The Saturday games

Joyce/Searle - Should be a good one this, Joyce came through two 3-1 wins against Labanauskas and Noppert that both seemed to play a bit closer than the scoreline suggests, while Searle had one of the more comfortable second round wins in taking out Matt Campbell. Searle's better, but Joyce has shown enough consistently throughout the year to be in with more than a fighting chance, showing at over 40% in all three different samples, creeping up a little bit over the last 3+ months. Unfortunately the market is more or less in agreement with that assessment.

Williams/Pietreczko - Match up between two unseeded players just in or on the fringes of the top 32, so kind of an important one for UK Open purposes at a very minimum. Scott came through one of the better round one games against Niko Springer, as well as a scrappy one in terms of scoring against Cross, both by a three sets to one margin. Ricardo on the other hand got through a fairly comfortable opener against Zong before getting home against van Veen which may have been more comfortable than a 3-1 end result indicates. I've got this one fairly tightly - Scott over an average of my projection lengths is just a shade under 55/45 for me, but that is heavily influenced by the full year sample, which takes into account when Ricardo was playing a fair bit worse than he likely is now, so if you do think it's a true coinflip then there's a tiny bit of value on the German here.

Aspinall/Gilding - Now we get two seeds, both winning 3-1, Nathan playing a bit worse statistically by Andrew but definitely being dragged down a bit more by his opponent, Gates playing significantly worse than Lukeman did. Looking at the numbers, Gilding may be a tad undervalued, he's currently floating in between 2.5 and 3 on the exchanges, and while I think Nathan is the favourite, it's not by a huge amount, just a bit more than 55%, so I think you can justify going with Andrew in this one.

Dobey/Rock - Another seed v seed matchup and one of the more anticipated games of this round, Rock didn't drop a set against Griffin but played worse than Dobey, who was taken to four sets by Merkx but looked better regardless of the game being closer. This one seems genuinely too close to call, I've got Dobey better but it's only by a percentage or two, the market has things a little bit wider so there could be the tiniest bit of value on Josh here.

van Gerwen/Dolan - Two players with real easy first round games against Hurrell and Lee respectively, neither dropping a set nor looking in any real trouble. This is one that could get ugly quickly, year long makes this about 80/20 in van Gerwen's favour, which is not quite as much as the market thinks he's a favourite, but an average of sample sizes makes it more like 90/10, such is Brendan's current form, and hints to van Gerwen actually being a value play.

Littler/White - Luke made hard work of Meikle early on, losing a set and going close to losing the first two, but looked phenomenal after that, while Ian got a first round bye and then ground his way through a tough match with Ritchie Edhouse. This one is looking even more one sided than the previous game - White is longer than 20/1, but as I have him at about a one in twenty shot, that's fine by me.