So, what to make of our new card holders?

Few ways we can look at how things will shake up, so let's go through some of them. In retrospect, I probably should also have picked up on the players who just missed out, given they're already up to the fourth (!) player on the alternates list, but it is what it is. First off, percentage of legs won:

Now some of this may be a bit misleading, as players that didn't enter at the first stage didn't get to stat pad against any of the fun players, so let's look at things another way:

Here we're doing a similar thing, but we're breaking it down by the speed in which legs were won, and sorting by the number of all legs that were won within fifteen darts. As such, you don't have a great deal to worry about with Barney, he's looking pretty good, but the few below also seem pretty competent, especially when you consider that most of them came through straight from the final stage, so you don't get the sorts of cheap wins that you might otherwise get. The worrying thing is that for Worsley, whose overall winning percentage was the lowest, he can't really say he's got too many of them overly quickly. Suppose the other thing to note is that Schindler's got an awful lot of legs won in twelve darts or better.

As our prediction tools only work off won legs, and then tweak based on losing average in comparison to that, let's see if the order changes wildly if we remove lost legs, and still sort by fifteen dart win percentage:

There's a few changes here. All of a sudden Murnan looks like the man to beat, with Barney, Mitchell and Schindler weighing in at over 50%, and quite a few floating around at roughly that mark.

How does that compare to the tour as a whole though? Looking back at the last twelve months, it's not overly favourable - the first player in terms of overall scoring that is below 60% in terms of proportion of legs won being in fifteen darts or less is Gurney, and he's fifteenth. To find a player that is below 55%, you need to go down to Steve Lennon or Andy Boulton, and you need to go down as far as Ryan Murray before you get someone who is below 50%.

That a large number of players are below 40% is a bit of a concern, especially with those who have got a very high percentage of legs that are won in seven visits or more. There is a huge caveat though, there's going to have been plenty of games in the first stage where someone's been playing a jobber, hasn't needed to rush a leg, and a 21 dart kill is going to be more than enough. Fortunately, I built the stage into the data model, so let's take out the entirety of the first stage and also eliminate the round of 128 entirely, so we're just looking at players who've at least managed to win one game to filter some of this out:

Now de Vos is looking a heck of a lot better, although the players at the top are mostly the same. I'd normally look in terms of who has come through on points as who might have the better shots, but it's a huge mixed bag - the likes of Murnan, Schindler, Lukeman and Williams, sure, they're looking decent, but Worsley, Lerchbacher, Zonneveld and even Soutar have got to be a bit questionable.

One thing to note about Baggish - he's a bit low here, but he's not been gifted many legs at all. He's got quite a high proportion of kills in six visits, but after that, he's either taken things out, or got it done beforehand. Koltsov, by comparison, may have looked pretty good on paper, but has been given a heck of a lot of free legs.

Might be worth taking a cheeky punt on Murnan in this series. Nothing crazy, but there's certainly bookmakers out there who'll give you quarter the odds to make a semi. He has won one of these before, and clearly looks to be playing at a decent enough standard.

We have our 128

I think that went just about as well as could be expected in terms of players I wanted to see get cards. Let's start in Europe first - Koltsov binked the day outright, we knew Schindler, Barney and Lerchbacher were all extremely close already and all converted, Zonneveld got back on with a good run today, Michael held on despite an early defeat, while Unterbuchner, Gawlas and Marijanovic did enough to get home, with the two Rodriguez brothers sandwiching Luc Peters in just missing out, both RJR's being live right until the end but just losing the games that'd get them over the line. Very pleased with those names, especially Gawlas, very excited to see how he'll do with a full two years on the senior tour to develop, not necessarily expecting anything straight away, but it could be a case where he comes back much, much stronger on a second run. It was a pity that Doets, Veenstra and Vandenbogaerde all had fairly early exits, would have been happy with any of them getting in over, say, Michael or Marijanovic, but we can't have everything.

As for the UK, Baggish got to the final and did just enough to nick the last card by a leg or two, as Mitchell won outright, and Gilding, Lovely, Soutar (despite a first round 6-0 defeat), Murnan, Mathers, Hudson, Worsley, Claydon and John Brown closed out the points list. Feel for Chas Barstow who lost a 5-3 lead to Adrian Gray when a win would have got him a card, as well as Jim Williams who finally got on a bit of a run but fell to Carl Wilkinson and couldn't get enough points. At least the players that missed out will be getting a UK Open spot, that tournament being just a couple of weeks away, but first we've got the first set of Players Championship events in just eight days from now.

The good thing about the format this year is that pretty much all the new card holders will have thrown a TON of darts in Q-School, so we can try to gauge where their game is at pretty quickly, and not have a huge time lag between those players having thrown those darts and kicking off competitive matches. I'll put together something by the weekend showing how they've all thrown - apart from someone like Shepherd who binked pretty quickly without playing stage 1, there's lots of data there, and it should all be useful. 

Final day incoming

Another two people lock up cards automatically, Florian Hempel got the card in Europe and Jake Jones was able to get there from the UK. Lost Horvat from my list as he dropped out after day two, but from countback Lewis Williams is in after a nice run to the semis, as are Jack Main and Martin Lukeman, while Alan Soutar probably just needs a point. In Europe, Schindler, Lerchbacher and Koltsov are in, which gives me another two in, Barney and John Michael are very close as well.

There's an awful, awful lot of players that need to bink to get in now - the cutoff for Europe's already at 5 and you can only score 5 without binking, and it seems pretty unlikely there won't be some people just outside that nick a couple, so Marko Kantele, Ronny Huybrechts, Thibault Tricole, Nico Kurz, Jeffrey de Graaf and Chris Landman will need to win it all. Likely that Franz Roetzsch and Christian Kist will need at least a final, while Marijanovic, Decker, Rowby, Campbell and Alcinas will all be looking to the last four realistically.

The UK cutoff is also already at five, so Alan Norris, Scott Baker, Haupai Puha, Arron Monk and Adrian Gray all need a win, Scott Mitchell, Adam Smith-Neale, Jarred Cole, Simon Stevenson, Kevin Painter, Jim Williams and John O'Shea may need to do the same, and at the very least will probably need a final.

Either way, both races are going to be incredibly tight and it'll be fun viewing tomorrow.

How are we doing after day 2?

Not brilliant, but could be worse - we've not got any of the single day winners, as Kirk Shepherd continues his West Brom of the darts world pattern of winning back his card again, Geert de Vos returned to form and got a card, Jason Heaver put in a great set of performances to claim the card today, while Geert Nentjes claimed the card in Europe today, and I'm not really sure how I missed him off my list.

As for everyone else from my picks, Rafferty unfortunately withdrew, and the rest of the UK list is looking like a bit of a dumpster fire - Soutar is almost certainly in, Lewy Williams is in a good spot after a semi final run today, but they're the only players in the provisional spots - Askew and Jenks have two, Stevenson and Cole have a point a piece but everyone else has a big fat zero. That is not a good return. Martin Lukeman and Jack Main are looking extremely good regardless, while Eddie Lovely and Gavin Carlin don't need much more right now.

In Europe, my picks are looking a lot better - I don't have Lerchbacher, who's close to a lock with 7 points already, but Barney, Schindler (who's finishing off ten darters on the bull for fun) and Koltsov (who missed three for a card today) look very good on points so far, but everyone else is a bit off. I've got Plaisier and Veenstra on three, Campbell on two, while Horvat and Roetzsch have just the single point.

That really is quite a lot of players not yet on the board. The number of high quality players without a point is remarkable, but when you only score once in the top 32, it's perhaps a bit understandable. There's a couple of things in relation to Q-School's new format that need fixing for next year, if they keep it this way - the first is sorting the leg difference so that it only counts once in rounds where you can score points proper. The idea that you can play a prelim, smack someone up 6-0, and have a +6 advantage over someone who's got a bye is a bit silly. The other thing they should have done is kept around five players who just missed out on the final stage around in the bubble for the event that people withdraw. This happened on day one in the UK, but when you know that you're giving the winners of each day an auto berth, why would you not have extra people filling in the last few spots based on countback?

Will check in tomorrow with the scenarios, might do something in running on Wednesday given I'm off work.

OK, let's pick our winners

Bit of indecision as to whether the split in cards is 17/12 or 16/13 for UK/EU, so I'm just going to pick 17/13 in no particular order (i.e. alphabetical):

Jason Askew

Danny Baggish

Darren Beveridge

Jarred Cole

Nick Fullwell

Andy Jenkins

Darren Johnson

Scott Mitchell

John O'Shea

Dave Pallett

Nathan Rafferty

Fallon Sherrock

Alan Soutar

Simon Stevenson

Scott Taylor

Jim Williams

Lewis Williams

Stefan Bellmont

Matt Campbell

Kevin Doets

Dragutin Horvat

Boris Koltsov

Nico Kurz

Wesley Plaisier

Franz Roetzsch

Martin Schindler

Thibault Tricole

Raymond van Barneveld

Richard Veenstra

Niels Zonneveld

Round one done

Well, first bit of it is at least. Having a quick scan, there's quite a few big names that have missed out - Wes Newton, James Richardson, Dean Winstanley, Darryl Fitton, and probably most shockingly Wayne Warren (on the stupid stupid tiebreaker that is three dart average), while on the EU side, I don't think there was any major casualties. Some names I had heard of, but only the likes of Toon Greebe, Thomas Kohnlein, nobody major.

Barney was safely through before today but got through outright, also we got Roetzsch through automatically, Veenstra, Koltsov, Gawlas, Rasztovits and Kurz also got through outright, while the points table has quite a few randoms along with some steady players who can make a run on their day, the likes of Unterbuchner, de Vos, Plaisier, Landman, Vandenboegaerde, Eidams etc.

In the UK, probably the biggest names through automatically were Painter and Warburton, quite a few known names alongside but those were probably the biggest two. Plenty of big guns through on countback, the PDC lead with Sherrock but the likes of Hudson, Smith-Neale, Ladley, McDine, Usher, Quantock and most of the Aussie contingent got there.

We'll see what happens with stage two in the next few days.

Q-School is under way

Thank god for that as well, something to analyse. A bunch of people have put up their picks, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but I'm going to wait until we've got lineups for Stage 2 before picking out who's going to get a card.

Simple thing is that we've not got much of anything to go on. It doesn't take any skill to say that Raymond van Barneveld will win a card, or that Danny Baggish will win a card, or that Matt Campbell win a card, or that Jim Williams will win a card. Or that the guy who lose 6-0 to someone averaging 45 won't win one. Where there is interest is in some more of the fringe names and making some sort of hero pick that comes good. But how will we do it?

Answer is we don't know. The only non tour card level darts we've had in the last 12 months is limited Challenge Tour and Development Tour games, the Dutch Open, and maybe the odd game in the UK Open. That's really about it. At least if we look at how players have done in the first stage, we can have some kind of an educated guess.

That said, if there's something of note that I want to say over the first stage, I'm definitely going to mention it. While three events and then done is a pretty brutal format, it's not going to take a huge amount of points to make stage two. But you really don't want a bad start. In the Euro event, you're going to need to make the last 32 to get anything, so it's a bit concerning to see some players who I'd have thought would do well drop early. Franz Roetzsch didn't play well at all and is out already (sure he'd have played Barney in the following round). Wesley Plaisier is done. Boris Koltsov needed to come from 5-0 down and did after playing like complete arse before then, while he's got one point (which may be it as he's getting tanked by Vandenboegarde right now) he's lucky to get that. Quite a lot of the decent German names have already slipped up early.

Couple of interesting draws in the UK field - Hedman against James Bailey. Gordon Mathers against Daniel Day. Mike Norton (he who had a nice UK Open run a few years ago and played Barney IIRC) against Sherrock. Haupai Puha and Mick Todd. Mike Warburton and Darryl Fitton. These are all first round games. No idea on the board assignments as a whole, but if you're getting this in round one, the later rounds should be a lot of fun.