combined text-scraping and image-processing pipeline, we extract and standardize detailed game- and shot-level information, including player statistics, hammer possession, Power Play usage, stone coordinates, and post-shot scoring states. We describe the data engineering workflow, highlight challenges in parsing historical records, and derive additional contextual features that enable rigorous strategic analysis. Using these datasets, we present initial insights into shot selection and success rates, scoring distributions, and team efficiencies, illustrating key differences between mixed doubles and traditional 4-player curling. We highlight various ways to analyze this type of data including from a shot-, end-, game- or team-level to display its versatilely. The resulting resources provide a foundation for advanced performance modeling, strategic evaluation, and future research in mixed doubles curling analytics, supporting broader analytical engagement with this rapidly growing discipline.