Wednesday 3 June 2020

Still waiting for news

As the Home Tour meanders to its conclusion, with Ando and Klaasen having got through the first semi final group, and with the Remote Darts League getting towards the same stage with what looks like it could be a pretty exciting fight for playoff places, only Hogan really looking safe along with Richardson if he does work with his games in hand tonight, we're still waiting for the big PDC news as to what the hell they're going to do with live darts going forward. Until then, what's to mention?

Well, Wolfie got a nine darter today. Nice work from Martin, seems like he's been playing his best stuff in quite some time.

Duzza posted an interesting question on Twitter earlier, namely whether once we're past the coronaparanoia stage, is there any sort of future for "online" darts? That's a good question, and I'm thinking there's still going to be a bit of a market, although it'll be somewhat different - obviously it's still going to be predominantly focussed around non card holders because PDC protectionism, but where there's going to be a market is in matching up players against each other that normally wouldn't play each other, or would rarely do so, for geographical and financial reasons. We're seeing the RDL do this somewhat with how they've invited some of the better Australasian and North American players, where I can see things properly going is some sort of affiliated tour face offs - it may be a little bit tricky with some of the time differentials, but I think there'd be a market for the PDC to get their affiliates to arrange some of their tour weekends at the same time, and then tack on a day to provide a streamed "tour vs tour" event. There's a few things going for this - you'd have all the players in the same venue anyway, so you'd be able to put a bit more effort into production quality, and it'd probably be reasonable enough to chuck a few quid at the players for an extra hotel night in terms of expenses.

A sensible trial event for such a thing would be DPA vs Asian Tour, if only so you eliminate much of the time differential issues that might some up with other alternatives - Japan/Korea is only an hour different, if at all, from anywhere in Australia you might think about playing an event in, places like Singapore and the Philippines would be perfect for Perth and only a couple of hours off the rest of the populated areas. Get the logistics right with everyone working on the same sort of time of the day, and then work on the rest later, although as long as you're placing the Americas so that they'd play anything from Europe from the east coast and anywhere else from the west coast, it wouldn't be insurmountable in the slightest.

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