Big weekend just gone

Let's look at the WDF first - Matt Campbell won an event in Canada which sadly only seemed to have the final on Dart Connect, while Wayne Warren and Nick Kenny claimed titles in Romania, some interesting new names coming through that I've not heard of before, and a few that haven't been seen for a bit.

To the PDC, and the first Challenge Tour weekend is in the bank - let's look at the winners, as due to the top heavy nature of it, they're going to get first dibs at the Players Championship events, through at least twelve and possibly fourteen of the events. Robert Collins? That's believable. Scott Mitchell (who I believe did enough on the remaining events to top the table, Erik did the table but I can't find the tweet right now)? That's very believable. Matt Dennant? Fine. Jitse van de Wal? Now that's a real oddball winner, but fair play to the lad, the Dutch production line keeps producing them, will be one to keep an eye out for in next weekend's Dutch Open.

We zoom forward towards the Dutch Open now, it's always a fun event to try to keep track of. It's rumoured to be on Dart Connect, but we'll wait and see, it's not there yet - hopefully at a minimum I can find a stream and get the key parts logged in the database - but something I'll do at some point this week is take another look at the Challenge Tour and how it's scheduled, and how they can speed things up a bit. Mitchell won his event after last orders, which is a bit silly - obviously if you're running through 300+ players twice it will take a while, but the matches do have one thing on Dart Connect - timestamps. Using those, and this could take a while, I should be able to demonstrate how they can speed things up by better using their resources. It's what project managers, or wage thieves as they're better known, refer to as a Gantt chart - I'll plot when each board is in use, and hopefully it should show a bloody huge leak in how they run these events. The only small problem is that the board that are listed on Dart Connect aren't the actual boards they are using - at least in the later stages when they're down through to the last 32 onwards and it filters down to using "boards 1-16", that Callum Francis played Jerry Hendriks between 8:03 and 8:20 on board 7 in event 4, while Boris Koltsov played Graham Usher between 8:11 and 8:24 on board 7 as well is kind of a clue, but if I spot where there's overlap and allocate the overlapping game to the lowest numbered board available, it should still demonstrate what they can do to fix things.