Let's talk about the USA for a minute

I'm going to ignore Adrian Lewis and Stephen Bunting getting fucked over by a flawed testing procedure for a virus we don't need to worry about right now (and, as a consequence, Chris Dobey, I'm sure having his game shifted at the last minute didn't help his preparation one bit, although it looks like Simon Whitlock played pretty well). Let's talk about the CDC series, and these are the stats of the top handful of players:

Those really aren't bad stats. They're not bad stats at all. Especially for Baggish - I mean yeah, it's a less than 100 leg sample, but that's really good. If he plays like that he's certainly a danger to do some damage at the worlds. There's not many players with such a flat average in terms of winning/losing in my database around that sort of level, I guess the closest is Damon Heta - but that should give you a bit of a clue. I wouldn't sleep on him and there will probably be some value. The others there certainly look like they'd be able to give lower level tour card holders a bit of a problem. A couple of the Canadian guys are also in and around that level from the week before. The North American standard certainly seems to be improving and, assuming that the world stops losing their mind, Baggish could definitely do some damage on the Pro Tour level. I'm certainly excited to see what he can do in the worlds.

Back tomorrow with round 2 thoughts, although it'll probably be very brief and potentially at short notice.