The fat of the land

Well, that was a strange day in terms of the bets. Have Lennon miss match darts, get dragged to a deciding leg by Norris who's playing his only good game all season, Lennon wins the bull then Norris throws in a twelve darter, Beaton can't score and loses to Dobey, Rowby chucks away a two set lead, then Ryan Searle gets us out of it partially by beating Mensur Suljovic who threw six maximums in four legs in the first set. How odd. As ochepedia pointed out, we've now had three players this year miss darts for the match and go on to lose - Jose de Sousa, Wayne Jones and Steve Lennon - no prizes for guessing what the common factor in those matches was. Still, I think I heard Searle using Breathe by the Prodigy as his walk on, if you use van Gerwen's old walk on then you might play like him to. Maybe that's how it works.

Tomorrow we round off the second round. Eight games up - we've already looked at van de Pas/Long and I don't want to look at it again, second game is Hendo/Clemens. Gabriel was clinical in finishing off Aden Kirk who really looked a bit out of his depth and not in form, and I more or less can't split the two. The bookies can't either, so let's move on to West versus North, we looked at this one earlier and thought the 4/7 West line was close to on the money, so next up we have Kyle Anderson kicking off his campaign against Noel Malicdem, who got past Jeffrey de Graaf in what was a fairly sluggish game. That's obviously all the data I have on Noel, he was doing OK without de Graaf helping to boost his average at all, but nothing to really think that he can trouble Kyle, and the line of 1/5 Anderson reflects that.

In the evening we start with Ian White against Devon Petersen. In the season long stats I'm seeing this as nearly 97% for White. 1u White 1/5, Devon didn't do anything against Jones to make me think anything different is going to happen rather than what should have happened against Jones, but with White being a slight bit shaky on stage over the past few months I'm just going to go with the solitary unit. Klaasen/Brown we've done and we're on Brown for half a unit, we then get Price against Aspinall, Nathan beating the Dutch youngster Nentjes in straight sets on Tuesday, looking pretty good outside of a couple of trainwreck legs which dragged the whole standard down. Nathan's been playing well all year, has won a title, and his stats aren't that far behind Price's at all. Even if you filter down since the summer break, where Price won his Euro Tour event, his major title and has been over his injury, Aspinall is still better than one in three to win. That said, the market isn't quite as all over Price as I thought they might have been and the best price we can get is 13/5, which I honestly don't think is enough. The last game is a mouthwatering tie between Jonny Clayton and Dimitri van den Bergh - Dimitri is installed as the favourite, which seems counter-intuitive given Clayton is the seed, has won a bigger event this year than Dimitri has, and that Dimitri really didn't play well against Puleo at all. The projections agree though, but they don't have the Belgian anywhere near as far in front as is needed to consider a bet, and over more recent form it looks more like a coinflip game. So the only thing we're adding is an expected punt on Ian White, which I think everyone saw coming a mile off.