Let's sim the Pro Tour

First of all, let's all wish Kyle Anderson a swift recovery.

Into week two of the coronaplague police state, and people are going a bit nuts - everyone is simming everything. FDI's done a whole ladies' tour, a few people have done various popularity contests, so let's go nuts on this one. Let's sim a whole Pro Tour season on steroids. But, to make it more interesting, we're going to invite non-tour card holders.

How am I going to do this? I'm going to pick 24 players from just outside the Pro Tour rankings, and rotate them in somewhat at random, having some of the main tour players step out to let them in. What we'll do is:

PC 1-6: All 128 Pro Tour players in
PC 7-30: 16 random Pro Tour players replaced by 16 invites

Everyone on the main tour will miss out on three events (this kind of simulates what happens for a lot of players anyway), while everyone on the invite list will get sixteen events to "show" what they can do, so they get more or less half a season. We'll use the current Pro Tour Order of Merit to seed players, but to shake things up slightly so we don't get the same potential matchups every single tournament, once we have the seeding order we will do what they do in tennis and shuffle things about a bit. Seeds 1-4 will be placed as normal, but seeds 5-8, 9-16, 17-24 and 25-32 will be randomised within their own groupings. We'll then run things through the master computer, although I'm not going to run out every leg, just a win/loss based on the standard projection system, albeit tweaked slightly so that I'll add 2% to the winning chance for every one point differential in consistency (for newer readers, consistency rating is winning points per turn minus losing points per turn), if only so that we don't have Sherrock going in as a favourite against Gurney.

So which 24 players am I going to pick? I've expanded my database back to include as long ago as the 2019 (PDC) worlds, have sorted by points per turn, and while I've not gone purely on that ranking (I've needed to exclude some players like Paul Lim and Keane Barry based on lack of sample to run the sim with, and have passed on some players just to ge ta bit more variety), it roughly represents the best of what's out there. In alphabetical order, I've gone with:

Seigo Asada
Danny Baggish
Stephen Burton
Corey Cadby
Robert Collins
Ritchie Edhouse
David Evans
Andrew Gilding
Cody Harris
Paul Hogan
Boris Koltsov
Nico Kurz
Noel Malicdem
Kyle McKinstry
Cameron Menzies
Scott Mitchell
Arron Monk
Nathan Rafferty
James Richardson
Fallon Sherrock
Scott Taylor
Mario Vandenboegarde
Wayne Warren
Jim Williams

Fairly wide selection there - I think the only surprise is that I've not got any Dutch players on there, although most of the good ones are on the tour right now, and apart from maybe Veenstra or Landman, or maybe some of the younger guys like Nijman or van Tergouw, nobody is jumping out to say pick me (while looking through the FDI Dutch list, is Christian Kist really only 33?), so I won't. It's my sim, I'll pick who I want :)

It'll take a fair bit of time to put all the technical gubbins into place before doing the draw, so don't expect anything immediately, it sounds like we'll have plenty of time to do this sadly.