Sunday 23 May 2021

Catch up

Been a pretty long time since a post, so what's gone on since then?

I've updated the second/third division darts page following Super Series 3. Barely any games given the number of players that chose to give it a miss, nothing to see here. Oddly more games played in division three than two.

They've announced details of the Challenge Tour and Development Tour. It's a shame they've had to split it into two as they have done, as that'll massively dilute the quality of the fields, but I'm not sure what else they could realistically do, and it at least gives certainty to players below the Pro Tour level as to what sort of PDC darts they can expect to get in. Six events in three days is a tad ambitious, but with the field size effectively halved, I think they can get away with it.

Still nothing on the European Tour. At this stage, there's realistically nothing before the Matchplay going to happen, but it would be nice if they could tentatively schedule something. I can understand them not wanting to play hokey-cokey with moving events around, but it is a little bit irritating. For this reason, I've not added any of the German Superleague stats to the database - first, I'm still undecided as to the overall quality (it dragged Clemens' stats down a bunch last season), second, by the time I can actually use it for anything useful (which would be to get a line on domestic European Tour qualifiers), the data is going to be somewhat stale.

Good news is that we've got some WDF stuff starting soon. It's mostly Oceanic stuff through until the Dutch Open, but ranked events is a big bonus. After that though, there's at least enough scheduled for things to really pick up - October in particular looks packed with stuff from round here. Hopefully sanity will have prevailed by that stage.

I've been watching a few Youtube videos from someone who makes a living trading on Betfair, and was thinking of chucking down some thoughts on if there's anyone that we can make speculative punts on in order to lay back later in the worlds, but I don't think I will. Simply, there's no liquidity in the market. That said, checking some of what has been matched, if you're the punter who got MvG at 17.5 or Wright at 80 (!), then good job. It's all very well me thinking that Keane Barry's got the quality to bink something and shorten, but if there's only four quid available at a price that's shorter than I can get on the sportsbook, then going on the exchange for the exchange's sake seems like a pointless play. If I want to trade it, I want to pick someone who has the capability of binking something big, or at least going extremely deep, which will shift the public's perception enough that the price plummets. All the value in the usual suspects of de Sousa and Clayton has long gone. Maybe someone like a Cullen (50/1) or Heta (80/1 on Boyles, 66/1 elsewhere) has a chance, but how much damage would they have to do in a major to shift the price down heavily enough before the off that it's worth it? Similar with Humphries, van Duijvenbode, but they're even shorter right now. Dolan at 250/1 outside of the exchange looks tempting, as does Noppert, but what would they need to do to drive the price down to double digits?

What I will do on a similar subject though is revisit the thought process that goes through looking for Players Championship each way value. The next event runs Monday to Thursday, so I can have a look on the weekend before and that should hopefully give plenty of time to walk through a plan of attack.