Sweden took silver behind Canada at last year's World Championships and took gold in 2013 and 2015.

Two other sides from last month's Winter Olympics are included - Italy, skipped by Joel Retornaz, and South Korea, skipped by Chang-min Kim.

Canadian skip Brad Gushue, an Olympic winner in 2006, returns with his team to defend the title they won in Edmonton in Canada last year.

Hosts United States, the Olympic champions, will be represented at these Championships by a team skipped by Greg Persinger and not the rink led by John Shuster which won the gold medal at Pyeongchang 2018.

The field also includes China, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Scotland and Switzerland.

The 8,000-seater Orleans Arena, close to the famous Las Vegas strip, will be the venue for the event.

This will be the first World Championship to be staged there, although the Arena has previously hosted curling's Continental Cup for three seasons.

The World Curling Championship started in 1959 as the Scotch Cup. 

This will be the ninth time the US has hosted the event, the most recent time being in 2008 in Grand Forks in North Dakota.

All the teams except for the hosts had to pre-qualify.

The eight European nations qualified from the European Curling Championships 2017 held in St Gallen in Switzerland in November.

The three Asian teams came through from the Pacific-Asia Curling Championships 2017, held in Erina in Australia, and also in November.

Canada came out ahead of Brazil in the Americas Challenge to take their place in the line-up.

In this year's competition, a new play-off format will be used.

The top six teams will qualify for the play-off stage - rather than four which was the case previously - after the round-robin phase is completed.

The teams ranked first and second qualify directly for the semi-final games, while the third-ranked team will play the sixth-ranked team and the fourth-ranked team will play the fifth-ranked team for the other last four berths.

In the semi-finals, the first-ranked team will play the lowest-ranked qualifier and the second-ranked team will play the other.

Semi-final winners will then play for the world title and gold and silver medals, with the losers playing for bronze.

Following the Opening Ceremony tomorrow, the teams will start 20 sessions of round-robin play until the evening of April 6.

The qualification games and semi-finals will take place on April 7 and the medal games will be on April 8.