Day 1 thoughts, day 2 bets

Thoughts on day 1 - Buntz is who we thought he was. Decent, but overrated, and we'll take the Doets bet to the hoop. Kevin should be safe as a card holder in 2024 now, and he can come out of tonight with a lot of credit and confidence. Really not sure on the pundits on Sky afterwards saying "Smith's back" - it was a good performance, but nothing more than that, it was a bit better than expected but I'm not suddenly thinking he's getting out of this quarter or anything like that. Menzies had a couple of moments where it looked like he might do Menzies things, but came through fine. Whitlock against Nebrida was a tense game, but a hard one to watch - Simon underperformed by a fair amount, Paolo looked a lot better than we were expecting, and naturally it would be the fucking five set game featuring the slowest player of the night where the twats that are sportradar dropped the ball after set one. I've got the data through nefarious sources, but honestly. Use Dart Connect as at a minimum a backup. In every event.

Day 2:

Evans/Sosing - Seems like I've said that I like Lee's game (in context, relative to his reputation) ad infinitum all year. That's not changed. Said in the previews that I don't think Sandro is great, but not even being able to get 1/4 on Lee takes this well out of the realms of thinking about it. I also don't want to consider the qualifier at all, maybe everything hits perfectly and he makes a fight of it, I'm not seeing it though.

Scutt/Kciuk - Over the largest sample, this looks like a fine line, with Connor typically 2/5 everywhere. If I narrow it down to smaller samples, the data model absolutely hares Kciuk. Like literally despises him - if I say data from Matchplay onwards, Kryszytof wins 5% of the time. I think that's a sample size thing perhaps, and as such I'm leaning towards the larger sample as being more representative of where this game is actually at - but I'm certainly not interested in punting on the underdog in this one.

van Dongen/Penhall - 0.25 van Dongen 4/9, the data says Darren's not completely dead, we know him to have some level of competence, but the full last year indicates that this should be nearer to a 2/7 line. And Jules' form is tilted towards right now. Seems a fairly easy bet at that price.

Chisnall/Menzies - 0.1u Menzies 11/4, there's a few fringe books that offer slightly closer than 3/1, but I'm just taking the freely available 365 line. We've talked about Cameron a lot, and while we think Dave's a favourite, we can't realistically see any sort of sample where Dave's more than a 60% favourite. Cameron's a bit more inconsistent for sure, but even if we bump Chisnall's chances to 65%, that is still saying 11/4 is an enormous edge. And we take those.

Hughes/Cameron - Kind of half tempted to take Dave here. 13/10 is not overly enticing on the face of it, but when I filter down to appropriate sample sizes and it shows Hughes down 45/55, it does draw the attention. I'm going to decline it, I think Jamie's sorted a few things out and might be playing better than the data suggests, but if you're betting anything here it should be leaned towards the Canadian.

Barry/Rivera - 0.1u Rivera 9/2, this is simple common sense, we know Reynaldo is solid, we know Keane is not elite, we take the flier on Coralbrokes. That 9 would need to be a 5 before I don't think about taking a shot at it.

Williams/Muramatsu - 0.1u Muramatsu 5/2, again we take the Coralbrokes larger than the field underdog price. Having seen him live a couple of months ago I know Haruki to be competent, he projects reasonably well against someone who's had merely an OK season - certainly better than 30%, and it's definitely worth the shot at these prices.

Anderson/Whitlock - We're not even remotely considering Whitlock on this one. He was not good today, could easily have gone out, and pretty much any sort of recent projection is saying "4/1 lol". The main question is whether we have enough confidence to go with Ando at severely odds on against someone we know has at least been alright at points this season. I'm seeing projections of over 90% over basically all samples, so I think there's the safety to go large - 0.5u Anderson 1/5. Simon doing little to inspire confidence today is the tiebreaker to bump up to half a unit from a quarter.