Well that's Q-School done

What an absolute train wreck that was. Picks went horribly, only getting two from the UK pool (Payne outright and Hall on points), EU pool was a bit better as I got six from the points list but nobody outright. Can't really complain with the players that got in, there's quite a few new interesting faces, seemingly a minimum number of retreads that are basically just wasting a spot, there's two or three from the UK list that I'm not really interested in seeing, but generally the list of players is good. Might have got more from the UK list, but I picked three players where it turned out they, at least on the face of it), had zero interest in winning a card and were just playing a day to get Challenge Tour eligibility.

Still can't quite believe that Plaisier didn't make it out of stage one, that was a shocker, and it's a pity that Tricole didn't make it, thankfully Sherrock didn't make it which would probably have turned a huge bit of the PDC into a clown show. Weird someone said I sounded a bit dull when expressing this opinion, and they follow me on Twitter at the same time. Odd behaviour.

In terms of who I'm most excited in seeing, Cadby's got to be at the top of the list. Hopefully he can play most of the schedule. Similar with Perez, I have no clue how much he's going to play. For new players, Veenstra's going to be a good one to watch, we've seen that he can put up a good consistent level in a lot of tournaments and will not be an easy out. Slevin looks like he could be a good young one to watch. There's several other good young names through the points lists. At some point this week I'm probably going to go through the stage 2 data and see how everyone's winning legs look to try to gauge how they will play if they keep that up.

For now it's all eyes to the Challenge Tour, and who's going to show up to it and get an early shot at getting into Pro Tour events. If rumours regarding at least one new card holder are accurate, there should be some spots up for grabs for sure. After that, it's the Dutch Open the following week, so 

Last thing to say is that they really, really need to look at how Q-School is organised. That Whitehead didn't win a card by playing on day 4 where if he had stayed in his hotel room he would have done is an absurd situation. They really, really need to switch to a Swiss system for stage two - failing that, they need to top up from the stage one points list so that every day has 128 entrants. That there were byes on day 1 was kind of absurd. Another thing they need to do is to say that the last sixteen of each day of round one are straight through - the fields are deep enough that you have enough points from it, just take them out of the field and make the tournament that little bit quicker.