So a word on what this is showing, before we start thinking about who we want to punt on. The seeds and players should be obvious. The odds are in decimal, and the points per turn metric is the same as what we usually use - dating back to September inclusive. There's an argument that information from that long ago isn't going to be massively relevant, but I'd rather take some extra hard information to increase sample size.
Now that last column is the key one. What I've done here is taken the number of points per turn everyone's scoring above 87, cubed it, and then multiplied it by the odds. Getting something like this perfect is going to be hard - the quality of player doesn't necessarily increase exponentially, but it does increase more than linearly I think, if we take someone scoring 85 per turn, then I'd think that someone scoring 95 probably has more than twice the advantage of someone scoring 90, but I think I've needed to do this in order to account for the wild swings in odds, unless you're wanting to chuck out the very short priced players.
Let's look at who jumps out. In the top quarter, Mensur looks useful. Still got a very good game, still has the ability to go very deep (he has a tour win in the sample used), 50's is fairly tempting, and aside from van Gerwen, his quarter isn't really that threatening, and even Michael doesn't look his usual invincible self. van Gerwen would have to go through Cross to get to that point, and while we've pointed out that Rob's maybe not in the most brilliant form previously, he's still clearly an elite player.
Second quarter has Wright and Ratajski as potential punts, but you've got to look at de Sousa. You can't look past the Portuguese guy - he's got an incredible game, is showing it this year as well, albeit running into some tricky opponents, and at 66's is very nicely priced. This isn't anything new, but is highlighting that even after two wins he's still value.
Third quarter? I had White on the Saturday last weekend, but skipped the Sunday, damnit. The only real issue is nothing to do with White's quality, we all know that, it's that this quarter is fierce beyond belief. We've gone with Clemens and Clayton a few times in these, Nathan Aspinall isn't an inspiring bet but is clearly a danger to anyone here, same with de Zwaan really, Noppie can flash and while Gurney's figures are really bad for a Premier League player, especially in 2020, he can turn it on if he needs to.
Bottom quarter has one obvious highlight in Justin Pipe, level of play is good enough that we can justify thinking about him at 150/1, but there's three very short priced players in his section that he may have to go through to win it, including an almost unavoidable Gerwyn Price, so maybe the combination of going through all of those top talents sours my enthusiasm a bit.
Then we have the wildcards. We might think Suljovic looks good - drop Humphries and Anderson (either of them I guess) in as first and second round opponents and it suddenly looks fairly horrendous. On the flip side, if any of these drop into something like, say, that eighth of the draw with Suljovic in, or the Cullen/Beaton area, or even just into a half of a board with a weak seed, then you can maybe think about taking the three figure players. Is there anyone in that list that you can look at and say nah, he can't make a Pro Tour final? I don't know. Maybe Devon is a bit of a stretch, but that's about it. Just keep an eye out on who goes where on Saturday morning, and place your bets accordingly.
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