Monday 4 June 2018

World Cup explosion

The PDC have finally got their finger out and announced what they're going to do for the world championship. It's 96, thankfully, and more or less what I said they should hurry up and do last week - "At least they should say we're having 96 players, consisting of 32 seeds, 32 from the Pro Tour rankings and 32 invites from international tours/qualifiers/PDPA qualifier etc."

So that's exactly what they've done. 32 seeds, 32 from the Pro Tour OOM (seemingly just a straight 32, rather than however many and then the next best remainder from outside the UK/Ire), and then an interesting list of qualifiers. The top four from the Asian Tour is a big boost to that region, given they still have a Japanese and Chinese qualifier (also adding an Indian qualifier, presumably to get Prakash Jiwa in), they look to have an extra spot for North America, which is probably about right, while they've also added two ladies qualifiers - one from the UK and one from outside.

I'm not sure about this. Really not sure at all. Darts doesn't really have any sort of gender inequality in the sense that female players cannot play at the same level as the men, so having two qualifiers which exclude half of all possible players doesn't seem right to me. I'm also not sure how this will sit with the BDO's version of the worlds - £7.5k just for turning up even if you lose nine straight legs will get you more than anything other than outright binking their worlds. Sure, some of the top players could probably get close to there on merit, but are the BDO going to blackball anyone who plays the qualifier and loses (I assume they won't also allow whoever makes the PDC worlds to play theirs at the same time)? It's a bit of a risk for anyone that's actually good on the women's side.

I watched a bit of the BDO World Trophy. The standard of the darts wasn't bad, the standard of the production was. I could have done a better job of it using OBS and streaming to Twitch. Stream was flaky and breaking up, camera quality of zooms on the doubles was woeful. Not really sure of the point of having it on some TV channel on page 94 of the Sky guide just to say it's televised. If it's not on Sky or BT, nobody's going to notice it. Just stream it to Twitch - you'll probably get more viewers, and more of a community experience. This is particularly important if you want to try to capture a younger audience - I'm nearer 40 than 30, but I can't recall the last time before yesterday I watched TV outside of football at the pub. It was probably the UK Open. On the other hand, I watch Twitch streams or bookmaker streams more or less daily.

I also watched a bit of the World Cup, good to see Japan having a bit of a run, while you had some real quality games, particularly featuring the Netherlands. Seems to have qualified both Barney and Cadby for the Grand Slam - in terms of the BDO side, now that their outright places have been won by Duzza, Duzza and Ratajski, I guess it's just their top eight.

Here's something to think about in terms of the previous post - let's say that we've got two players that have exactly a 50% strike rate on both trebles and doubles. Now let's adapt these players - the first one, we'll call him Peter Manley, acquires the ability to hit his double in one dart every single time. The second one, we'll call him Someone Else, acquires an increasing chance of hitting his trebles. What percentage of hitting trebles do you think that he needs to improve to in order to be a favourite to win a match? 65%? 70%? More?

It's actually just 57%. Less than you thought, eh?

1 comment:

  1. If they're going to have women's slots, it's a pity they come a couple of years too late for Stacy Bromberg. RIP

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