2011 Canadian Mixed champions Robert Campbell and Rebecca Jean MacDonald, from the Charlottetown Curling Club, won their opening game Sunday afternoon at the World Mixed Doubles curling championship in Saint Paul Minnesota, beating Denmark 8-6, aided by a four point sixth end. Team Canada plays England on Monday morning at 9 Atlantic, and faces Switzerland at 10:30 pm ADT.

Photo: Rebecca Jean MacDonald, Robert Campbell

Mixed doubles curling has teams of two players – one male and one female (no alternate/spare player is allowed).
– Teams have only six stones each (instead of eight) – and one of those stones, from each team, is prepositioned on the centreline before each end of play starts.
– Player one delivers the first and last stones and player two plays the second, third and fourth stones. If they choose to, the two players may swap positions from one end to the next.
– Sweeping can be done by both team members.
– Each team receives 46 minutes of playing time and games are fixed at 8 ends – compared to 73 minutes and 10 ends for “traditional” curling.

Altogether 24 nations are participating in the Mixed Doubles event in St Paul: Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Scotland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and hosts USA.

Among the competitors this year are Bridget and Sean Becker of New Zealand, the sister and brother team who took silver in Chelyabinsk last year. György Nagy and Ildiko Szekeres have returned to represent Hungary after taking silver in 2009. And the Spanish duo, Sergio Vez and Irantzu Garcia, will be hoping to improve on their fourth place finish in Russia last year after they lost the bronze medal game to China.

The 24 Mixed Doubles teams  have been divided into three groups. Each group will play a round robin before quarterfinals on Friday April 22, and  the semi-finals and medal games on Saturday the 23rd.

Results: www.2011worldcurling.com/draw–scores