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Curling Tips: Draw Weight, Bank Shots and Spreading Six Stones

Updated October 2026

Curling gives you six stones, one sheet of ice and no opponent, yet most rounds end with a disappointing total because the stones knock each other out of the house. The good news is that the physics is fully deterministic: the same drag always produces the same slide. That makes this a game of calibration. This guide gives you the measured power settings for a draw to the centre, explains a bank shot most players never notice, shows why a perfect 24 is impossible, and suggests a layout for all six stones.

How a throw is set

Every stone starts from the same spot near the bottom centre of the sheet. To throw, put a finger down anywhere on the ice and drag in the direction you want the stone to travel. This is not a slingshot: dragging upward sends the stone up the ice toward the house. The direction comes from the line between where your finger first touched and where it is when you lift it, and the length of that line sets the power.

Full power is reached at 130 game units of drag, which on a typical phone held upright is close to 130 screen pixels. Anything shorter than 10 units is treated as a cancelled throw, so a light tap does nothing. While you drag, a coloured arc fills clockwise around the waiting stone to show the power: it stays green up to half power, turns yellow up to 85 percent, and red beyond that. That arc is the most useful instrument in the game.

The dashed line, on the other hand, only shows direction. Its length grows with power, but it is roughly a tenth of the real distance the stone will slide. Never judge weight by where the dashed line ends; judge it by how much of the power arc is filled.

Friction and the draw to the button

A moving stone loses about 39 percent of its speed every second and is treated as stopped once it is crawling below a small threshold. Because the slowdown is proportional to speed, distance rises almost exactly in step with power, which makes calibration easy to learn.

We measured straight throws on an empty sheet in a simulation of the game's physics. With the stone thrown straight up, the results by power were:

The bullseye window is only about 3.5 units of drag wide, so consistency matters more than anything. Direction is more forgiving: on an empty sheet, a throw up to about 3 degrees off vertical still stops in the bullseye. Each degree moves the stopping point roughly 6.5 units sideways, which is half a stone's radius.

The back-wall bank shot

The ice is enclosed. Side rails and the back wall both bounce a stone back, keeping 55 percent of its speed. That creates a second scoring window most players never find. In our simulation, straight throws between about 39 and 44 percent power travel past the house, hit the back wall, and slide back down to stop on the bullseye. This window is nearly twice as wide as the direct one, about 6.5 units of drag, and sits comfortably in the green part of the arc.

There is a catch. A returning stone travels down through the house from behind, so once stones are sitting there it will run into them. In our six-stone simulation, banking every throw with small aiming errors averaged only around 4 points. Use the bank for your first stone if your direct draw is shaky, and switch to direct draws once anything is in the house. Above about half power the rebound itself is too strong, and the stone ends up far from the rings.

How the house is scored, and why 24 is out of reach

The readout updates after each stone comes to rest, so you can see what your layout is worth as you build it; the final score is taken when the sixth stone stops. At the end each stone earns points for the innermost ring its centre sits in, with a little tolerance: a stone counts for a ring as long as its centre is within half a stone radius of that ring's edge. Bullseye stones score 4, then 3, 2 and 1 moving outward.

That tolerance makes the bullseye zone wider than it looks, but stones cannot overlap. Fitting stone centres inside the bullseye zone, at most four can sit there at once; a fifth always pushes one out. A run of six bullseyes is therefore geometrically impossible. We ran a search over stone arrangements and found nothing better than 21 points, for example four on the bullseye with one inner and one middle stone, or three bullseyes and three inner stones. Treat 21 as the true ceiling and anything in the high teens as an excellent round.

A layout for all six stones

Throwing every stone down the same line is the classic error. In our simulation, six perfect identical draws scored only 9, because each new stone hits the last and knocks it through the house. Spreading the stones sideways works far better. The plan below scored 17 with perfect execution, about 14 with errors of one drag unit and one degree, and about 12 with errors twice that large.

  1. Stone one: straight up at about 27 percent power, a draw to the centre.
  2. Stones two and three: about 4 degrees left and right, at very slightly less power.
  3. Stones four and five: about 2 degrees left and right, a touch lighter again, around 25 to 26 percent.
  4. Stone six: straight up and lightest of all, around 25 percent, to settle in front of the cluster.

The principle is to fill the house from the centre outward and from the back forward. A light stone that stops in front of the pack still scores and is far less likely to scatter what is already there.

Practising calibration

Because there is no timer, use the first throws of every round as a calibration check. Drag slowly, watch the arc, and release at the same fill each time. If your first stone stops long, lighten every remaining throw a little; if it stops short, add a little. On a different phone or after rotating the screen, re-check: the drag scale is tied to the size of the sheet on screen.

Your best total is saved on your device, and any score above zero can be sent to the Hall of Fame from the end-of-round card.

▶ Play Curling Six stones, one house, and a carefully judged slide.