Sunday 26 November 2017

Players Championship - Final Session

Happy enough with the Beaton bet. Having the darts and a break 11 legs into a 19 leg match is a position where you'll normally win, but that 12th leg was absolutely key - if your opponent offers you eighteen darts to break you need to take it at this level, at 8-4 and throwing the game is done. This, of course, is what Clayton did to get the critical break. Oh well. Pipe winning was a big shock, neither played great but Pipe held it together at the end. Cross winning over Wade was pretty standard, Cross not being at his steamrolling best, but getting enough legs cleaned up in fifteen which Wade doesn't really have the scoring to break. Dekker put up a fair bit more resistance than was expected, and should fill him with confidence ahead of tomorrow's World Championship draw.

Rob Cross against Jonny Clayton in a best of 21 should be a Cross win, I've got it at 78% Cross to win before a decider compared to 10% for Clayton, with Cross being priced up at 1/6 then I think there might be small value still on Cross, but it's not really enough to go chasing. Michael van Gerwen has just finished and there's no odds yet, but I'm getting Pipe at just over 2% to win - given van Gerwen was 1/25 or there abouts against Dekker, I can't see that there's any sort of value here.

So that leaves a probable final of Cross against van Gerwen. On the stats I have from the start of the year, I have it 67% to van Gerwen before a decider compared to 18% for Cross, so a final line based on that should be around 1/4 van Gerwen and 7/2 Cross (van Gerwen is 1/4 to win the whole event, and lines of 1/25 on van Gerwen to beat Pipe have just come up, so this seems like it should be quite accurate), but if we look at comparisons just on this event, it's a lot, lot closer. Both have obviously won the same amount of legs (32), both of them have the same number of twelve dart legs (9), and the remaining legs won are very similar, with van Gerwen getting 13 legs in five visits and 10 legs in six visits, Cross with one less in each of those two categories where he took more than six visits to kill. Both have lost the same number of legs (16), with just a 30 point difference in the total points scored - while Cross has scored more points, he's had an extra three visits to do so, so his average in losing legs of 94.01 is just beaten out by van Gerwen's 97.51. Based on just this event, it could be a lot closer than the line suggests. I'm not going to suggest to bet on Cross to win, but if you can get a decent price on something like +3.5 legs or perhaps +5.5 legs (thinking that van Gerwen should win the throw, +3.5 covers the situation where he gets just the one break and wins 11-8, taking +4.5 seems horribly pointless) then go for it.

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