Sunday, 5 March 2023

UK Open quarters - any value?

A bit late in the day, but Dart Connect failed to get two of the last sixteen games from board two onto their system, so needed to use the much slower version of scraping from sportradar (which, unlike in round one, was actually working, avoiding the even slower version of finding the games on Youtube and scraping from there). Looks like all the big guns bar MvG are out, and as he's got a potentially tricky opponent in the quarters, perhaps it's not a formality that he wins it? We'll see. Ando was a bit disappointing in the match with Dimi, passing up many chances to get ahead earlier, then after getting back to 8-8 with the match in his hand, chokes the seventeenth leg. Oh well. Still up over a unit for the event, anything we like in the quarters?

Gilding/Schindler - Great opportunity for both here, in a match I'm finding impossible to call for either - Schindler has the tiniest edge possible, if they were to play a world final, I wouldn't even favour him by a third of a percent. As such, the tiniest of value is on Gilding (who has been this deep before, let's not forget), but at a generally best price of 11/10 it's not the edge to chase.

van Gerwen/Aspinall - Nathan's come through some tough opponents, but maybe a little bit of a breather of a match against Cullen will come in handy to keep him refreshed against MvG - let's not forget Aspinall at the Slam being completely spent in the final. van Gerwen probably had his toughest test on the Friday, with both the remaining games being relatively comfortable - one against an opponent I thought he'd steamroller but didn't, then one where I thought he'd be given a stern test, but wasn't (maybe Humphries ran out of steam given his draws). Aspinall's live but I'm not giving him a great deal better than a one in four chance. He's 10/3, again, it's not the sort of edge I'd want to jump over.

Burnett/van den Bergh - Can the Richie fairytale continue? He's already beaten one player better than Dimitri, so why not? This is actually projecting reasonably close, although I say that in terms of closer than you might think - still seeing Dimi at about a 70/30 line. That probably points towards taking Richie, but I do wonder how many times he can get away with things as he's done, what with two 10-9 wins already and overcoming a big average differential against Wright. He's clearly going to need to be opportunistic again, it can happen, but I've just got the sense that taking around 4/1 isn't quite the right play.

Cross/Gawlas - Rob's just been quietly going about his business, eliminating Beaton and the Dutch pair of RvB and JdZ, while Adam has come through several tight games before putting together his best performance probably of his career to get this far in a rout of Willie O'Connor. Rob should be far too strong and claim this a little over three quarters of the time, which with a line of 10/3 on Gawlas, is reflected in the market.

So no bets - with the only one we saw in the last sixteen being on someone who's out, this isn't unexpected. As stated, I don't hate it if you want to take a flier on Richie, I'm just not going to officially recommend it, I might have a couple of quid on the exchange for shits and giggles. Will probably NOT be back in time for the semis, but I do not predict we will see anything of value if the market's views are coinciding with ours this accurately already.

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