Second/Third Division Darts 2021 results page

No, I'm not going to remove Wade and put Price into division two. What a clusterfuck this is. My interest in the PL is usually minimal, but I'm not bothering to watch it. As we've seen from pretty much every withdrawal apart from Durrant, this is a false positive, and Price has actually confirmed it. What the PDC are actually thinking not double-checking the test (which is best practice for positive tests anyway), just having a couple of players pull double shifts in the first couple of days, then have Price play catch up later in the week. In the unlikely event that Price's second test showed positive, then Wade could play catch up just the same. Absolute insanity from the PDC to run without its world champion and world number one.

Anyway:

Division 2

Joe Cullen 11.70

Ian White 10.61

Michael Smith 10.13

James Wade 9.29

Krzysztof Ratajski 9.27

Damon Heta 9.00

Devon Petersen 8.50

Dave Chisnall 8.04

Luke Humphries 7.90

Ryan Searle 5.56

Division 3

Dirk van Duijvenbode 10.50

Callan Rydz 10.33

Keane Barry 10.00

Adam Hunt 9.00

Josh Payne 9.00

Jeffrey de Zwaan 9.00

Bradley Brooks 8.50

Keegan Brown 8.50

Steve Lennon 8.17

Max Hopp 7.00

Full Results

PC1 - James Wade 6-5 Krzysztof Ratajski (2)

PC2 - Adam Hunt 6-3 Steve Lennon (3), Dirk van Duijvenbode 6-4 Keegan Brown (3)

PC3 - Krzysztof Ratajski 6-4 Devon Petersen (2), Ian White 6-1 Ryan Searle (2), Ian White 6-3 James Wade (2), Joe Cullen 6-2 Krzysztof Ratajski (2), Keane Barry 6-0 Jeffrey de Zwaan (3)

PC4 - Dirk van Duijvenbode 6-1 Max Hopp (3)

UK Open - Luke Humphries 10-9 Dave Chisnall (2), Michael Smith 10-9 Joe Cullen (2), Luke Humphries 10-7 Ryan Searle (2), James Wade 11-5 Luke Humphries (2)

PC5 - Joe Cullen 6-3 Dave Chisnall (2), Krzysztof Ratajski 6-1 Luke Humphries (2), Michael Smith 6-2 Ryan Searle (2), Callan Rydz 6-3 Adam Hunt (3), Callan Rydz 6-4 Bradley Brooks (3)

PC6 - Luke Humphries 6-5 Ian White (2), Jeffrey de Zwaan 6-2 Max Hopp (3)

PC7 - James Wade 6-3 Luke Humphries (2)

PC8 - Joe Cullen 6-2 Ryan Searle (2), Joe Cullen 6-3 Krzysztof Ratajski (2)

Super Series 2 - Electric Boogaloo

Another four Players Championship events in the books. In the absence of van Gerwen, the three big players claimed three of them, with Price, Wright and Clayton (arguably the best player outside of those three right now - if not higher?) claimed one each, with Brendan Dolan picking up the first event back on Tuesday. Congrats to those - also to Smith, Humphries and Wade for picking up final money, Price also getting one to be the only player to final twice this series. A few surprising names had good series, Jason Heaver made one semi and picked up an additional 3k in the other three events after drawing a complete blank in the first series, Scott Mitchell averaged over 1.5k per event, Alan Soutar made a semi final on day one, but then levelled off a bit (the hype train is a little bit ridiculous on him now, there's certainly no betting value when he's half the price of Noppert to bink a PC event), and we also saw quarters from Barstow, Schindler, Zonneveld and then quite a few players in the top 64 but not top 32 region. Good stuff all round.

New FRH rankings:

1 Gerwyn Price

2 Peter Wright (UP 1)

3 Michael van Gerwen (DOWN 1)

4 James Wade

5 Gary Anderson

6 Jose de Sousa (UP 1)

7 Dimitri van den Bergh (DOWN 1)

8 Dave Chisnall

9 Michael Smith

10 Joe Cullen

11 Nathan Aspinall

12 Krzysztof Ratajski

13 Jonny Clayton (UP 2)

14 Glen Durrant (DOWN 1)

15 Rob Cross (DOWN 1)

16 Simon Whitlock (UP 1)

17 Daryl Gurney (DOWN 1)

18 Dirk van Duijvenbode (UP 2)

19 Ian White (DOWN 1)

20 Stephen Bunting (DOWN 1)

Wright's reclaimed the #2 spot as a result of van Gerwen's absence. Dimitri having a bit of a bad run this series has allowed de Sousa to nick ahead, Clayton's win edges him ahead of Durrant and Cross, while two quarters from van Duijvenbode moves him up to a new high of 18.

Lower down, Dolan is up to #29 as a result of his win (and two semi finals!), Adrian Lewis is out of the top 32, while Mitchell and Soutar cement places in the top 100.

Is it me, or do there seem to be a disproportionate number of players that we might already have seen the best of? Let's scan our eyes down the FRH rankings, and see who looks to be sliding. That chunk from 14-19 is the big one, DvD obviously excepted, and I think we can exclude Whitlock as well, while we may have made this point 12-18 months ago, he's shown a bit of late. Durrant, post Premier League, has been positively mediocre, he does not even feature on the top page of scoring in 2021. He's below Matt Edgar. It's surely a long, long way back to getting up to the top ten level of play he was at a year or so ago, especially when you factor in the strides the likes of de Sousa, van den Bergh, Cullen and Ratajski have made (and Clayton for that matter).

What about Cross? He's also not on the top page of scoring, albeit only just, but if I were to ask you who would be the two players immediately above and below him in scoring, would you guess Scott Waites, Andy Boulton, Jason Lowe and James Wilson? It's not terrible, but it's a long way off the top five level he was at. He's currently 50/1 to bink the worlds, and I'd rather take a Ratajski at 33s or Dirk at 40s.

Gurney's an interesting one. His scoring is about half a point lower than Cross's, and he's always been fairly low in comparison to his main OOM ranking. That said, when was the last time he was outside the top 16 in the FRH rankings? It's probably got to have been before he won his first major. He's having good results in 2019 drop off, he binked a Euro Tour pretty much two years ago exactly, semi finalled the Matchplay, and also semi finalled the PC Finals as well as a Pro Tour bink.

Then we've got White. Now Ian's scoring is just fine, it's in the top 16. He's been a top 16 player for quite some time. He's just not got results for the last twelve months, and similarly had a good 2019 (by far his best money wise with two Euro Tour wins and pretty decent major results. Question is whether he can get the results back on track. Suljovic is a bit lower down, but fairly similar.

Scrolling down, Adrian Lewis is outside the top 32, and as it stands, wouldn't make the worlds. That's pretty fucking remarkable. Something I posted on Twitter about Lewis - he's inconsistent. This season, he is scoring twelve and a half points higher in the legs he's won compared to the legs he's lost. That's a huge disparity. When he's winning his legs, he's pretty darned good - it's in and around the top 20 level. But when he's losing legs? It's awful. There's only eight tour card holders that are scoring worse than Lewis in losing legs. There's clearly still an A-game there, but it seems like the B, C and D games have disappeared completely. Why this is, only Adie would be able to tell you, but if he can just scratch together a few scrappy legs here and there, then the results will probably come.

Further on, there's lots of players that I think are clearly past their peak. Beaton I don't think ever gets back to the top 32. He's scoring below 89 this season and that won't cut it. Steve West is two points lower again, but at least has a bit of time on his side and still shows something in patches, but I doubt he can ever do it on a week in week out basis to get into one of the tricky to qualify for majors, which barring a good worlds run is exactly what you need to do to get into the top 32 (it's similar to what's been holding Humphries back, although now he does have a major final's worth of money and, after this week's final, isn't too far off in the Matchplay race). Henderson's 48 in a couple of months and is scoring pretty much at West's level in 2021. After being gifted some ranking money in 2020, it's hard to see how he pushes back to the top 32 either. Darren Webster is not only looking nowhere near the top 16 (two years ago, he was seeded for the Matchplay), he's nowhere near the top 32 and is more likely than not to lose his tour card, and is he going to get it back at 53?

Age isn't a defining factor, we just need to look at what Mervyn King has been doing in the last twelve months, but it's pretty hard to see how we don't see the likes of van Duijvenbode, Petersen, Noppert, Clemens, Humphries etc keep pushing on to the top 32 and permanently dumping the likes of White out of it, and similarly lower down, players like Searle, Heta, Rydz and others are going to occupy top 32 spots sooner rather than later. Then you've got players like de Zwaan, Dobey and Hughes, for whom anything can happen - they're all good enough to go on a run somewhere and make serious bank to threaten the top 16, then they're also all inconsistent enough that they may drop from the top 32. de Zwaan and Dobey are both outside the top 32 in the tour card race reckoning, Hughes is 29th.

Edgar v de Vos

OK, there's something I mentioned I wanted to pick up in the previous post, and that was expanding on something Matthew Edgar commented on in one of his videos, it's this one here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G7CHlge80o

Edgar posts a lot of good stuff here, so in the unlikely event you're not already aware of Edgar TV, then go and check him out, but what I want to do is analyse what he's commented on in the last third or so of the video, namely where in the "cons" section, he comments on tons. Here, Edgar is referring to this chart from Dart Connect:

Now Dart Connect's brilliant, but here's a huge example of where statistics can be either outright misleading, if not telling you the whole picture. Look at that 100+ column, which is what Edgar is thinking looks bad, and something he wants to improve on, and if you look at it at face value, then it does appear bad. But what exactly is it telling you?

Here's where Dart Connect is a bit disappointing, it has a bunch of stats, but doesn't really explain what it does. Here, it just says "all turns of 100 or more". OK, that's fine, but it doesn't look to be calculating it right for one - if we simply count the number of turns where someone scores 100 and compares it to the number of turns full stop, it gives too high a figure for both Edgar, and also for Geert de Vos, who we'll be doing a comparison against. However, if we go for an alternative metric which I thought they might use, and that's to only include turns where it's actually possible for a player to score 100 (i.e. if the marker says Matthew you require 40, it doesn't count), then for both players it gives too low a figure, by more than what it's out using how you think it'd be calculated. Maybe it's me mistranscribing the actual scores, but for it to be the same for both players makes me think there's simply something wrong with how it's worked out.

The main thing is what it's intending to show, and is it a useful statistic? You would think that it would just be intended to show scoring consistency, but a statistic that says someone starting 100-100 is better than someone who starts 60-140, when they both are on 301 after two visits, is surely not that useful. Sure, as a pro you'd want to be hitting at least one big treble a visit, which in theory should correlate to this 100 count, but that's relying on you staying straight all the time and never switching. And here you've got a limitation with Dart Connect, it just records the score with the three darts, it's not going to tell you whether someone scoring 59 has gone 20-20-blocked and 19, or 1-1-blocked and T19. Unless there's something behind the scenes that I can't immediately see (no clue how they score cricket), we're out of luck.

So what's a better metric? The goal of darts is to win the leg, so maybe something like the percentage of legs where a player is under some score remaining after some number of visits. Maybe 120 or under after 12 would be a good measure, so that you see how often you are going to enter the critical fifth visit with an outshot that is only going to require one treble to be on a big double. This could probably be queried if you had a direct connection to the DC database, but for now it'd be something you'd need to work out on your own.

The other big issue is one thing that may be overlooked - certain visits under 100 will cause more visits under 100. Let me give you an example - I start off a leg with two straight tons, you start off with two visits where you block the T20 bed after the second dart and end up with 99. Who's more likely to have a ton visit on turn three, if we assume that we have the same skill level at hitting big trebles?

It shouldn't take a genius to work out that I will, as a result of the previous visits. I'm on 301, can stay on 20's, and will ideally look to get seven marks to leave 161 and be on a finish. You can't stay on 20's, and will try to get seven marks on 19's to look to leave a 170 out. Difference here is that I will get a ton if I only hit one treble - you won't. Having a visit where you need to get off 20's in the early stages of a leg may well see you needing to do the same (rightly or wrongly) later on in order to try to avoid leaving bogey numbers, and through no real fault of your own, and it will really damage your ton percentage.

So is this an issue affecting Edgar? Fortunately we can take a look at this. Here I've grouped every score that Edgar and de Vos put up in the Super Series, and grouped it in blocks of 5, so anything that's 95-99 will be in the same bar, anything 100-104 is as well, etc etc. Let's take a look:

Now I've deliberately left off the y-axis, but as an exercise to the reader, have a guess where the 100-104 group is. If you said it's where that largest blue bar is, then you're correct. de Vos won a game in the Super Series and Edgar didn't, so de Vos has had an extra 24 visits, but that's a huge number of straight tons from de Vos. An absolute mountain. 52 straight tons in 47 legs. By contrast, Edgar has only hit 19, but look at the bars just below those two. Edgar's hit significantly more scores of 95-99 than de Vos has, and enormously more scores of 90-94 - de Vos has only hit three to Edgar's 18.

Is this a problem? I wouldn't necessarily say so. If someone's hitting four straight tons, they're leaving 101 - which isn't really much of a different checkout to 120, you've got 19 points of wiggle room before you're being left with a fundamentally more difficult outshot. If you're on 101 and I'm on 116, then if we both hit a treble first dart then it's just a case of which big number we hit to leave a double of choice. Sure, you might have more choice as to what preferred double you want (if I'm on 114, I can't really set up D16), and there's also you having the option of using the bull last dart in hand on the fourth visit to get just under 100 for the fifth visit in a lot of circumstances, but I think it's fair enough to say that the lack of tons isn't necessarily going to cost Edgar if, as it looks like, it's as a result of a lot of switching.

I don't know if I'll be posting here through the Super Series - I may put in some quick things if anything looks interesting, but for the most part I'll probably just put some each way selections for the outright events on Twitter.

Should have fired on Humphries I guess

That's another UK Open in the books, congrats to Wade for binking and especially grats to Humphries for reaching the final, great achievement, actually winning something is surely just around the corner, and I guess Wade is vindicating those who said he should have been in the Premier League.

New FRH rankings:

1 Gerwyn Price

2 Michael van Gerwen (UP 1)

3 Peter Wright (DOWN 1)

4 James Wade (UP 1)

5 Gary Anderson (DOWN 1)

6 Dimitri van den Bergh

7 Jose de Sousa

8 Dave Chisnall

9 Michael Smith

10 Joe Cullen (UP 1)

11 Nathan Aspinall (DOWN 1)

12 Krzysztof Ratajski (UP 2)

13 Glen Durrant (DOWN 1)

14 Rob Cross (DOWN 1)

15 Jonny Clayton

16 Daryl Gurney

17 Simon Whitlock (UP 2)

18 Ian White (DOWN 1)

19 Stephen Bunting (DOWN 1)

20 Dirk van Duijvenbode

Nobody in or out of the top 20, Petersen's quarter run didn't actually see him rise at all, although he has closed the gap to King in 21st to less than 4000 points. van Gerwen passes Wright by over 5000 points, Wade's now got a 30k cushion down to Ando but there's a 200,000 point chasm to Wright in third. Cullen hits the top 10 despite an early exit, Aspinall having a lot of his ranking back loaded (this is of course the weekend where, in the real order of merit, he'd lose his UK Open win). Whitlock creeps up a couple of spots with his quarter, as does Ratajski.

Humphries, as previously advertised, hits the top 30 (knocking out Adrian Lewis), Dobey also holding a spot there for now. Jamie Hughes drops from the top 32, Dolan is up to 34, Kleermaker rises to 55, Jacques hits the top 100, while Soutar is only a few spots outside right now.

I'm not sure when I'll be back with a new post - there's something I do want to pick up on from one of Edgar's videos which I'd need to do before the next Super Series, but I'm not sure when that'd be.

Semi final tips

Don't really fancy any bets for the semis. The Wade/Price line, set with Gerwyn having slightly less than a two in three chance, looks spot on to me. The van Gerwen/Humphries line, where you can get better than 3/1 on Humphries, I think in theory should be a bet on Luke, I'm just struggling to see Luke being able to hold the game together for 21 legs against van Gerwen. So I think that's it for the event - 34 bets, gaining 2.4 units at a roughly 30% return on investment. Can't complain really.

In terms of FRH rankings, van Gerwen has already managed to regain the number 2 spot from Wright, Wade was 5 anyway but could get to 4 if he manages to bink, while Humphries is up to 35, would hit the top 30 if he reaches the final, and a bink would see him up to 21. Plenty to play for.

Quarter final tips

Seems like most of the weaker players have been eliminated at this stage. There's not a single really weak spot left, so I'm not anticipating a great deal of value here, but I am expecting a good level of play upcoming. Let's look at what we've got:

Whitlock/Wade - Wade was a pretty comfortable winner over Clemens, who seemed a bit below the level he's played at throughout the tournament, while Whitlock was again forced to a decider, this time by Brendan Dolan. Market has it 60/40 in favour of Wade, which seems about right at a rough guess, and it appears close to spot on in the projections. Maybe Whitlock's a point or two better off, but there's not the value to bet it.

Price/Petersen - The real Gerwyn showed up with a 102 average against Chris Dobey, who wasn't throwing badly at all himself, 10-5 maybe a little bit flattering. Devon ended the run of Peter Jacques 10-4, fairly comfortable, Peter seemingly just running out of steam. I thought the projections might have been closer on this one, but they give Devon just a one in three shot - to within a tenth of one percent. We can see 5/2 in places, which is worth thinking about, but it's not quite enough to recommend.

Chisnall/Humphries - Dave ended the dogged resistance of Alan Soutar in a game where he needed a break and waited until almost the last moment to get one, getting over the line by just that one break. Luke was comfortable against Kleermaker, dropping just four legs and only needing to average 93 to do so, makes me think we could have opened the throttle on bet sizing in that one, oh well. This one might be closer than the market suggests, I'm seeing this as 55/45, and we can get 7/4 on Luke. No consistency issues on this one either. I'm just wondering whether a combination of Chisnall starting to realise what he can do in majors, combined with Luke playing to get to an uncharted level in a major, might be enough to shift things slightly more in Dave's favour, that, and a slightly better level of play throughout the event. I'll pass on it as a result, but wouldn't be surprised if I regret it.

van Gerwen/Ratajski - MvG needed every single leg to get past de Sousa, Jose getting the break back fairly late but then a combination of a four visit kill from the opponent (in leg 17) and then failure to score (in the decider) prevented Jose from getting the additional break he needed to win. Ratajski was magnificent. Nobody should be beating Clayton 10-3 right now, and Krzysztof made it look easy. Maybe his best TV performance. Market has this at 2/1, I see this as 55/45. Think it's enough to play it - 0.25u Ratajski 2/1, I do get the sense it's finally his time to break through and get the huge TV win.

So just the one play. Will be back before the semis, but it may be very short notice.

Round 6 tips

Down to sixteen players and eight matches, both the main tips came through, missed out on Suljovic over van Gerwen but couldn't do too much about that one, although I was a bit excited at 3-1. Don't think there were any huge shocks, or any shocks for that matter, the only one I suppose being Kleermaker over Rydz, but that wasn't a big one in any case. Let's project round 6:

de Sousa/van Gerwen - There's really very, very little to split between the two on the stats. de Sousa actually projects to win more often, but van Gerwen has the higher overall scoring, as there's next to nothing between his winning/losing scoring, whereas there's a bit of a gap for Jose (although he's still consistent enough that it's below the database average). Will almost certainly be taking Jose to pull the upset.

Petersen/Jacques - How far can the Jacques run go? Probably ends here, Devon's a cut above who he's played to date, should probably claim this two times out of three, and has looked very steady, not being troubled much at all.

Clemens/Wade - Spicy one this, but relegated to stage 2 - for once I can't really disagree with the stage 1 picks. Clemens has had no issues to date, Wade had a bit of a tough time in round 4, but was able to pull away from Cross earlier today. Looks about 60/40 in favour of Wadey here, Gabriel definitely got a good shot but James has the edge.

Humphries/Kleermaker - Probably only one of two games that you think are auto-board two games (the next one's the other), Luke has been throwing very close to his best stuff throughout and gets another player outside of the top 32 here, while Martijn's just been quietly doing the business while never really hitting the peaks in terms of averages. Should be really comfortable for Luke, I'm projecting over 80%, he's a clear five points in scoring ahead of Martijn whichever way you look at it.

Dolan/Whitlock - Good opportunity for both, feels like it should be close on paper after Brendan was able to end the run of Luke Woodhouse and Simon edged a nail biter against Darius Labanauskas. Looks like Simon has a small advantage, more than 55%, not quite 60%.

Dobey/Price - Chris rattled off ten straight to end the John Brown fairytale, while Price was never really troubled by Ricky Evans. Probably the biggest test for Gerwyn yet, key thing will be whether he can step up the gears if needed. Looks like it's about a 2-1 matchup in the Welshman's favour, Dobey is definitely live here, although whether he's able to realise what'd be the biggest win of his career is another question.

Ratajski/Clayton - Amazing game this one's going to be. Krzysztof was pushed pretty hard by Madars Razma, while Clayton made van Duijvenbode look ordinary with a 108 average. Nice arrows. Model can't split the two, seems bang on 50/50.

Chisnall/Soutar - Dave continued good play with a 104 average to pull away from the ever dangerous Danny Noppert at the end and win 10-7, while Soutar continued his remarkable run and defeated Ron Meulenkamp by the same score. Probably ends here, Alan's gone 92, 92 and 93 in three of his games by conventional averages with just the one big one against Mansell, he's going to need that against Dave really. 70/30 in favour of Chizzy for me.

Will edit with bets once oddschecker stops fucking around thinking that the Suljovic game is still in play.

Bets:

0.1u de Sousa 5/2

0.25u Humphries 2/5

0.25u Ratajski 6/4