Grand Slam of Curling

A boycott that turned into a business

The Grand Slam exists because the best men's teams in Canada walked out. Eighteen of the country's top twenty rinks, remembered as the Original 18, agreed to boycott the Brier from 2001 to 2003 in protest at the Canadian Curling Association's control of the sport, the absence of prize money at national championships and the restrictions placed on players' own sponsors. What they built instead was a series of four majors — the Canadian Open, the Masters, the National and the Players' Championship — run inside the World Curling Tour, which Ed Lukowich had founded in 1992 with later help from John Kawaja. The men's Slam series dates from the 2001–02 season; a women's series followed in 2006–07.

The commercial logic was simple and has not changed: a minimum purse of CAD $100,000 per event, an open field drawn from world rankings rather than provincial playdowns, and eight-end games built for television rather than the ten ends of championship curling. Rogers Media bought the series in 2012 and made Sportsnet its home. In April 2024 it changed hands again, to The Curling Group, a consortium fronted by two of the sport's own — Jennifer Jones and John Morris — alongside the former NFL players Jared Allen and Marc Bulger, with Nic Sulsky as chief executive.

Five events, twelve feeder bonspiels, one ladder

The 2026–27 season is the clearest statement yet of what the new owners want. The old second tier is gone. Five events remain, all in Canada, all six days long, running from the Tuesday after Canadian Thanksgiving to the weekend before Christmas: the GSOC Invitational at the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre in Victoria, 13–18 October; the Masters at Co-op Place in Medicine Hat, 3–8 November; the National at Centre 200 in Sydney, Nova Scotia, 17–22 November; the Open at Fort William Gardens in Thunder Bay, 1–6 December; and the Players' Cup at Slush Puppie Place in Kingston, 15–20 December.

The first four each field sixteen teams per division. At the Masters, twelve come from the World Curling Team Rankings, two are sponsor invitations and two are won on the ice at Satellite Events — established tour bonspiels that now sell berths in the only currency that matters. Those twelve feeders stretch from the Euro Super Series in Stirling, Scotland on 20–23 August to the Swiss Chalet Women's Spiel in North Bay on 6–8 November, taking in Karuizawa in Japan, the St. Paul Cashspiel in Minnesota, the Shorty Jenkins Classic in Cornwall, the Autumn Gold Classic in Okotoks and the Stu Sells events in Oakville and Halifax. Win one and the invitation is yours; if the winner is already in, it passes down to the runner-up or the highest-ranked semi-finalist, with a ranking floor of world No. 32.

The Players' Cup is no longer an invitational at all. It takes the top twelve men's and twelve women's teams on cumulative points, counting only each team's best six results from any mix of Slams and Satellites, with the cut-off falling on 7 December. Round-robin wins are worth three points in regulation and two if they come via a shootout; a Slam title adds forty bonus points, a quarter-final exit ten, a Satellite win twenty.

The rules that changed the scoreboard

Two changes carried over from last season have altered how the games actually look. A team may blank only one end per game; a second blank costs it the hammer. And a round-robin game still level after eight ends is decided by a draw-to-the-button shootout rather than an extra end, with extra ends retained for tiebreakers and playoffs.

The series has published the arithmetic. At the Co-op Tour Challenge, blank ends fell to 0.49 per game in the men's division, down 47 per cent from 0.93 the previous season, and to 0.41 in the women's, down 45 per cent from 0.75. First-end blanks dropped 64 per cent on the women's side and 45 per cent on the men's compared with the AMJ Masters. Scoring crept up — men from 9.89 to 10.22 points per game, women from 10.56 to 11.07 — and single-point ends with hammer rose sharply, from 2.52 to 3.12 per game for the men and 2.57 to 2.93 for the women. Kerri Einarson's caveat was that the women's game produced fewer blanks to begin with.

Victoria, and a finish nobody wanted to defend

The season opened at the Co-op Invitational in Victoria, sixteen teams per division in four pools, with twelve open invitations issued because this was the first Slam of a new Olympic cycle. Yannick Schwaller's Geneva rink — Benoît Schwarz-van Berkel throwing fourth, Sven Michel at second, Pablo Lachat-Couchepin at lead, Glenn Howard coaching — beat Magnus Ramsfjell of Norway 7-3 for the men's title, the world No. 1 team's first Slam of the quadrennial. Schwarz-van Berkel's verdict on a week in which his skip was stung on the foot by a wasp: "Every week something happens. Maybe it's a good distraction to release the pressure."

Einarson won the women's final 6-3 against Bo-bae Kang of South Korea, a seventh Slam title and a first since 2024, with Shannon Birchard back at third after missing most of 2024–25 with a knee injury and Jocelyn Peterman new at lead. Einarson credited the sweepers: "The girls swept their butts off all week. The ice was so fast, and it was hard to even throw it that slow and believe it."

The week's talking point was uglier. In the last round-robin draw on the Friday night, the rinks of Matt Dunstone and Brendan Bottcher threw stones through the house in the eighth end, engineering a tie that sent the game to a shootout and qualified both while eliminating Danny Casper's team, which finished on six points. The crowd booed and chanted "Shame! Shame!" and "Borrrrr-ing!" Casper's Ben Richardson said it "definitely leaves a bitter taste in my mouth"; third Luc Violette said he did not understand why neither team tried to win the end. Dunstone said "there was no conversation whatsoever"; Bottcher said his team knew it needed a point to qualify. Sulsky called the finish "a little too obvious" and said committees would look at the incentive built into the 3-2-1-0 points system, now in its second season.

The slot hockey left behind

On 13 August 2026 the Grand Slam and its sister property, the co-ed Rock League, signed five-year agreements with Sportsnet and CBC that put more than 300 hours of curling on Canadian linear television in 2026–27, roughly double the previous volume. Sportsnet carries three draws a day from Tuesday to Friday at every event and the Sunday finals; CBC and CBC Gem take the Saturday playoffs, with those games also on Sportsnet+. Morning draws stream on the Rock Channel, at $19.99 a month or $89.99 for the season. ESPN+ holds the United States, DAZN the rest of the world.

The timing was not accidental. The deal was struck two months after CBC and Sportsnet ended their NHL arrangement at the close of the 2025–26 season, finishing nearly 75 years of Hockey Night in Canada on the public broadcaster. CBC Sports executive director Chris Wilson said the aim was to reach a wider audience of fans; Sulsky called it "a defining moment for the sport". Rock League, the franchised mixed competition that debuted in April 2026, expands to a season running select weeks in January and April 2027.