PL new format

Couple of announcements been made by the PDC over the last day or two. The one I'm most excited about is that the Rileys' qualifiers for the UK Open are back - while in the last year of them they did kind of get overrun by a bunch of Challenge Tour players, it is always fun to see who can win a tournament to play their way in - especially if it's a relative unknown.

The big one however is the Premier League revamp. I get a feeling this one isn't going to go down that well. As the glorified exbo to end all glorified exboes, it does need shaking up now and again, but I don't think they've thought this one through. I could understand a cut down to eight, I mean eight players did pick themselves then de Sousa and Dimitri made it up to ten by default, and you don't necessarily want to pick players by default, but the format I feel will get stale, and quickly. While in the old format, you did see repeating matches, it was only ever once in the whole league. Right now, you have the very strong possibility of seeing the same matches for weeks on end. It may be new and exciting in week one, but if we're on week five and we're seeing Price against Wright at some stage for the fifth week in a row, it's going to get boring. Fast.

Additionally, what the hell are they thinking with regards to the scoring? Win your first game, you get two points. Win your second game, you get one point. Win the final, and you get two points plus a token (for these players at least) cash prize. Having the first round game be the (equal) most valuable game in terms of points seems like a horrific mistake, if you go 1-1 in every single week of the season you will finish with an above average number of points. That doesn't seem right at all. The PDC have previous for this, it was like that in either the UK Open qualifier prize structure or the Pro Tour back in the day, it is now back to like that in the Pro Tour now, it's also like that on the European Tour unless they've changed the prize money again and I've not noticed (and I'd like to think I would notice). Making it six for a win, three for a final and one for a semi final would be much more sensible.

Will comment on Q-School extensively tomorrow and probably compile some stats for those who've got cards. I'll want to look at the stats as a whole ahead of the Challenge Tour anyway.