Grand Slam of Curling 2026-27 Preview: Five Canadian Stops

By Cole Gallagher / August 23, 2026

The Grand Slam of Curling returns for a five-stop 2026 season, and for the first time in a while the whole tour sits inside Canada – Victoria, Medicine Hat, Sydney, Thunder Bay and Kingston, running from mid-October to just before Christmas. There is a new qualification structure underneath it, a reformatted finale, and two major broadcast agreements that put the sport in front of more people than it has been in years. Here is the full picture for Canadian bettors. Operator comparisons are in our top betting sites guide.

GSOC Outright Odds

Team	To Win
Team Homan (Women’s)	Check Odds →
Team Mouat (Men’s)	Check Odds →
GSOC Invitational Women’s (full market)	Check Odds →
GSOC Invitational Men’s (full market)	Check Odds →
Players’ Cup Women’s (full market)	Check Odds →
Players’ Cup Men’s (full market)	Check Odds →

Curling markets in Canada are seasonal. Expect books to price each Slam in the week or two before it starts rather than months ahead, and expect the deepest markets around the Invitational and the Players’ Cup.

The Five Stops

GSOC Invitational – Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre, Victoria, BC, October 13–18. The season opener, and the first competitive look at how the rinks have come together over the off-season.

GSOC Masters – Co-op Place, Medicine Hat, AB, November 3–8. The Alberta stop, running concurrently with a U21 Jr. GSOC.

GSOC National – Centre 200, Sydney, NS, November 17–22. The Maritime stop, and the tour’s only trip east of Ontario.

GSOC Open – Fort William Gardens, Thunder Bay, ON, December 1–6. Northwestern Ontario, in a building with a long curling history.

GSOC Players’ Cup – Slush Puppie Place, Kingston, ON, December 15–20. The season finale, with a GSOC Wheelchair Invitational running concurrently.

Five events in ten weeks, all in Canada, all in Canadian time zones. From a purely practical betting standpoint that is a significant improvement over a tour with European legs, because every draw is watchable live and in-play markets are usable rather than theoretical.

The New Satellite Event Structure

This is the most substantive change to the tour this season and it is worth understanding properly.

GSOC Satellite Event partnerships replace the former Tier 2 events. Each Satellite champion earns an automatic berth into one of the first four GSOC events. In other words, the route into a Slam is no longer confined to ranking and invitation – there is now a competitive qualifying pathway that runs alongside the main tour.

For bettors, the consequence is a specific kind of uncertainty. Slam fields will now include at least some teams who arrived by winning a Satellite rather than by ranking, and those teams are by definition in form. A rink that has just won a competitive event to earn its spot is not the same proposition as a rink filling out a field on reputation. It also means Slam fields will not be fully known as early as they used to be, because Satellite results feed into them.

The practical advice: check who actually qualified before betting any Slam outright, particularly for the first four events. A qualifier in good form is exactly the sort of team a market prices lazily.

The Players’ Cup Finale

Kingston in December is not just the last stop, it is a different kind of event. The Players’ Cup features the top 12 men’s teams and the top 12 women’s teams, ranked solely on GSOC and Satellite Event points.

That word “solely” is doing a lot of work. Qualification is not based on a broader world ranking or a season-long tour standing that includes other events – it is based on how teams performed at the Grand Slams and Satellites specifically. A team can have an excellent season elsewhere and still miss Kingston.

Two things follow from that. First, the Players’ Cup field is by construction the twelve teams who have performed best in this exact competitive environment over the preceding two months, which makes it the strongest and most tightly matched field of the season. Second, the four events before it double as a qualifying race, and by the time the Open finishes in Thunder Bay there will be teams playing for their Kingston place. Those are motivated teams in an environment where motivation is not evenly distributed. Worth remembering in early December.

Curling Betting Markets Explained

If you are new to betting the sport, four market types cover almost everything you will see.

Event outright. Backing a team to win the whole tournament. Straightforward, and the market most likely to be available in advance. Note that Slam fields are typically small and the format usually involves group play into a knockout, which means outright prices are shorter across the board than in a large-field sport.

Match winner. The head-to-head on a single game. This is where most in-play volume sits and it is the most liquid curling market during a draw. There is generally no draw option to worry about, since tied games go to an extra end.

Hammer and the first-end advantage. This is the concept newcomers most need to grasp. The hammer is last-stone advantage in an end, and it is a substantial edge – the team with hammer is trying to score two or more, while the team without is trying to hold them to one or steal. Hammer alternates based on scoring: score in an end and you give up the hammer for the next one, which is why a team will sometimes deliberately blank an end to keep it. Which team has the hammer in the first end is settled by a pre-game procedure that varies between competitions, commonly a draw-to-the-button style measurement. It is worth checking who has first-end hammer before betting a match, because it genuinely shifts the win probability.

Totals. Books offer totals markets on curling, most commonly on points scored in a game. Be careful here, because curling games can and frequently do end early by concession when one team is out of realistic reach, and different operators handle early concessions differently in settlement. Read the rules before you bet a total. The number of ends played is not fixed in the way that periods in hockey are.

Equal Purses and Who Runs the Tour

The Grand Slam of Curling is owned and operated by The Curling Group, and has awarded equal purses to men’s and women’s teams since 2015. That is not a marketing line with no consequence – equal prize money is a large part of why the women’s Slam fields are as strong as the men’s, and why women’s curling markets in Canada are as well-supported as they are. If you are used to sports where the women’s markets are thin and badly priced, curling is a genuine exception.

Broadcast: ESPN, Sportsnet and CBC

GSOC has announced multi-year broadcast agreements with ESPN and with Sportsnet and CBC. For Canadian viewers that means the Slams remain widely and freely accessible domestically, and the ESPN deal gives the tour meaningful American distribution.

Broadcast coverage matters more to bettors than people assume. Televised events get priced by more books, get in-play markets, and get more attention from traders – which cuts both ways, but on balance it means better availability and tighter margins than the untelevised tour events that curling bettors have historically had to work with.

Our Prediction

Cole’s Pick: Homan and Mouat to be the two shortest prices across most of the tour, with the Players’ Cup the hardest event of the season to call

Homan and Mouat are the top-ranked teams on the women’s and men’s sides respectively and headline the Invitational field, so expect them to be favourites wherever they appear. The more useful part of the call is the second half. Kingston takes the top 12 teams by GSOC and Satellite points only, which means the finale field is self-selected for current form in this exact environment. Twelve in-form teams in a compressed format is the definition of a hard outright to price, and it is the one event this season where a longer price is likely to be a fair one rather than a filler.

Confidence: high that Homan and Mouat lead the market, low on any specific event winner. Fields for four of the five stops are not confirmed and no games have been played this season.

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