Post Slam

Humphries is good. Scarily good. Cross did basically nothing wrong (in the legs Humphries won he was averaging 103 for crying out loud), but for all intents and purposes he couldn't lay a glove on him after the first session. Absurdly good stuff, got to give the credit to Luke but Rob can walk away from that one with his head held high. The question is now whether Humphries is the favourite to bink the worlds. I think we can break this down based on form and data. 

Let's look at where Humphries lies in terms of overall scoring through various data points - first, including the worlds and nothing before:

Anderson 96.07

Price 95.62

Humphries 94.85

van Gerwen 94.65

Cross 93.80

Let's cut off after the UK Open is done (so as not to include that):

Anderson 96.24

Price 95.74

Humphries 95.29

van Gerwen 94.11

Cross 94.05

Let's cut off after the Matchplay is done:

Anderson 97.19

Humphries 95.80

Price 95.19

Cross 94.86

van Gerwen 94.65

I don't think anything shorter is necessarily useful - you will quickly run into sample size issues, but it can't be argued that Humphries is improving. A lot. You don't need numbers to see that, you just need eye test. Then again, Ando and Cross are doing the same. That said, I will quite happily defend any bookie who is pricing Humphries as the favourite to bink the worlds - there is an extremely strong argument to say that is the case, but it is as wide open as anything.

New FRH rankings:

1 Michael Smith

2 Luke Humphries (UP 1)

3 Michael van Gerwen (DOWN 1)

4 Nathan Aspinall

5 Gerwyn Price (UP 1)

6 Peter Wright (DOWN 1)

7 Rob Cross (UP 4)

8 Jonny Clayton (DOWN 1)

9 Dave Chisnall (DOWN 1)

10 Danny Noppert (DOWN 1)

11 Damon Heta (UP 1)

12 Joe Cullen (DOWN 2)

13 Dirk van Duijvenbode

14 Andrew Gilding (UP 1)

15 James Wade (UP 5)

16 Dimitri van den Bergh (DOWN 2)

17 Ross Smith (DOWN 1)

18 Josh Rock (UP 1)

19 Stephen Bunting (NEW)

20 Chris Dobey (DOWN 3)

I'm likely going to start looking at the PC Finals tomorrow and get some tips up for round one by Tuesday/Wednesday. It's been a bit of a rough tournament from a betting standpoint, but hopefully we can rebuild in what ought to be a decent enough event in terms of seeing players where I think I have a data advantage over the field. Back soon.