Hempel/Bunting - Stephen continues to look absolutely fantastic. The "most underrated player on the tour" moniker that a few of us were using is completely done at this stage. Null, void, everything. Florian didn't play bad - he can come out of that game with no regrets, maybe he could have been a bit tighter on doubles and nicked a set, but there was zero chance he was winning that game. Phenomenal display.
Cullen/Searle - Doubles, simple as. That killed our bet. First set can't do too much, second set racked up the stats but I don't think there was a huge turning point in that one, third set was trivial then fourth set Joe repaid us the favour in the last leg. Last leg of set five was what killed us. Joe was OK, but he wasn't unbeatable, and the opportunities were there for someone to beat him. Ryan generated them, just didn't take them.
Smith/Dobey - You know how I was saying that this session was the best of the five that were scheduled for round three, at least on Twitter? This game proved that. Absolutely fantastic game. Anyone who had tickets for this session got the value I thought they would do. I'm not sure that there was a great deal to separate the two - just looks like Ross was maybe a little slower out of the blocks, and Chris had just a bit better timing. Doesn't take much to separate two evenly matched players like these.
Price/Dolan - Oh wow. Did not expect that one in the slightest. Could Price have done anything hugely different? Maybe, he missed some darts in sets three and five, but not a bucketload, the killer was the final leg, where he's got the darts back, then fails to score. Give credit to Brendan where it's due, was an excellent game, but this has opened everything up hugely.
Humphries/Pietreczko - Ricardo can come out of this one with no regrets, he put everything into it, was playing absolutely fantastic stuff, but just seemed to run out of steam when he'd got himself into the winning position. I know it's a bit of a lazy diatribe on the face of it, but this does have inklings of the Smith/Schindler game from the stage last year where Michael was in the shit but dug himself out of it. Luke knows he's dodged a bullet here, so we'll see what goes on from here.
Evans/Gurney - This one doesn't seem quite as bad as some people were making out on various media that I was monitoring, it just seemed to got through a couple of rough patches, mainly Ricky not finishing off set two, then set four was a bit of a dumpster fire. Still, Gurney got through, and he's not without chances next round at least.
We've already called the round three games for tomorrow, but there's two round four games, and they feature the Michaels. Do we fancy either of them? In van Gerwen against Bunting, no. The market seems to have caught up with Stephen very quickly as you would expect, and is only really calling it around 60/40. That doesn't seem unreasonable. Got to trust the longer data - I absolutely believe Bunting can win this one, and on a personal level hope he does, but I'm not tipping on a personal level. There's no way I can justify a recommendation on Bunting at barely longer than 6/4. Similar on the Smith/Dobey game - except here, the data is a bit more in our favour in that it is saying that Chris is playing the better darts throughout the year. SLIGHTLY. It's really, really marginal - at best I'm seeing 55/45 in certain samples, and it's a lot closer than that in most. I can't really say with enough confidence that 11/10 gives us enough edge that it's a tip to recommend. For entertainment purposes? Go ahead, Bunting/Dobey double, it doesn't seem like it's an awful bet and it will give entertainment. For profit? I think we may be close to done for the event, and we may need to be closing the book unfortunately down unless something really weird happens. I'll be back tomorrow evening for the other six last sixteen games.
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