Category: Sports

Unraveling the Mysteries and Controversies of Curling Technology | June 15 2026, 12:52

It’s amazing that the core of curling is based on a physical anomaly that scientists have been unable to explain for 100 years. According to physics, if you spin, say, a regular glass and push it forward, friction should make it roll in the opposite direction of the spin. But the 20 kg granite curling stone defies these rules throughout its entire existence — it curves in the same direction it rotates. Either the stone leaves microscopic scratches on the ice, upon which its rear part then “jumps,” or the ice clings to it like teeth on a comb – there are many hypotheses, but clarity is nil.

There’s an interesting story in curling called “Broomgate.” In 2015, brooms with such aggressive directional fabric were released that sweepers could literally “steer” the stone like a joystick. Chaos ensued, and players from top teams (!) agreed not to use this then-legal hack out of gentlemanly honor. The federation tested 50 brooms and officially banned these “technological doping” tools. In 2024–25, “Broomgate 2.0” erupted. The controversy was not over the bristles, but the stiffness of the foam under the pad. Right during the Grand Slam of Curling (2025), top teams rebelled and signed a collective agreement to abandon these innovations mid-season. From June 2025, stiffer foams were banned — models like the BalancePlus Firm 2.0 were specifically targeted.

The photo shows curling in 1959 at Loch Leven, Kinross, Scotland.

AI Revolutionizing Decision-Making in Sports and Business | June 14 2026, 02:06

Today, I pondered how AI is changing age-old, even centuries-old concepts about how people should make decisions in various situations, especially in sports and probably in business. It’s far more interesting than just automation. It’s more about fixing bugs in how people have long considered something to be correct and true.

For example, in the game of “Go,” it was believed for decades that invading the corner (3-3 point) was crude and premature. AI then proved otherwise: early capture of the corner is efficient, and chasing after “beautiful” shapes loses to pragmatic control over the center. Or consider the famous 37th move by AlphaGo in the match against Lee Sedol, which was very strange: people did not play that move because they thought it was “playing into empty space.” It was first taken for an AI mistake, but then recognized as brilliant (there are plenty of analyses on YT). In esports, OpenAI Five demonstrated that aggressive early buyback of fallen heroes in “Dota,” which people considered a waste of gold, works.

Pure mathematics almost erased the mid-range shot from the NBA: it has an accuracy of about 40-42% and yields ~0.8 points per attempt, while a three-point shot with even 35% accuracy brings 1.05 points per attempt, and clubs have restructured for pure profit. Well, this is not AI, but mathematics and statistics. The under-basket shot (lay-up/dunk) turned out to be statistically the most effective.

In soccer, there’s the xG – expected goals metric; AI debunked shots from 35 meters and from outside the penalty area as ineffective (chance of scoring ~5% and 20% respectively) and ultimately teams patiently bring the ball into the penalty area, where the xG of the shot increases to 15-40%. It turns out, DeepMind had a project with Liverpool, a system advising coaches on corners – TacticAI. Expert assessors in 90% of cases preferred TacticAI’s recommendations over the tactical setups used in practice.

So, interestingly, if this continues, will a team or athlete using more powerful AI have an advantage due to more successful methods than a team that does not have such knowledge? Will AI game methods be so complex that they can’t be “stolen” to another team through outside observation – just like in the case with Go?

Exploring the Dynamics of Russia’s Kyykka Sport Federation | June 06 2026, 13:49

DID YOU KNOW that in Russia there’s a Russian Skittles Sport Federation with a president, a first vice-president, and a regular vice-president. All in blazers. There’s a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There’s an entire apparatus for the president of skittles sport with three advisors and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. They have a skittles march, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky. There are 18 regional departments and 28 regional federations with their own hierarchy.

The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Interesting, doping in skittles sport… There’s a subsection called “methodological recommendations”. Also, their charter talks about online skittles competitions. Imagine that, online!

In 2024 there was a World Championship in Skittles Sport. Apparently, they are supposed to hold it every three years. And it had a Grand Closing. Apart from Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, in addition to Sergey, Vitaliy, and Konstantin, there was Eugen Schlein, or simply, Zhenya. From the development program for 2026-2029, it turns out that players from Congo, Ghana, Guinea, and Ecuador are actively training now. In the selection criteria for the national team, there is a requirement for “game thinking”. To be admitted, you need to come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of passing the anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.

At the world championship, the disciplines are “classical skittles” and “European skittles” (and separately Finnish ones). The goal in both is to knock the skittles out of the town. European ones appeared in Germany because the emigrants from the USSR were told that it’s not customary here to throw three-kilogram stones and were given lighter ones.

In short, it’s all serious.

Mastering Cross-Posting: From Facebook Frustrations to Dual Blogging Excellence | May 23 2026, 14:28

I have perfected the cross-posting from Facebook to my two blog sites [which almost no one visits] – beinginamerica.com and raufaliev.com. When a new post is published on Facebook, a mechanism is triggered to translate the post into English, process attached images, generate descriptions for them, create a title based on the text of the post and descriptions of the images, generate tags from the same basis, record the post in turso db – this is a cloud database, free up to certain limits, create embeddings via openai, record in qdrant cloud – this is also a cloud database, but vector-based, and finally, upload images to wordpress via API, and publish the post in English and Russian via API.

All would be well, but of all the APIs, the silliest one is Facebook’s. Firstly, for pages like mine, transitioned to New Experience, it’s almost impossible to use most of this API. Well, it’s possible, but you have to spend a long time proving to Facebook that you really need it, by showing startup documents, demonstrating the application, etc. Obviously, they are reluctant to deal with something that takes content out of their system. In addition, the token that gives access to the latest messages is relatively short-lived (possibly a few weeks), and it needs to be obtained anew through a browser only. So, any automation requires regular attention, otherwise it breaks.

If you mess up and don’t offload the latest posts through this Facebook Graph API in time, they just disappear from the list of recent ones and that’s it, no more API access to them. The only way is to request an archive download from Facebook. This download is also rather silly – it requires a lot of transformations and removing unnecessary stuff. For example, in the file containing posts, which I process, for some reason there are links that I sent in comments without accompanying text. And the comments are in a separate file!

To assign tags, I had to solve a separate challenge. Here’s the thing: there are about 10,000 posts over all time. That’s a big chunk, and you can’t build tags from it because it doesn’t fit into the contextual window of the LLM. But you need to. So, I did this: a script takes random posts from the 10,000 in such a volume that their total size is just below the specified limit in tokens, and at the end of this block, it adds the prompt “generate the most common tags for me, 30 pieces” (I simplify the prompt used). In the end, I ran this 10 times and got 10 sets of tags with 30 pieces each, generated for different slices of the database. That made 300 tags, some of which are complete duplicates, while others are synonyms and closely related in meaning. All this is fed into the LLM, and we get a list of tags and a hierarchy of tags. Now we have a limited set of tags that reflect the 10,000 posts as closely as possible. Turns out, that in almost 20 years on Facebook, my breakdown is as follows:

Tag Posts

==================================================

#Russia 3412

#Thoughts 3146

#Tech 3105

#Culture 2765

#Hobbies 2726

#AI 1603

#Science 1367

#Software 1358

#Travel 1298

#Learning 1138

#Society 1050

#Nature 958

#Education 915

#Business 902

#Art 894

#Programming 889

#Humor 840

#History 807

#Gadgets 750

#Moscow 713

#USA 614

#Cinema 567

#Webdev 493

#Music 476

#Sports 473

#Mindset 443

#Auto 400

#Books 386

…

and so on. This list includes both tags from the limited list and tags that the LLM appointed to content simply because it didn’t find anything suitable in the limited one.

Tags from the limited list became categories on the site. The rest of the tags + these just became regular wordpress tags.

As for image search. I had two ideas on how to do it. The first – OpenCLIP. It’s pretty straightforward but requires hosting the model somewhere. Easy on my machine, but inconvenient to start it each time, plus I planned to move the migrator to a cheap server on Amazon. It’s also okay to calculate in cloud models, but you have to pay a bit, which is yet another dependency. But the main thing – it works quite well without it. I generate descriptions for images using OpenAI, which is used for translating into English anyway, and then create embeddings using a large model. So far, all search tests are a great success. Especially when there’s text on the image, and it’s a big question whether OpenCLIP would have interpreted it successfully.

In the end:

1) wordpress raufaliev.com – free

2) wordpress beinginamerica.com – free

3) turso db where all posts are stored – free

4) qdrant cloud where embeddings are stored – free

5) openai for translation and image descriptions – not free, but inexpensive (cost $30 for post processing over a year).

I attach two screenshots – how the search by images works, and by texts, as well as the migrator dashboard.

Colorful Climbing: A Fun Indoor Adventure with Masha | April 27 2026, 15:03

Went to the mountains with Masha. Yellow paths over yellow, red over red. The organizers should put a box of candies at the top. Found out that the muscles in my fingers are non-existent, and the rest hurt the next day. Cool experience (not the first time)

Rediscovering Gorodki: A Glimpse into a Traditional Russian Sport | December 20 2025, 05:29

Suddenly today, the word “gorodki” popped into my head. When I was a little boy, in Baku, Azerbaijan, we used to play two games in the courtyard – gorodki and knives.

I Google it. The internet tells me that in Russia there is a Russian Federation of Gorodki Sport. It has a president, a first vice-president, and a vice-president. All in blazers. There is a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There is a whole apparatus for the president of gorodki sport with three advisers and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. There is a march of gorodki players, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky.

The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Can you imagine doping in gorodki sport? It has a subsection “methodological recommendations”.

In 2024, there was a World Championship of Gorodki Sport. And it had a Grand Closing. Besides Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, besides Sergey, Vitaly, and Konstantin, there was Schlein Eugen, or rather, Zhenya.

Masters of sport. To be admitted to international competitions, one must come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of having undergone anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.

In general, it’s all very serious.

But I did not find a federation for the game of knives.