News round up

Been pretty quiet since the World Cup (that lay England suggestion went well, didn't it?), but there's been a few things happening so let's go through them.

First thing is Barney being announced for one of the World Seniors events. Now this one caught pretty much everybody out, and while I've seen the reasoning for him being in it given (he asked the PDC to play in it and they said yes), I do wonder why exactly the PDC are alright with it. This is a former world champion *of theirs* who is still doing enough to qualify for major events (he's in the Matchplay by £5k from Smith right now - if he just plays to his seeding in the remaining two Pro Tours that'll be £8k that Smith would need to find, more than £10k for anyone else, and would also need Joyce to overtake him), so clearly does have some marketing value for the PDC. This isn't, say, Brendan Dolan or Ian White getting the nod, no disrespect to them. Frankly, the only thing I can think of is that Barney's spoken with Porter behind the scenes, said that this is going to be his last season (he is 58 now after all), and will be handing in his card post-Ally Pally, and that as such, they don't have any sort of long term business relationship, so the PDC'll let him play other things and bill the next six months as some sort of farewell tour. That's just speculation on my part for sure, but I'm struggling to think of any other reasoning there could be - particularly if RvB tried to force Porter's hand and say he'll just resign his card now if you say no, although giving up the best part of fifty grand's worth of major prize money he's currently lined up for would be a pretty costly thing to do, so I don't think that would ever be realistic. Of course, I completely misread it in the first instance, and thought he'd got the invite for their world championship - not one of the run of the mill events. Here's my question to you though - if the PDC said "ok, everyone over 45 has carte blanche to play in these", is Barney even a favourite right now to get into the quarter finals of any given event? Anderson, Wright, Clayton and Ratajski I think are all clearly better. Gilding and Sedlacek are close. Then there's a few like Dolan, Suljovic, White, Vandenbogaerde and maybe some others that would be very clearly live, and that's before you get to those who are already on their circuit outside the PDC system, and those we haven't seen yet (Krcmar's playing well enough in 2025 that he could do a lot of damage, for example). Heck, Chizzy would be eligible in a few months. Could it be that Barney's looking to get what he can from the seniors before he's simply not good enough to compete in it? We'll see.

Then we've got the worlds criteria being announced. I think this has generally gone down well, although they took their time about doing it. Let's look at the changes and discuss, I'll go through in terms of general categories with what's changed:

Top 32 OOM and top 32 Pro Tour OOM > Top 40 OOM and top 40 Pro Tour OOM (+16) - these are fine. I don't think anyone thought for one minute all 32 spots would go to international qualifiers, but I was guessing more like they'd up the Pro Tour to 40 and leave the main order of merit spots as it is. That said, this does address a lot of the backlash they got about things like the Euro Tour changes and cutting back of opportunities for those lower down the rankings. Clearly not all of the 40 on the Pro Tour will be card holders, but this should make well over 60% of the card holders in any given year reach the worlds. Which is nice.

World Youth Champion & 1-2 of Development Tour > World Youth Champion & 1-3 of Development Tour (+1) - absolutely fine. I think most people assumed that some of the slots would be filled by expansion of the secondary tour positions. The tour is more than strong enough to warrant an additional spot, even given that a lot of the top names are card holders.

1-2 of Challenge Tour > 1-3 of Challenge Tour (+1) - also fine. Top end of this is always pretty stacked, some of them will clearly get in through the Pro Tour list, Labanauskas looking pretty much a lock for a spot there, but again, clearly good enough.

Women's Matchplay Champion & 1-2 of Women's Series > Women's Matchplay Champion & 1-3 of Women's Series (+1) - here I'm not so sure. I am not sure that the field is strong enough in the women's game to warrant a fourth spot right now, especially if Greaves (and others) opt to play Lakeside instead, and Greaves would be taking one of the Dev Tour spots instead anyway (and, going forward, likely the same if she does win a tour card and move to the Pro Tour full time). Granted, the numbers are worse because of the level of the field, but the averages aren't pretty and I think the status quo could and should have been maintained here. There's a reason why I don't include any data from here in my database.

Steel Darts Japan Winner, China Championship Winner, 1-4 of Asian Tour, 1-2 of Asian Championship, Indian Qualifier > Steel Darts Japan Winner, China Championship Winner, 1-5 of Asian Tour, 1-2 of Asian Championship, Indian Qualifier (+1) - again, fine. Area seems strong enough to warrant this many, adding an extra spot to the established tour seems the most sensible thing to do, although perhaps an alternative would be to host an additional country-specific qualifier to have precedence over the Asian Tour spot. A Philippines qualifier, for example, would seem to me to be a much better use of a spot than any of the three country-specific events they are hosting. I'd rather them have done that and made it 5 from the Asian Tour after all others are done than making it four from the women's game.

DPA Pro Tour Champion, Oceanic Masters Winner, DPNZ Qualifier > ANZ Premier League Winner, ADA Tour Winner, DPA Pro Tour Winner, DPNZ Pro Tour Winner (+1) - a sensible increase. I'm not sure I'm liking the idea of having two competing tours each providing a spot, and I'm not really sure what the ADA is, but the Oceanic region is good enough for an extra spot. I don't know what this means for the Oceanic Masters - it's essentially been replaced by the new regional Premier League, and giving it based on a series of events rather than just whoever might have run good on the day might give you a better quality of qualifier, but it is a fair bit of a downgrade for what was a fairly important event. Unless it's been cancelled going forwards and nobody's mentioned it, the area does seem to run its media based on pages that look like they were made on Geocities so that's entirely possible.

CDC Top American, CDC Top Canadian, CDC Next Best Player > CDC Top American, CDC Top Canadian, NA Championship Winner, CDC Continental Cup Winner, CDC Cross Border Challenge Winner (+2) - this seems a little bit of a weird way to do it. For whatever reason, I cannot find the first post the PDC made with their criteria for last year, so I am not sure if the spot there was for the NA Championship that Campbell couldn't use shifted to the main CDC rankings or just went elsewhere, I'm going to guess the former as otherwise it would kind of not be an increase. That they appear to be adding it to a one off event rather than their existing league is a bit of a weird one, making it three spots that may be decided this way, maybe they just can't work out which is their most prestigious event.

1-2 of SDC > Nordic and Baltic Championship Winner, 1-2 of SDC (+1) - again, fine, if they're setting up a new event, which they are doing with this Nordic championship, then adding a worlds spot to give it a bit of added prestige from the get go seems sensible enough.

East Europe Qualifier > SE Europe Qualifier, Czechia Qualifier, Polish Qualifier, Hungarian Super League Winner (+3) - now this is a huge increase. I do wonder if this is a placeholder series of events in lieu of them announcing a new regional secondary tour, which I think the area could certainly support, they're holding Euro Tour qualifiers already anyway after all. I think the countries are right - think Hungary's a bit behind the other two and Poland seems the strongest, but these are places that are holding Euro Tour or World Series events so it's logical enough.

PDC Europe Super League Champion, West Europe Qualifier > Netherlands/Belgium Qualifier, Mediterranean Qualifier, DACH Super League Champion (+1) - adding a spot here is fine. It would have been snappier to call the first of these events a Benelux qualifier (and it also means we don't forget Luxembourg, who seem to fit in neither of these events which I assume is just an oversight), but that could be fixed.

CDLC Qualifier, ADG Qualifier, TCH Qualifier 1-2 > UK/Ireland Associate Qualifier, CDLC Qualifier, ADG Qualifier, TCH Qualifier 1-4 (+3) - this is a mishmash of everything that's left. Although there's been plenty of calls to give a second African spot, I don't think it's quite the time given how few spots there are for some areas which are clearly stronger. Maybe that's something that comes sooner rather than later, similar in South America with Argentina looking pretty decent at the World Cup, but keeping it as is for the time being I think is the sensible thing. An associate qualifier for the UK and Ireland is a bit of an interesting one - I guess we have qualifiers for non-card holders for everywhere else, so why not? It'd essentially be a bonkers Challenge Tour event with all the money in one spot, which should be fun. Then we get an increase to four spots for any tour card holders that still aren't in. Which seems like a lot, given we could have as few as 40-45 players left - the brackets are only going to contain 10-12 players which is not a big field to run through, although at the very least it would take one heck of a number of withdrawals or other qualifying spots not running for someone to get a bye straight to the semis. If you're a card holder and don't make the worlds, you've been given your chances.

That leaves one qualifying spot to be determined - I don't know if this is a situation where they're waiting on something like knowing the Oceanic Masters will run, a potential new event that they're waiting for final clearance to unveil, or (hopefully not) some form of backup plan to gerrymander the field should a big name they want in the field not qualify. Maybe a catch all qualifier at some point around the WDF World Masters? Really not sure how they're going to use it, but we'll see.

Metal fatigue

And by metal, I mean specifically tungsten. One of the big problems people have made out in relation to the Premier League is that we see the same games again and again. So let's quantify that. Here's a cross-table as to how many times we have seen each game take place just in the Premier League this season:

This might be a tad small, but it should give you the gist of things. The only games we have seen the bare minimum of times were the respective games between van Gerwen, Cross and Bunting, and this is despite van Gerwen withdrawing from one against Price. What is should highlight beyond anything is how many times this format has given us Littler against Humphries. It is, if we exclude the finals day, every other week.

Now, back in the old days of wrestling, a promotion would NEVER give away a match between their two top talents who they are pushing towards a pay per view major card matchup. Now clearly this is different - anyone that is paying for the subscription (at least in the UK) who has paid in for the Premier League is going to be getting the Matchplay as well. But this sort of thing just will naturally harm the potential draw rate. How on earth can they possibly try to do any sort of billing of their dream Luke on Luke violence final as "the final we've all been waiting for" when due to the ridiculous Premier League format, they have given this game away NINE TIMES already this season? It goes the same for more or less anything between these players - they are clearly not the top eight players in the world, but the PDC clearly see these players as at least marketable if not. Why should us, as keyboard warriors (sorry, punters), give a shit if we get Aspinall against van Gerwen in the Matchplay when you've given this to us six times already?

It gets worse when you expand to other televised events. Let's go through what we've seen from events we can see. I'm going to include the European Tour, as we can see all of those. I'm not going to include the Pro Tour, as while a lot of the games between these players will take place when there is a high probability of these coming against each other, it's not guaranteed and I'm pretty sure nobody is tracking it. So let's go through event by event.

World Masters - Nothing miraculously

UK Open - Bunting/Dobey

Bahrain - Littler/Price, Humphries/Aspinall, Humphries/Bunting, Price/Bunting, Dobey/Bunting

Dutch - Littler/van Gerwen, Littler/Bunting, Price/Cross, Cross/Bunting

Nordic - Littler/Aspinall, Humphries/Price, Aspinall/Bunting, Price/Cross, Dobey/Cross, Cross/Bunting

ET1 - No games

ET2 - Humphries/Aspinall, Price/van Gerwen

ET3 - Humphries/Bunting, Aspinall/Price, Aspinall/Bunting

ET4 - No games

ET5 - No games

ET6 - No games

ET7 - No games

ET8 - Aspinall/Dobey

So, a bunch of the additional games have come from the World Series events, and not so much from the Euro Tours - mainly because a lot of players in the PL have either not entered or withdrawn from the tournaments in question. What that does to the cross table is this:

It's not a huge change, but it tells us enough - apart from two matches, we have seen everyone who got to the PL finals day against anyone else in the PL at least four times already this season, barring two matchups.

So what can we do about it? The first thing would be a reversion to the previous PL format. Increase back to 10, and go to an actual league format - the strength in depth is there regardless of who you pick, the cut down to 8 after 9 weeks does add jeopardy which frankly is not there in the current format, and you only see every game twice, plus whoever plays each other in the finals night. You never go into an event thinking "well I saw these two last week". Only three weeks didn't see some sort of rematch from the previous week. Increase the field, limit the number of times people play each other, it increases variety. Secondly, they really need to go back to what they used to do probably nearly a decade ago now, and use toe World Series as kind of a proving ground for those players who are on the up, but who they might not quite see as Premier League ready. Looking at the line ups they have had so far, in Bahrain they had 7 PL players plus Wright (van Gerwen not there), all 8 in the Netherlands, and then 7 PL players plus Clayton in Copenhagen (again, van Gerwen not there). Now I guess for the Wright inclusion there may have been some pressure on the PDC to include certain players, and I don't hate the inclusion of Clayton given he's had a good season, but they are hardly the future of the sport. Why on earth are we not just having 3, 4, 5 of the Premier League line up and some real wild cards in there? Why are we not giving Josh Rock a shot? Gian van Veen? Wessel Nijman? Damon Heta? Martin Schindler? Mike de Decker? Granted, some of these may end up as jobbers to the stars in the relevant events, but why? Plenty of them have done enough, are playing well enough and are young enough that they may be on the cusp of going stratospheric if things go their way in the next six months. Wouldn't you want to see how they handle themselves on a huge stage against the best in the world?

World Cup madness

I see that they've made the group stage draw (but seemingly not the knockout draw) for the World Cup. I've instantly seen two wildly different takes on England's chances - they are, naturally, the favourites, and are priced in one place at 4/11. Now, yes, vig, but let's call that a 75% chance. In reality it's lower, but let's just round it off to that. Oche's said it should be 1/7 - i.e. that the chances of England not winning are half of what the bookies say. Lendel's said it should be evens - i.e. that the chances of England not winning are twice what the bookies say. That's quite the difference, but whose thoughts are more outlandish?

With no draw, it's hard to say, and it's even harder to know how to model doubles - we have no idea if Littler is running into his perfect format, or whether he hates it with a passion. The latter is possible, I hate hate hate playing pairs. I think the best thing we can do is to set bounds, and say that the best chance the better team has will be the chances of the better player for the better team (likely Littler, but it's close), and then swap the players to get the worst chance, and the winning shot will be somewhere in the middle. Let's assume it was done in draw order, whereby England, as the 1 seed, would get the 16 seed in round one, then 8, 4 and 2. This would give them Finland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and then Wales. Only the last two are fixed - they could end up getting much tougher teams in the first two rounds (although I think more teams seeded in the group stages are fielding nowhere near their strongest teams - but let's go with it.

vs Finland:

Littler v Kantele - 100%

Littler v Harju - 89%

Humphries v Kantele - 100%

Humphries v Harju - 86%

vs Ireland:

Littler v O'Connor - 80%

Littler v Barry - 94%

Humphries v O'Connor - 75%

Humphries v Barry - 92%

vs Northern Ireland:

Littler v Rock - 62%

Littler v Gurney - 86%

Humphries v Rock - 55%

Humphries v Gurney - 81%

vs Wales:

Littler v Price - 63%

Littler v Clayton - 73%

Humphries v Price - 54%

Humphries v Clayton - 66%

Now these numbers are quite, quite telling. Let's chuck the Finland numbers out as both Kantele and Harju are working on very limited data for the smallest sample, although if we do play split the difference, say England win 95% of the time and it's 1/20 in the pricing, it's probably not too far off, it's not worth mentioning. If we look against Ireland - Willie would be expected to beat either Luke somewhere between one in four and one in five times. Keane would not be as good, which is fine - no slight on Barry, but O'Connor is clearly the better player right now. The average of all those is 85%. That's clearly an indication that England are massively favoured, but not a lock. That drops to, say, a 1/6 pricing, pre vig. That immediately makes the 1/7 valuation Oche had look ridiculous, and we're not even at the semi final stage.

In the semis, we get a pair of opponents where one player is doing really well (fun fact - since March Rock has a higher points per turn in my database than Littler over a 50% larger sample), and the other player is certainly not playing badly, and may be a tad underrated. Add all those percentages together and split them and you get to 71%. That's more or less the 4/11 that the bookies (or at least the bookie was quoted) to win the whole tournament. Then we go to the final. No player is rated at less than a one in four chance to win a best of 19 against any other player in the match. That should be the deciding factor in telling you not to bet on England to win this event - they're too short. Way, way too short. Wales ought to be no more than 2/1 to win the final - and this is a known pair which has binked this event twice, so understands the tournament, and are known to be playing well as of right now, with (since March) Price being second only behind Humphries in scoring, and Clayton being over 93 per turn which is clearly enough to be considered at an elite level and he has a Euro Tour bink of late. Combine, say, a 1% chance to lose the opening game, a 10% chance to lose the quarter, a 25% chance to lose the semi and a 30% chance to lose the final, all of which are likely underestimates of England's chances to lose, and you get them at being odds against to win the tournament.

I'm clearly making some simplifications. But in such a unique format, you have to make these sorts of adjustments. I'm going off the data I have. Are England favourites to win? Absolutely. Should we bet England to win? Absolutely not. We should probably do the opposite.

Matchplay getting closer

Aspinall managed to bink another Euro Tour, looks like he was fortunate to do so, probably will throw up even more opportunities to lay him in the future, looking at post worlds data he's not even in the top 20 in scoring, but we're going to need to wait a fair bit to try to exploit that, with over a month's wait before we have any ranked events that we can realistically bet on (yeah, the odd line might pop up for Players Championship events, but it's not realistic to react to those in time given they're all midweek and drawn on the fly with work commitments). New FRH rankings are as follows:

1 Luke Littler

2 Luke Humphries

3 Michael van Gerwen

4 Stephen Bunting

5 Jonny Clayton

6 Chris Dobey

7 James Wade

8 Ross Smith

9 Damon Heta (UP 2)

10 Josh Rock (DOWN 1)

11 Gary Anderson (DOWN 1)

12 Mike de Decker (UP 1)

13 Danny Noppert (DOWN 1)

14 Martin Schindler

15 Dave Chisnall

16 Rob Cross

17 Gerwyn Price

18 Nathan Aspinall (NEW)

19 Ryan Searle (DOWN 1)

20 Peter Wright (DOWN 1)

Gian van Veen is the player to drop out, but you have to think that's only going to be temporary. Heta gets back into the top 10 with his final, while Nijman is getting closer and closer to the top 32 following another good run at this level. Matt Campbell breaks back into the top 60 following his final session visit.

That's probably going to be it in terms of posts for a bit - as mentioned, there's no Euro Tour for a month, so I'll be looking to use this non-darts, non-football time of the season to recharge the batteries ahead of the Matchplay run up.

Leverkusen quarters - ah, that's better

Not a perfect run by any means as Aspinall pulled off the win over Pietreczko, but a triple hit on Heta, Campbell and Bunting clawed back a good chunk of Saturday's losses, so we'll take that. Clearly when it looks like we've identified players to lay, we'd rather not have to lay them twice for obvious reasons, but at least it did work this time. Onto the quarters:

Campbell/Heta - 33/67

Menzies/Clayton - 36/64

Aspinall/Dobey - 30/70

Nijman/Bunting - 48/52

As such, looking at the markets, there's nothing really doing in the top two, we'll lay Aspinall one more time (backing someone who just averaged 110 and 6/8 on doubles rather than Brooks and Pietreczko makes things a bit more comfortable), and take a small nibble on Nijman. If we project further looking at who's favoured, Clayton's a tiny favourite over Heta (not even 55/45), while Dobey's probably around that mark as a favourite against Bunting. A Clayton/Dobey final would similarly be extremely tight - would give Chris the edge, but it's so marginal and with him still not having won at this level, there might be that sort of intangible element that makes it a coinflip. This should be a pretty damned good session regardless.

Leverkusen day 3 - the rebuild starts here

Wow is all I can say about that one. Wouldn't call it the worst day ever, but it might be top five, with two large bets running into a 107 average and 6/6 on doubles and then a 106 average and over 50% on doubles as well. Brooks didn't help, I did sense check that when the numbers said he should be favoured, and it's right, there is a little bit of a consistency issue but it's never going to be enough to swing something to not be a bet. We did at least downsize so that's a start, nicking that one would probably have turned the day into break even. Eight games, let's go:

Wade/Campbell - 57/43

Heta/Harrysson - 78/22

Menzies/Edhouse - 58/42

Clayton/de Decker - 56/44

Aspinall/Pietreczko - 53/47

Dobey/Gilding - 66/34

Wright/Nijman - 45/55

Bunting/Gurney - 65/35

As such, it looks like continuing to lay Aspinall, Gurney and Harrysson will be the plays for me, although I'm cutting the bet sizing on account of at least some of these playing well, and obvious bankroll things, also Campbell may be a tad undervalued. Let's see what happens.

Leverkusen day 2

Yesterday was a big irritant. I think I described it on X as like putting the lunchtime kickoff in an accumulator - I had a small number of minimum plays all in the 2-3 range, which went alright, but then had a max play. On the first game. So we know how the whole day is going to go right from the outset. And when Madars couldn't score, that basically set the tone and the rest didn't matter. Oh well, at least I thought the edge of the play might have been a bit overstated and toned the bet down slightly, but it's still a bad one. We go again today:

Smith/Campbell - 70/30

Searle/Gilding - 60/40

Heta/Mansell - 68/32

Noppert/Edhouse - 71/29

Chisnall/Menzies - 52/48

Anderson/Nijman - 60/40

de Decker/Joyce - 59/41

van Veen/Gurney - 73/27

Dobey/Springer - 55/45

Wade/Wenig - 59/41

Wright/Pilgrim - 76/24

Clayton/Wattimena - 56/44

Smith/Harrysson - 76/24

Aspinall/Brooks - 49/51

Schindler/Pietreczko - 62/38

Bunting/Woodhouse - 62/38