Weekend round up

Really pleased to see Ratajski return to form, he never exactly dropped massively, but has certainly upturned and got the win over Bunting, which would have given me an instant hit on my next five winners on the Euro Tour, but it wasn't to be, oh well, let's give you the new FRH rankings:

1 Michael Smith

2 Michael van Gerwen

3 Nathan Aspinall

4 Luke Humphries

5 Gerwyn Price (UP 2)

6 Jonny Clayton

7 Peter Wright (DOWN 2)

8 Rob Cross

9 Dirk van Duijvenbode

10 Danny Noppert (UP 1)

11 Joe Cullen (UP 1)

12 Dave Chisnall (UP 2)

13 Dimitri van den Bergh (DOWN 3)

14 Damon Heta (DOWN 1)

15 Andrew Gilding (UP 1)

16 Ross Smith (DOWN 1)

17 Ryan Searle

18 Josh Rock (UP 2)

19 Chris Dobey (DOWN 1)

20 Gabriel Clemens (DOWN 1)

Ratajski's win is not enough to propel him back into the top 20, but it enough to pump him back up to number 22, while Bunting's final pushes him up to 24. Rock continues to improve gradually, while surprise semi finalist Wesley Plaisier is just a couple of places outside the top 100, Brian Raman now safely into the top 90 after making the final session.

We've also had a bunch of qualifiers from regional tours get sorted for the worlds, let's give a quick blast through them:

Stowe Buntz - Seems like a fun player, getting a few CDC titles, maybe a touch inconsistent but probably understandable given he's come out of nowhere a little bit, standard is not bad at all.

Dave Cameron - Fairly similar player in terms of quality to Stowe, been around for a while and we know what we're going to get, been making some inroads on the seniors tour as we all know.

Tomoya Goto - In through the Asian Tour, but just seems a fair bit pedestrian compared to the CDC players mentioned already, very little in terms of explosive quality and a fair bit of a drop off when not winning legs.

Paolo Nebrida - Kind of similar, does have the advantage of returning from last year but hasn't really kicked on hugely from 2022 where it feels like he looked a bit more impressive than he has been in this season.

Reynaldo Rivera - The newer player, at least in terms of recognition, in this season's Asian Tour, Reynaldo looks quality. Scoring up towards 90 over a 120 leg sample size is no joke, he appears comfortably the best player in the region and will be someone that players want to avoid.

Alex Spellman - The hype has been building on Alex for some time now, he's certainly got enough about him that we can talk about him in the same way we have talked about the likes of Baggish and Lauby over the last 4-5 years, the only thing I can see as a potential issue is that a lot of what he has done in terms of quality has been in finishing a good proportion of legs real quickly, which may work to his disadvantage in that he may not be able to sustain his quality over a five set or better match.

Check back later in this week for Hungary, but in terms of the Euro Tour, for next year it's good to see Germany being trimmed back to just 6 events, but Switzerland in terms of a new venue is an interesting choice to say the least. Will give them the benefit of the doubt, they've not done too many things wrong in terms of locations, but that looks like a weird expansion location on paper.