ZOMG NOPPERT

Well, there's another sure fire avenue of betting value down the drain. Congrats to Danny, that was quite the jump, and commiserations to Michael who's got to be wondering at this stage what he has to do to actually bink a title. Pretty weak final session in terms of entertainment, Smith had a blistering run against Barry, but both of the Noppert games, while tense, definitely lacked quality.

Still, it's given a bit of a shakeup to the FRH rankings:

1 Peter Wright

2 Gerwyn Price

3 Michael Smith

4 James Wade

5 Michael van Gerwen

6 Jonny Clayton

7 Gary Anderson

8 Rob Cross

9 Jose de Sousa

10 Danny Noppert (UP 9)

11 Joe Cullen (DOWN 1)

12 Dimitri van den Bergh (DOWN 1)

13 Ryan Searle (DOWN 1)

14 Krzysztof Ratajski (DOWN 1)

15 Luke Humphries (DOWN 1)

16 Dave Chisnall (DOWN 1)

17 Nathan Aspinall (DOWN 1)

18 Dirk van Duijvenbode (DOWN 1)

19 Mervyn King (DOWN 1)

20 Damon Heta (NEW)

Funny that, apart from Noppert jumping everyone, there's not a huge deal happening. O'Connor and Barry climb to 33 and 38 respectively, but were obviously clearly outside, Smith with a final has now opened up over a 60k point gap to Wade. Heta is, for I think the first time, into the top 20, Bialecki's great run sees him just three places outside the top 100, would hope that he's able to build on this somehow, but it's going to be a bit tricky to do so immediately - Euro Tour qualifiers would be a tricky ask, especially considering they just ran a whole load of Eastern Europe qualis this weekend (and props to Karel Sedlacek for cleaning up), and I don't know if he's playing the Challenge Tour at all either. As such, I find it hard for him to find a pathway to add much of anything anytime soon, so will just have to regroup on the Development Tour and/or any upcoming WDF events.

We're heading on to Hildesheim next, and we've got some relatively sensible seedings, at least compared to Riesa, there's some spicy potential last 16 matchups in Price/Ratajski, Wright/Heta, Clayton/Dimitri, van Gerwen/Cross, Smith/Humphries... it should be a lot of fun, chuck in qualifiers like Dobey, Soutar, Huybrechts, Gurney, Chisnall, Lewis, Suljovic, Hughes, Waites, heck, got to say Lukeman and Evans after last weekend, as well as a pretty strong German quartet in Schindler/Clemens/Springer/Wenig, and there'll be some great games. There will, however, be no Noppert, because of course he didn't enter the quali. Oh well.

In the end on the betting we finished up one third of a unit. That could have been better, but it could easily have been worse if some marginal results went the other way. Still, we've learned and some of this should easily be applicable immediately with the associate and home nation qualifiers in ET2. We know the field, expect something back on Thursday once we know the draw.