Day god knows summary

Pretty quick, I'll be back in the morning with hopefully a round 3 megapost, but for now let's look at the Friday games.

Benito against Jim, good god, I was absolutely right to bet on Jim just based on Benito not being good, Long upped his game a bit and pushed him all the way, but got his one match dart - and missed. That's 4/4 for players who missed match darts and lost that I've bet on, this is much fun. Next was Hendo against Clemens, by all accounts it sounded like a good game (I was at work, so was listening to Mason and Nicholson etc on Talksport 2, if you've not listened to it and think darts doesn't work on radio, give it a go - it's not bad at all), some big scoring, some big outs, I don't think anyone could see a clear edge for either player and it went to the last set, value was had. West/North in the compass point derby followed, Steve got home fairly comfortably, North showed in flashes but West seemed a bit better, hitting multiple big outs on top of hitting high scores, he does seem a real threat. Kyle Anderson against Noel Malicdem ended the session, Kyle came through, although despite Kyle putting up what looked like real good numbers on paper, Malicdem pushed him incredibly hard and showed exactly what he can do, continuing a trend of the Asian qualifiers performing really well. Maybe if he could have held out the first set after pinning two huge outs the game might have ended differently.

Ian White. Good god. If another player in any tournament costs me more money than Devon Petersen for the rest of my life I'll be stunned. I'm pretty sure I'll be piling into Steve West next round, but really? Really? I'm just glad that he'd already fucked up his Premier League spot. Klassen against Brown at least pulled something back for today, it wasn't pretty, but it went something like was expected - Jelle kicked off alright but then faded and the other guy came home. Then Aspinall didn't just blow up the bottom half, he nuked it from orbit by defeating Gerwyn Price. Nice stuff, should have trusted the model and bet it. Then we had Dimitri returning to form after a questionable opening game, eliminating Jonny Clayton by bagging a nice early lead, not being able to do much in the second after Clayton found form, then nicking a third then turning on the afterburners in the second half of set four to get home.

The bottom half is such a trainwreck now that there's only two seeds in the top sixteen left in Michael Smith and Rob Cross - oddly enough the only two players I have money on each way for the title. We're going to have one of Aspinall, Kyle Anderson, Petersen, West, Alcinas, van de Pas, Dolan or King being a world championship semi finalist.

Only going to pre-emptively add 0.25u Joyce 5/6 against Norris, it looks about 60/40, nearer 2-1 on recent form, I don't think Alan's "form", if you can call it that is sustainable. I'll get to more in the morning, but for right now we're down a third of a unit, which considering the amount of really marginal stuff and other comebacks we've been on the wrong side of, seems almost like a relief.