Thursday, 13 February 2020

Mishmash of things

Few things to talk about:

- They've announced the PC5/6 entries, a little bit strange to see Dobey not playing in either, Larsson I can kind of understand (there's a Nordic/Baltic weekend the week after, so getting back in the area perhaps?), Thornton and Whitlock also miss the Saturday so that gives Dennant and van de Wal a shot in that one, along with Mitchell and Collins getting into both. Shows just how huge that winning an early Challenge Tour really is.

- Scottish Open is showing on Dart Connect, which is nice.

- Tour Card holders qualifiers tomorrow for Belgium and Sindelfingen, seems like it's fairly well attended, DvdB and Huybrechts get a free pass for the first one and Clemens/Hopp for the second, early chance for people to have a couple of good games and get decent ranking money into the bank. Someone did post up the seedings on Twitter, there's a few up there that are fairly surprising to be honest.

- They've announced the US exbo players, and it looks pretty vanilla. It's the top eight in the world minus Michael Smith and plus Sherrock. Obviously Sherrock has forced their hand somewhat, but unless they're going to do something special with the other events (and as they probably forcefeed Whitlock into Australia as one of the PDC eight, that's further limited), it seems the days of the World Series being a stepping stone for those around 11-25 in the world is more or less gone. I know there's the Contenders now, but that's one game.

- I bet on Cross each way in the first two PC events, but was that a good idea? Someone talked about form in non-ranking events on Twitter, obviously those are meaningless, but if we look at, say, from September onwards (so it gets a few of the back end floor events, as well as one of his major wins, if we just do after his last major win there's little sample), he's barely scoring 92 a turn! It's notthing like when there was a clear three or four away in the 2019 full sample, of which Cross was one of them. Above him in that sample (and, for Cross, this is nearly 350 legs) are Dobey, Humphries, Clayton, de Zwaan, Pipe, Suljovic, Chisnall, Ratajski, Clemens, de Sousa and White, along with the entirety of the Premier League players sans Gurney. That's a substantial list. Now it'd obviously be silly to start ringing alarm bells about someone who's won two major titles in slightly more than the last six months, but punting on Cross at 20/1 may not be the automatic investment it first looked like.

- Better each way tips based on that list might be White at 35, de Sousa at 66, Clemens at 60, Ratajski and Suljovic at 45 are probably still good, Pipe at 150 appears excellent, maybe also chuck Huybrechts in at that price as well.

I'm away this weekend so don't expect anything substantial until Sunday evening at the earliest.

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