UK Open quarter finals

No post for the last sixteen - as expected the data signal wasn't good enough to be able to do much other than peek at the draw quickly, but to be honest, looking at who drew who, I didn't see any games that I thought would be exploitable from a betting perspective - Gurney would likely have been installed as a big dog against Wright anyway, Clayton drew Dobey, Hughes drew Suljovic, maybe I'd have looked at Clemens against Price, most of the players we'd be looking at went up against each other.

Quarter finals today, as ever there's a couple of surprising names, looking quickly through the games, maybe Dimitri's worth a look at 100/30, but he's not put in any really powerful performances that make me think he can hang with Gerwyn over a longer format game. It'd only be tiny marginal value anyway, I'm only thinking this should be a 4/9 sort of price for the Welshman. I'd have expected to have been all over Cross against van Gerwen at 4/1, and if this game took place six months ago I would be (and I doubt we have this price), but looking at the last six months, he only projects to win maybe 25% of the time, so I can pass that one as well. Gurney/Klaasen's a nightmare of a game from our perspective, both are so all over the place in terms of how the model interprets their games, it's another one where maybe the underdog is the value play, but Jelle's only 7/4, and I'm only getting him up to 45%, I think with Daryl's weird propensity to outperform the model on a consistent basis, I can leave this one alone as well. This just leaves Clayton against Hughes, which I think is the only play of the day - 0.25u Clayton 4/5, he needs to win 55% of the time for this to be break even and I think he's playing well enough that he'll get there just short of two times out of three. That's enough of an edge for me.

Couple of other quick things - there's been a DPA weekend, I really like what they're doing in that each of the three tournaments they have has a bit of a different format, one's a straight knockout, another's the same but with set play instead, while the one in the middle has some sort of group stage play before a knockout. Keeps things fresh and interesting, as for the winners, I don't know much about Steve Fitzpatrick other than he had a decent performance in a quarter final loss previously, but he's won today, while Mal Cuming and Ben Robb took down the other events. Seems like the pots are getting shared around a fair bit.

Finally, we have a tragic tactical error to talk about, from the deciding leg of van Gerwen against Lowe:

This is just horrible to see. You're on 86 for the match against the best player ever who is sat on a single darter. You miss the big number, fine, it happens to everyone, at least it's not a shank into the 1 needing 100, you can rebuild. But you absolutely have to take a moment and not think "82 = go for the bull". The entire point about going bull on 82 is that with three darts in hand, you give yourself at least one dart at a double guaranteed if you hit at least the 25 in that visit. With one dart in hand, you leave yourself two darts at double when you come back, guaranteed. With two in hand though, you'd better be pretty fucking sure that your opponent isn't going to check out to not go for the biggest two targets which, in combination, will win you the match, and that is treble fourteen into tops. If you miss the treble and then miss another treble and only leave yourself on 48, it doesn't matter as you are playing Michael van Gerwen with three clear darts for the match - leaving yourself an extra dart at double next visit is irrelevant if 80%+ of the time you're not coming back. Such a shame, Lowe's been playing great stuff and this could have been a career defining win. I'm sure he'll rebuild though.