A busy weekend is ahead! First games in the Mercure Perth Masters are tomorrow (Thursday) at the Dewar's Rinks in Perth. The Curling Champions Tour event has a first class lineup as usual, with sixteen foreign rinks and sixteen domestic sides in the thirty-two team triple knockout. Eight teams progress to Sunday's playoffs.The event website for draw and results is here. £6,000 is on offer for the winning team, with a total £17,000 in the prize pot. Mike McEwen's Canadians won last time, see here, and they are back in Scotland for the 2012 event.
Elsewhere around the country, thirty-three men's teams have entered for this season's Scottish Senior Men's Championship. In this weekend's qualifiers, sixteen teams will play at Forfar Indoor Sports in three sections and seventeen at the Greenacres rink, again in three sections. The top two teams in each section qualify for the Scottish Senior Finals which are at Lanarkshire Ice Rink, February 8-12. The holders, skipped by Ken Horton, are in the draw at Forfar. Follow the results here and here.
The Junior Club Challenge is at Murrayfield on Saturday and Sunday. Each junior club side is represented by two teams. Some strong junior clubs field more that one squad of two teams. Division 1 and Division 2 both play off this weekend. The six clubs in Division 1 are Forfar, Gogar Park 1, Hamilton 1, Dumfries, Stirling and Galleon. Forfar topped the league last year, see here, when the event was held at Ayr. The bottom two clubs after the weekend's play will be relegated to Division 2.
Division 2 includes Gogar Park 2, Greenacres, Stranraer, Perth, Hamilton 2 and Braehead. They are fighting for promotion (the top two) and to avoid relegation ( the bottom two).
The results will be on the Royal Club website here.
Division 3 playoffs are scheduled for February 25-26 at the Dumfries Ice Bowl.
