Switzerland's Nadine Lehmann and Martin Rios (pictured top) enter the competition as the reigning mixed doubles world champions after they won the title in Erzurum last year.

The 2012 bronze medallists Christian Roth and Claudia Toth return to represent Austria, while Russia's Yana Nekrasova, who won gold in Chelyabinsk in 2010, and France's 2011 bronze medallist at St Paul, Pauline Jeanneret, will both play in Canada with new teammates.

Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Scotland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United States complete the line up of nations competing at the tournament, which runs until next Saturday (April 20).

This year's competition, taking place in the newly built Grant-Harvey Centre at the same time as the World Senior Curling Championships, marks the first time that Canada will have hosted the World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship, which began in 2008 in Vierumäki, Finland.

Instead of playing in teams of four, mixed doubles curling is for teams of two players made up of one male and one female, with no alternate or spare player allowed, and squads have only six stones each – instead of eight – with one of those stones, from each team, being 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 and sweeping can be done by both team members.

Each team receives 46 minutes of playing time and games are fixed at eight ends, as opposed to 73 minutes and 10 ends for traditional curling.

For this championship, the 27 teams have been divided into three groups – blue, red and yellow, and each group will play a round robin from tomorrow until Thursday (April 18).

The quarterfinals will take place on Friday (April 19), with the semi-finals and medal games scheduled for next Saturday (April 20).

Live coverage of the event will be broadcast on the World Curling Federation's (WCF) YouTube Channel.

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