Pre-Matchplay final checkup

Peter Wright's claimed his second title in as many days, so with Michael van Gerwen and James Wade having given this Pro Tour double header a miss, let's have a quick look at the stats of the remaining 30 players from these two events:

Clearly Peter is leading the way, but some interesting things to note:

- Michael Smith's got to count himself pretty unlucky - sure, you wouldn't expect two first round losses to Toni Alcinas and Pete Hudson, but it's not like he was playing badly in the legs he lost.
- The other players up there are those that you'd have thought would be, but Joe Cullen's put a bit of form together right at the right time, capped with a final run today (although he was obliterated therein) following a last 16 yesterday. Maybe it's not so straightforward for Ian White as we first thought.
- While Smith lost twice in the first round, so did his opponent Jamie Hughes (to Josh Payne and Kirk Shepherd), and didn't look good in either of them, not the greatest of looks coming into a big major. Similarly, fellow newbie on the circuit Glen Durrant seemed a fair bit off the pace, sure it took Wright to beat him yesterday, but he did chuck away a 5-2 lead in that then lose to Steve West in the opening round today.
- Speaking of Wright, the players in his quarter really haven't performed - five of the seven others are all in the bottom ten of this pair of events, Gurney's also in the bottom half - only Jonny Clayton continues to put up any kind of resistance in his quarter and and 7/4 for Peter Wright to claim it looks really quite good.

New FRH rankings:

1 Michael van Gerwen
2 Michael Smith (UP 1)
3 Rob Cross (DOWN 1)
4 Gary Anderson
5 Gerwyn Price
6 Daryl Gurney
7 James Wade
8 Nathan Aspinall
9 Peter Wright
10 Ian White
11 Dave Chisnall
12 Mensur Suljovic
13 Simon Whitlock
14 Jonny Clayton
15 Adrian Lewis
16 Joe Cullen
17 Darren Webster
18 Stephen Bunting
19 Max Hopp
20 Jermaine Wattimena

Cross's prize money degrading faster than Smith's has helped Michael claim the #2 spot in the rankings despite a pretty poor couple of days results wise. Otherwise there's no movement - Wright's double bink has kept him above White where some real failures would have seen him slip to #10, he's opened up a near 20k point gap over him and is back within 10k of Aspinall. Cullen's final has stabilised him in the top 16 for now, lower down Ron Meulenkamp's semi final yesterday sees him hit the top 50, Justin Pipe is now solidly back in the top 64 following his final, a couple of board wins for Christian Kist has bumped him back into the top 90, surprise semi finalist today Adrian Gray is up to near the top 128.

I'm going to shove all the first round matchups into the master computer with all of the data from the last two days and recommend bets accordingly, watch this space.