Tuesday, 8 October 2024

Grand Prix day 2

We continue...

Chisnall/Menzies - A right banger to start, Chizzy being pretty much the number 1 seed on the floor getting almost all the cake, while Menzies is probably the best player right now without a title to his name and now just pushing on to majors after not quite reaching the Matchplay. I can barely separate the two, maybe having Cameron a percentage point or two better, but with it being a debut I think just calling it a coin flip is completely fair. With Menzies being the odds against player at 11/10, there's nothing of value to look at in the opener. (note - this was written up yesterday due to oddschecker being useless in terms of the order of games shown, Menzies' price appears to have drifted a bit since then, but not enough to consider a bet. At least on 365, as now oddschecker seems to have canned the game completely)

Woodhouse/van den Bergh - Luke continues his consolidation within the world's top 32, and has a decent shot here against a player who is much more widely known in Dimitri, but who compares very closely statistically and the UK Open winner, who may not have even been here if it weren't for that win, can't really be separated in terms of projections, so lines which put Woodhouse as a tiny underdog don't seem unreasonable.

de Decker/Heta - And we get back to back Belgian involvement, Mike also looking to push up into the top 32, building on a first Pro Tour title a couple of months ago, but faces a tough opponent in Heta, who's claimed a couple of Pro Tours himself this season and sits in that tier of players who are not elite, but almost as good, which is enough of a differential over de Decker to put Damon at approaching 60% chances to get through. This is another one that oddschecker isn't pricing up because reasons, but 365 have Damon at 8/13, which is round about where I'd expect things to be and doesn't show any signs of value unless there's a complete outlier/misprice I can't see.

Wright/Wade - Two veterans of the scene who are having resurgent seasons, Wright having shown he's still relevant by picking up a Euro Tour and looking much stronger since then, while Wade hasn't really converted into results (although he has had some good runs), he is scoring better than he has done for quite some time, which translates to a high 50% projection for this one against Snakebite. I'm happy to pull that down to maybe 55% given there is evidence that Peter's playing better than a larger historical set of data, which would put things right at the 4/5 Wade line, which we naturally won't be touching.

Price/Noppert - Two players now who've been somewhat underrated throughout this year. While Price's numbers have tailed off slightly, it's still not far off elite levels at all, meanwhile Noppert may be the most underrated player on the circuit, with a title to his name this season (which is more than Price has) and numbers which are only one place behind Price when it comes to overall scoring, which puts him as an underdog for me, but not even 55/45, this one is that tight. The market is shading things a bit further in Gerwyn's favour, but we'd realistically need to be getting 6/4 before I'd look to fire on Danny, and we can't even get better than 11/8.

Smith/Anderson - Ah shit, here we go again. Repeat pretty much everything I said in the Matchplay. Anderson is really good, Smith not so much, Michael may be not doing as well as he should on the Pro Tour compared to TV, but I can't think he's mailing it in or anything, that doesn't seem like his nature. Fortunately, this time, we won't be piling in, I still see Ando as a good favourite, but only around the 2-1 margin, after possibly factoring in maybe Smith playing better in major events, and with prices hovering shorter (often more than one or two ticks shorter) than the 4/6 I'd probably want to be able to bet Ando, we can ignore this one and just hope we get a good game.

van Gerwen/Gurney - Michael may be getting back to his best, having broken a fairly long title drought with a Pro Tour in mid September and a Euro Tour the weekend afterwards, and translating that to numbers the count of players who are outscoring him at the moment is very small indeed, we're talking legitimate world championship contenders and that's it. Gurney's doing alright for himself, and this is a tournament he's done historically alright at, but this is one of the few games that feels like a real mismatch, with the only pertinent thing being whether Daryl is closer to a one in three shot or a one in four shot over what is a very short format. With him being priced around 9/4, the bookies seem to concur with that approximation.

Dobey/Cullen - Chris is playing so well at the moment that only Anderson and Humphries are outscoring him in the sample I'm using, that's just how good he is. Picking up multiple Pro Tours, including on the recent three day stint, he faces Cullen, who seems to be one of the most out of form players in the tournament, and given some of his social media posts and other thins said this year, may not be in the place he needs to be to truly threaten Chris, who's projecting about the same as MvG is in the previous game. And, annoyingly, the market's doing more or less the same in this one as that as well.

So nothing today, and with nothing yesterday, I very much doubt that we see a spot generated in the tournament where we'd want to bet, but I will look at the last sixteen after today's games just in case.

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