BDO worlds

That post I mentioned on the BDO seedings - that's coming up, but first, van Gerwen beat Chisnall, might have been a bit closer, but oh well, probably more of interest is that Keane Barry came from behind to take advantage of Liam Gallagher missing many, many match darts to claim his worlds spot. New FRH rankings:

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

Not quite as much movement as you'd expect - Chizzy cracks the top 10 and is actually less than 5k behind Anderson and only 10k behind Aspinall, so with a couple of other good runs, maybe he can go higher? Wright's out of the top 10, but is less than a thousand points behind White so could reclaim that soon. Durrant's semi only cains him one spot, but Ratajski is less than 4k ahead. Dobey's semi final sees him rist to #23, King's quarter wasn't quite enough to get him into the top 20.

OK, the BDO. I'll talk mostly about the men's side, as there's not a great deal to talk about at this stage on the women's side other than that the Ashton side seems a heck of a lot easier than the Suzuki/de Graaf/Greaves/Dobromyslova side. First, the non-seeds - Bennett's the most exciting name, it's great to see new countries represented in France and Romania from the regional tables, Adams getting back is nice to see, the likes of Unterbuchner, Steyer, Landman, Hogan, Thompson, Chaney and Herewini could all cause damage. We'll know more once they've done the draw, but let's look at the seeding sections:

(1) Harms, (16) Waites, (8) Mandigers, (9) Mitchell

That's hard. That's potentially really hard for Harms, you've got the previous year's finalist, and also another previous winner meeting in consecutive rounds. I don't think Waites plays anywhere near the full tour, and I doubt Mitchell plays everything either, so these could well be underseeded. Harms has picked up quite a few wins this year, so fair enough that he gets the one seed. That leaves Mandigers - he had a nice purple patch in May where he picked up a large percentage of his qualifying points, but he does seem the odd one out here.

(4) Parletti, (13) Evans, (5) Warren, (12) Hamilton

This doesn't appear that strong really. Parletti seems to do alright on the circuit, but goes missing in the major events, but is anyone else stronger? Evans at least got two of his three biggest events last month, and has done decent work on the Challenge Tour and looked good in the couple of Pro Tour events we've seen him in, so might fancy his chances of a run. Warren's a pretty consistent performer and can't be taken lightly, then we've got the Hammer, whose qualifying performances are a bit underwhelming, lots of last 16 performances and his highest single event was back in 2018.

(3) Veenstra, (14) Robson, (6) Kleermaker, (11) Vandenbogaerde

Veenstra looks like the class of this section, having claimed the Dutch Open and made the World Trophy final, he should be way too strong for Robson, who's a bit like Hamilton in that his points to qualify haven't come from any real deep runs, it's certainly not been as good a year as his 2018 was but at least he's done enough to get in the seeds. Kleermaker has come along a lot in 2019, taking the Welsh Open and several other lower tier events and can certainly be considered a threat to Veenstra, while the Belgian claimed his biggest points haul winning the German Open back in May, but everything else seems a long time ago, or in much lower ranked events. Can't look past a 3/6 quarter final here.

(2) Williams, (15) Hogarth, (7) Kenny, (10) Smith-Neale

Williams has grabbed the first BDO major of the year, and has a string of other very good performances which makes him the clear favourite to advance to the semi finals from this part of the draw. Hogarth had a great run to the Dutch Open final but has been quiet apart from that, I don't know if he'll have enough to pressure Williams if they were to meet up. Kenny is back from a down year where he didn't even qualify and is putting together his best scores in the last couple of months, so is certainly trending in the correct direction, then we have Smith-Neale, who I don't think is playing anywhere near as well as he was twelve months ago when he was able to claim the World Masters out of nowhere, this looks for all the world like an all-Welsh quarter final.

I'll update the Second/Third Division Darts rankings shortly, with not long left to go it'll be interesting to see who can claim the titles there.