Wednesday 3 October 2018

Lakeside*

A brief interlude, given that the BDO have had their worlds qualifiers today. Hilariously, Andy Hamilton managed to win one of the spots, funny given that he was the first reserve who'd be in assuming someone already qualified won the World Masters (which starts tomorrow), so that first reserve, given that Roger Janssen is in through a regional list, goes to none other than Wes Newton. We also saw Nigel Heydon qualify, who's a somewhat familiar name from PDC darts who had a bit of a spell at the start of the decade but seemingly hadn't played a thing in over a year according to dartsdatabase, he has zero BDO ranking points anyway, Krzysztof Kciuk made it as well, who you might recall was the guy that knocked Ratajski out of the Ratajski qualifier for the PDC worlds last year, and the last guy in is Ryan Hogarth, someone I don't know much about but he's in their top 50 and played in the World Trophy, so likely isn't completely awful. It was a big qualifier to come through at least.

A few other names got deep - van Tergouw was one game away (lost to Kciuk in a deciding set), other last game losers were Matt Clark and Adam Smith-Neale who we know from the PDC (Clark recently enough to still be in the top 150 of the FRH rankings, Smith-Neale is there as well but will drop off when the 2017 UK Open qualifier points do), and the last final round loser was Chris Gilliland, who nearly made it through the qualifiers for a second year in a row, which would have been some feat. Others in the last 32 included Alan Soutar, Larry Butler, Gary Stone and Nick Kenny, there's quite a few fairly well known players that won't be there.

Of those that we knew before, other than the top 8 which I'll probably go into a bit further nearer the Slam, I'm mostly interested to see what Parletti will do having come from nowhere to be the ten seed, Hogan obviously, O'Shea for local funk power (no Fitton sadly), McKinstry to see if he can make a bit of a run, while we'll see if McGrath, after getting a win in the Auckland PDC exbo, has upped his game enough to get a win in the BDO worlds. Obviously the new names will be of interest - Janssen as mentioned above has had some results so who knows, there's two or three in the 17-24 list that I really don't know as well.

Quickly on the Grand Prix, was pleased to see Chisnall get the win and Gurney to hold off a bit of a come back from Meulenkamp, those results take us to a new high in terms of profit, and up enough that if we miss both the White and Wilson bets we're still break even for the tournament. A Gurney/Anderson quarter could be interesting, can't really say the same about a van Gerwen/Chisnall quarter, which we've seen so many times before. Would almost have been worth losing the bet to see van Gerwen/van Barneveld again. Looking back, that's the first time in ten years that all the four seeds have made it to the quarters in a half of the draw here. The player with the Chisnall death seed that time? Andy Hamilton. Funny how things come full circle.

* - assuming the event is held at Lakeside. Has that even been announced?

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