DEVON

Oh my god, he actually went and did it - Petersen's the latest PDC title holder, and did it in some style with an 8-3 drubbing of Jonny Clayton in the final, after taking out Ratajski and Noppert in the previous rounds. Long overdue, he's just been playing far too good to not win one soon. He's got himself into the Grand Slam as a result, as well as locking up a very high seed for the European Championship. Well, the Slam probably isn't 100% certain, but with the amount of standard PDC spots, it'd require quite the permutation of results for him not to get in.

New FRH rankings:

1 Michael van Gerwen

2 Peter Wright

3 Gerwyn Price

4 Rob Cross

5 Dimitri van den Bergh

6 Michael Smith

7 Nathan Aspinall

8 Glen Durrant

9 Daryl Gurney

10 Dave Chisnall

11 James Wade (UP 1)

12 Gary Anderson (DOWN 1)

13 Ian White

14 Krzysztof Ratajski

15 Mensur Suljovic

16 Adrian Lewis

17 Jonny Clayton (UP 2)

18 Chris Dobey

19 Simon Whitlock (DOWN 2)

20 Joe Cullen

Wade's run to the quarters was enough to see him pass Anderson, while Clayton's final was enough to see him inch up a couple of spots, Dobey staying still by passing Whitlock. There's not much between Smith and Aspinall right now with only a couple of thousand points between them, Durrant's within a Pro Tour win of passing both. Lower down, Noppert is now just one spot outside the top 20 after a semi final run, King gets back into the top 25 after the same, while Petersen is close to the top 32, he's got a bit of a gap but it should close fairly quickly in current form.

They've done the Grand Prix draw, and holy living fuck - that's stacked as anything. There's no way that van Gerwen should be the favourite. No fucking way. He is though, albeit a price of 10/3 is as long as he's been in a tournament this small since I can remember. I posted up a little chart on Twitter earlier today in response to a Petersen question, which listed the top 10 in 2020 by points per turn - van Gerwen is third, and if he gets past Ratajski (seventh) in round one, then he'll get either Petersen (fourth) or de Sousa (fifth) in the second round. Taking each of Wright and Price each way at 11/2 looks like it should be a good play - do this and, assuming one of them reaches the final (and their half of the draw doesn't look overly threatening), you book a tiny loss (if you go a tenner each way, i.e. £40 placed, that gives you a loss of £2.50) and then have a huge freeroll in the final where they'd be a favourite against anyone not called MvG (freerolling to hit £55). Seems value to me.

Some other good ties - Lewis/Dobey could be close, Smith/Dimitri ought to be good, I'm interested to see what DvD can do against Suljovic, Cross/Ando is a huge match, while Chizzy/Durrant is also likely to be highly entertaining.

We've got a bit of downtime now, there's no darts next weekend, so don't expect anything rushed for the GP yet.