Jones stands alone at Hearts

Team Canada's Jennifer Jones stands alone atop the leaderboard at the Tournament of Hearts in Victoria.

Jones skipped her Winnipeg rink to single points in the first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth and 10th ends, enough to sneak by Ontario's Krista McCarville 6-5 on Monday night.

Trailing 5-4, Jones executed a perfect tap to tie it in the ninth and won it on a draw behind cover in the 10th.

With the win, Jones improved to 5-0 through eight draws at the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre.

McCarville dipped to 2-3.

"It was a good day for us," said Jones, a two-time national champion and the reigning world champion.  "You know you're going to have to have a couple of those as the week goes on and we were on the right side of the inch on that one."

Jones prevailed 5-3 over New Brunswick's Andrea Kelly (2-3) in the previous draw, pulling out the win with a hit and stick for two points on her final stone.

"It was a pretty wide open game," said Cathy Overton-Clapham, who throws third rock for Canada. "We had lots of opportunities."

"We definitely went into that game knowing we could win," said Kelly, the youngest skip in the tournament at age 23. "We played our strategy, and this is how it turned out in the end."

British Columbia's Marla Mallett fell from the ranks of the unbeaten, losing 4-3 to Alberta's Cheryl Bernard in a strategic battle featuring a bevvy of blank ends.

"There was no need to get into anything with them," Mallett said. "We had our opportunities."

"They cheered when we threw a guard," Bernard said. "They want to see a curling game.

"That's the whole point of the free-guard zone, so I don't blame them. But everybody has to play their game."

Tied 3-3 in the 10th with Bernard lying a heavily-guarded shot in the four-foot, Mallett's final shot stopped well short of the house.

Bernard and Mallett share second spot in the standings at 4-1.

"In all honesty, I don't look at the standings," Mallett said. "The records don't mean anything."

'I was maybe disturbed a little bit'

Mallett, a former world junior champion (1988) making her first appearance at the Hearts, held on for a 7-6 win over Quebec's Marie-France Larouche in Draw 6 on Monday morning.  

Mallett, who plays out of Vancouver, curled at a 100 per cent clip through the first five ends and finished at an impressive 90 per cent efficiency.

"What I'm focusing on is five other jackets that are coming out there against [us]," she said.

Bernard began the day with an 8-7, 11-end victory over Larouche (3-2) in afternoon action.

Larouche struck for three points and a 5-3 lead in the sixth, when Bernard banged a guard with her final rock.

Bernard tied it 5-5 in the seventh, and held Larouche to a single point in the eighth before regaining the lead with two in the ninth.

Larouche drew to the lip of the button in the 10th to force an extra end, but Bernard won it with a draw to the four-foot on last rock.

"I didn't understand what the ice was doing," Larouche said. "Just to put the broom in the right place … that is why I was like, 'Oh, no.' Because of that, I was maybe disturbed a little bit."

'It was quite the game, that's for sure'

Barb Spencer of Manitoba (2-3) chalked up her first two wins, 8-7 over Kerry Galusha of the Territories (1-4) and 8-3 over Heather Strong of Newfoundland and Labrador (1-4). 

Rebecca Jean MacPhee of Prince Edward Island won twice, including 8-6 over Nova Scotia's Nancy McConnery (1-4).

Earlier, MacPhee (3-2) and Stefanie Lawton of Saskatchewan (2-3) tied a tournament record by combining for 23 points in a match won 12-11 by the latter.

"You have to try and keep scoring points," MacPhee said. "We never really had a great lead, so we had to just keep plugging away."

"It was quite the game, that's for sure," Lawton said. "We're scoring points.

"That's a good thing. Now we just have to try to keep down the rest of their points."

The other 23-point game in Hearts history went to Quebec's Francine Poisson, 14-9 over Manitoba's Marlene Cleutinx at the 1988 nationals in Fredericton, N.B.