Q-School day 2

Second day's in the books, and we got some known winners. Let's start with the Euro qualifier, where Mike de Decker got his card after a year of more or less qualifying every weekend for the Euro Tour events from the associate qualifier, certainly seems well deserved and will be a great addition to the tour. He beat out Dennis Nilsson, who after a bad first day put himself into contention to get a card, as did everyone else who made the quarters, as nobody at that stage had a great day 1. Kleermaker's more or less a lock now after a last 16 run, it'd be hard to shift Sedlacek after the same, while Tricole hitting another last 16 has put himself into a solid position along with Krcmar adding a couple of points today.

To the UK. Bradley Brooks is back on the tour, he won through over Damon Heta, scary to think he's burned through one tour card already, won a second, and he's not even twenty. It's an unorthodox way to develop, but it's clearly working if he's won the card outright straight back again. The other outright winner is Kai Fan Leung, who's been putting up some silly averages over both days and got home, just about, over Lisa Ashton, who was the talk of the twittersphere this afternoon/evening. I don't think I'm the only one that thinks that if Ashton would have won the card outright, that'd have been a far, far greater achievement than Sherrock winning a couple of games at the worlds. Oh well. I guess the thing we really need to hope from here is that Leung actually uses the card, unlike how Royden Lam did next to nothing after he won it, apparently according to some social media quotes, he's "thinking" about bringing his family here. OK then. Maybe just suck it up here for three months and see how it goes.

On the countback in the UK, Ashton's obviously in a great spot on nine already, as is Heta - it'd take a calamitous collapse or back to back horror draws for them not to get the one or two points that'd make them secure. There's a good few familiar names up there - an odd one is Steve Brown from nowhere leading the table with Ryan Murray. Andy Hamilton, Adam Hunt, Tony Newell and James Richardson all hold countback spots right now, while Ritchie Edhouse and Andrew Gilding are just outside looking in. It doesn't take a huge deal to get in right now, but if you've not got anything right now, a bad Saturday will make things out of reach for sure. Mitchell, Asada, Scott Taylor, Monk, Barry, Jenkins, Suzuki, Waites - none of them have scored a point. If you think that you need five to get on right now, and there's plenty of people on 3-4 who may well push up to six or more after tomorrow, you need to set some sort of platform to attack on Sunday as a minimum. Remember that 10 points wasn't enough for everyone last year. Plenty of people just on a single point - Fullwell, McKinstry, Williams and Rafferty all need to do something desperately tomorrow.

Interesting news from the WDF today as well:

So they're basically saying that when the BDO goes busto, they'll take over the World Masters, and have a largish end of season event similar to the current BDO worlds, which is exactly what I said they should intend on doing. This is nice to see.