Seems a pretty silly bit of scheduling thinking about this tournament - afternoon session on the Friday, but no afternoon session on the Saturday? Then again, the event is literally a stone's throw away from the Westfalen and Dortmund do have a home game on the Saturday afternoon, so not programming against that seems somewhat sensible. That'd be an amazing day of sport though - BVB/Hertha immediately followed by van Gerwen, Cross, Wright, Smith et al? Knew I should have booked tickets for this on spec and just seen what the fixture computer threw up.
0/2 on bets today - Lennon at least ran Smith close until Smith hit one great leg to break, hold for 5-3, then for the second time in the match Lennon couldn't go out in 21 darts on his own throw. Wattimena did nothing, well within the range of outcomes. Elsewhere, what the heck was wrong with Ian White's game - I thought he had genuine chances to go deep and he loses 6-1 to Richard North? Otherwise, it was mostly chalk and mostly one-sided forgettable games - West/King was as tight as we thought it would be, going to a decider and needing West to kill 106 after King wired bull for a 126 out, Noppert hung around against Cross for quite a while until a combination of his scoring falling off and Rob putting on the afterburners saw a 4-2 lead quickly turn into a 6-4 defeat. Nicholson was fun for two legs I guess.
There's preliminary lines out for Saturday evening. Oddschecker just has Smith/Cullen, but at least one bookie has lines for everything already and nowhere's going to be that far off.
Smith/Cullen's got Smith nearly at 1/2, is that fair? Maybe, I think it's overrating Cullen a bit. Cullen, first leg aside, really didn't play that great, Klaasen missing a stack of doubles and only getting the legs he did because Joe did the same, Smith averaged a ton and would have averaged a lot more if Lennon didn't throw junk in the first and last legs (although, if that happened, Smith is likely going home), I'm seeing this at nearly a 3-1 game in favour of Smith, so 0.5u Smith 4/7, this looks a fairly safe edge. Whitlock/Wright is next, Wright just held in six visits and broke in five every single time, pretty pedestrian stuff but not easy to really punish heavily, while Whitlock won the first leg in sixteen darts but needed no more than fifteen in any other in a 6-3 thrashing of Steve Beaton, the last two legs he won being twelve darters. The model's giving Whitlock a 35% shot - and a lot more on recent form, although on recent form the model hated Wright in the last round as well. But hey, we have the odds to go with it over the full sample quite comfortably - 0.25u Whitlock 3/1. North/Cross is third up, we talked a bit about how their games went earlier, it's a tough ask and the line looks good. We can just about get 4/1 on North, but a full sample is giving him only 21%, so there's not much there. A smaller sample is thinking he's got better chances, but betting North against the world champion in a race to 10 just seems wrong. Last is van Gerwen/West, as you'd expect the odds are pretty comical, West was OK but van Gerwen was superb, continuing his incredible form of late. For once odds of double digits odds on seem justified - especially in the more recent samples, which are putting West below 10% on the chances to come through.
That's it, today we had the longer punts, tomorrow we've got the better shots I think.
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