GIAN!

Had very bad night's sleep on Friday so wasn't able to get the data entered in time for the last sixteen (and as a consequence, later rounds), but doubt anything of much value was lost. I guess maybe it would have thrown up Aspinall to lose again? Who knows. In any case, it's a huge result for Gian to jump up to number six in the FRH rankings, right into the middle of a cluster between third and seventh with less than a PC win between them all. Although, with that being said, with only Bunting and Wade actually playing this week, van Veen will have to wait to get the Dutch #1 spot, with van Gerwen only being in that group on account of his semi final. Noppert moved up to 8th with his semi but is some way behind that pack. Joyce and Gurney gained a couple of spots, while Pietreczko (who had a Pietreczko > Littler last longer) jumps back into the top 32 and could go a bit higher with Cullen just a few hundred points away. I'll put a full update in after the last PC.

Bellmont claimed the Challenge Tour in other things that happened this weekend, so that'll get him onto the tour, which is a welcome addition, but unlike some other CT winners it does feel like maybe a bit of a wasted Grand Slam spot, Stefan's fine but doesn't really seem like a top 64 level player or someone that'd jump out as someone who'd retain his card for sure. In terms of Slam spots, there's now confirmed as two spots for Pro Tour wins, at the moment it's Dobey and Heta, but Smith (Ross), Searle and Cullen all have two wins as well and can force themselves in, while there's another eight that'll have a chance if they bink back to back this week. More interesting is the race to get into the worlds - Bates appears the last man in who could do with staying in for additional Dev Tour spots, quite a few interesting players just outside as of right now but there is more than a first round win gap between Bates in 40th and Hunt in 41st so I guess for those looking to break in, the hope is that 35th to 40th are all separated by less than a grand, so what are the chances that none of them go 0-2 this week and give someone a chance? You can drop down to 49th and still have someone that can get above with a semi final run ot s couple of board wins - if that for some of them. I may do a bit more of a deeper dive on Wednesday when a lot of the permutations have been sorted. It's not as if I don't have the time.

As an aside, looking back at the next new winners post from February (it was either just before or after the UK Open, I think before). How bad was that list?

Euros round one

Not sure how much value we'll be able to get out of this, given the incredibly vanilla nature of the field and the relatively small field size in general, but we'll have a look anyway to see if we can claw anything back. Numbers will go in small data/more form based to large data/less form based, with the composite overall number last.

Ryan Joyce v Luke Woodhouse - 48/49/50 - 49

Ross Smith v Peter Wright - 83/69/62 - 71

Gian van Veen v Damon Heta - 61/58/61 - 60

Gerwyn Price v Daryl Gurney - 64/71/72 - 69

Jonny Clayton v Ryan Searle - 59/57/53 - 56

Martin Schindler v Dave Chisnall - 56/49/53 - 53

Wessel Nijman v Michael van Gerwen - 50/49/44 - 48

Stephen Bunting v Chris Dobey - 59/59/54 - 57

Niko Springer v Jermaine Wattimena - 41/46/47 - 45

Gary Anderson v Cameron Menzies - 63/70/72 - 68

James Wade v Mike De Decker - 55/48/45 - 49

Josh Rock v Ricardo Pietreczko - 81/79/78 - 79

Luke Humphries v Krzysztof Ratajski - 76/78/70 - 75

Luke Littler v Raymond van Barneveld - 92/82/88 - 87

Nathan Aspinall v Rob Cross - 51/46/42 - 46

Dirk van Duijvenbode v Danny Noppert - 63/63/61 - 62

As expected, not much going, would have probably had a few minimum plays if we had a bit more working capital to get things to the minimum amount to bet, but we don't, so just laying Aspinall (after he wins a Euro Tour naturally) and having a small nibble on Ando.

100 not out?

Didn't have the time after an ill advised football trip on Saturday to get any projections up, which given how my picks on Saturday went was probably for the best. Aspinall denied us the dream GvV/DvD final, and set up the Euros field which is pretty much a wet dream for the PDC in that they have 29 of the top 32 in the FRH live rankings (Aspinall is back into the top 16 there, but will save until after the Eoros for a fuller update), missing out Edhouse (because he could never win this), Gilding (because he could never win a major) and Cullen (because he could never win a TV title) for the Euro trio of Ratajski, Barney and Springer, the latter being the only player to actually win their spot here rather than being gifted it. I'll get some numbers up for that tomorrow.

One thing I meant to mention a few posts ago was basically the most pathetic clickbaity X post I've seen in relation to darts in quite some time, which given the level of hysteria whenever Littler loses a match is saying something. I don't know the guy in question, not someone I follow and only noticed it as it appeared on an unrelated forum, but to paraphrase it basically said "van Gerwen to not play competitive darts after the Grand Slam before the worlds". Which we could paraphrase as "darts player misses one tournament he didn't qualify for". Which he might well still do, with the author of this said post apparently being ITK that van Gerwen won't play the last two Pro Tours. This might be true, but does it matter? You could write the exact same post about half the tour card holders. Doesn't make it news.

Anyway, in a more interesting thing I read on X, David Schlichting posted the theory after Greaves made it 86 unbeaten in the Women's Series that only Littler would be P > 0.5 (in layman's terms, more likely than not) to win 100 in a row on that tour if in her position. Now I don't think for one minute that David is extrapolating to imply that Beau is as such the second best player in the world, more that to even get this close should she not get to the century is probably lucky, but on reading this I summoned my inner Martin Schindler walk on music and thought this looks like a job for me.

I'll start by saying I'm clearly not going to model every permutation of possibilities, as that would just be silly. So I'm going to make some assumptions and simplifications. Firstly, how do we get to 100 wins? This is the simplest thing probably. Enter tournament. Win tournament. Repeat until streak is at 100. As such, we can reasonably say that we can replace that "win 100 matches" with "bink x tournaments in a row". How to find x? We just need to look at the entry counts and then gauge on average how many matches we'll play. Greaves, to win 86 in a row so far, has won the last 13 tournaments, That's pretty much right in between six and seven - this makes a fair bit of sense, while I could go through all the data and work out exact entry numbers, Grok's estimating that there's typically 80 to 100 runners in these things. If we call an average field size 96 for the sake of argument, then you've got a one in three chance of a first round bye - so for any given event, you'll need seven wins two thirds of the time, and six the remainder of the time. This gives us a nice even answer - if in three events, we expect 7/7/6 in terms of matches, that's twenty matches per three tournaments. So we need to win fifteen in a row.

Next, how often do we win a tournament? Now here's where we're going to need to get a bit controversial. The standard of the series is, in relation to the Pro Tour, pretty poor. Looking at the tour leaderboard on DC, there's barely a dozen players outside of Beau that were capable of an overall average that equates to winning legs in 21 darts or less. Barely half of these have a first nine over 80, so if they are wanting a six visit kill they're on average needing a three figure outshot. In the context of putting someone up against a tour card holder, that's not good. In the context of putting someone up against Littler, that's even worse. Dennie Olde Kalter would likely be an enormous favourite to win any WS event and you only need to go past best of 9 to best of 11 where he drops below 10% to win against Littler.

As such, I'm going to do a pretty brutal set of simplifications. First, I'm going to make all games best of 9, if only because I don't have best of 7 outwardly modelled in my master computer. It's only going to make a minor difference, adding or taking away one leg required doesn't change the maths that much. Second, I'm going to assume that there are at most a dozen players, other than us, that can realistically put up a challenge, and that if you draw anyone else, you get a free win. This isn't football where you can nick a goal on the break and then timewaste for the rest of the game - you can't drag someone into a scrappy opening leg, win it in 26 darts and then stall. You need to hit (at least how I'm modelling it) five winning doubles, and once you've thrown three darts there's nothing you can do to stop your opponent from throwing three better darts. Finally, I'm going to assume that in the event where we don't get a first round bye, we (and everyone competent) avoid each other, so as to be able to model things all the same - we're in the last 64 every time, and against 51 of the opponents we win, and against the other 12 we need to work for it. This may seem like an over simplification, but it only takes the PDC to say "we're seeding 16 players next year" and you get the same result.

So, that being said, how often do we win a tournament? With the simplifications we've made, this basically becomes a function of how many times we run into a good opponent, then working out how frequently we beat that good opponent. How good that good opponent is will come later, but let's cross the first bridge first. We've got 64 players - ourself, twelve players of interest, and then 51 jobbers. There's two things we need to do here - the simple one is working out how often we need to play someone good, which is a simple 12/51. or 23.5% of the time. The other thing we need to do is work out on average how often two of our good player pool run into each other. Now this  is something I probably knew how to do manually 25 years ago, but we have AI now, so I'm going to trust the number it's given in saying that we get 1.24 matches on average where it's good player against good player. Now clearly we can't eliminate .24 of a dart player in a match, so I'm going to need to round up/down accordingly and hope that we don't do one or the other that often. We'll repeat this process for each round:

Round of 64 - 0.235 matches for us, 1.24 matches total - new player count 12/20

Round of 32 - 0.355 matches for us, 2.13 matches total - new player count 10/6

Round of 16 - 0.6 matches for us, 3 matches total - new player count 7/1

From here, we know that we will get the bad player 1 time in 7, or s good plsyer with 0.857 probability, the bad player will lose to whoever, the semi finals will be between all good players so we need to go through an additional two players for a total of just a fraction over needing to beat four good players on average in any given event. That doesn't sound stupidly unreasonable, we'd expect the quarter finals onwards to see us up against someone decent a large percentage of the time, but in the early rounds the field is so weak on average that we usually don't run into any landmines early on. As such, the question is simplified into "how often do we beat a good player 60 times in a row?"

Now for the time consuming part. Working out the good player. I'm going to make one more massive assumption, and create a generic "good women's player", by taking the top dozen or so that we're trying to avoid (so women averaging better than 71.57 i.e. 21 darts on average), look at the speed that they finish legs against each other (to avoid watering down the stats where we're just playing really weak opponents who are letting us finish however quickly we want - this is the exact reason why I don't put any WS data into the database), and then I can put that data line into the master computer, stick it against whoever we want, and then if our tour card holder has a win chance of better than 98.86% in a best of 9 match (this being the sixtieth root of 0.5), then we know we're good. This is the ballache number crunching part. But it's done, and the sample of players I had has less than 100 legs in fifteen darts or fewer, and over 200 in each of the six and over seven visit buckets, with the latter being larger. Considering the database has over 50% of legs in five or better, that's a bad look. Shove that against Littler, and Luke wins a best of nine 99.47% of the time. That is way more than enough - heck, give Littler no free wins and the breakeven point is 130 matches. Yikes.

But who else would be favoured? What of Greaves herself? Well Beau would only expect to win against our conglomerate player just over 96% of the time, so for her, the breakeven point is 17 matches, or just over four tournaments as we've modelled it. So to get a thirteen tournament run is definitely a bit of sun running. Who else would be good? Well, sorting by winning average, nobody. Rock falls just short at 98.50%, Bunting despite averaging lower scores about a tenth of a percent higher but still no good, Price shows the same thing but is still short, and once you drop out of the top twelve you drop below 98%. So, too long didn't read version - yes, it is just Littler.

However, because there's always a however, there is one further thing that needs to be taken into consideration before we put the topic to bed. The data model I use for projecting matches makes the assumption that the bull is a coinflip. Now, with this level of disparity between quality of players, is that realistic? The question then becomes how often do we lose a match 5-4 (you would think that this would be most of the 1.3%, 1.4% of games that someone like a Pirce is losing), how often do we actually win the bull in practice, and how many of the additional times we win the bull were we not only not breaking anyway, but having the darts makes the difference between winning and losing? It's got to be a fairly small number, but we don't need to flip that many results to become a favourite to get to the magical 100 number. Price was breaking even at 52 wins against the good players and we needed 60 - that's pretty darned close. But that's an exercise for another post maybe.

ET14 R2 - urgh

Today started fine, then we just ran into Ryan Joyce godmode. Can't do too much about that. O'Connor over Gilding obviously didn't help either, but we can press on into day two of the event.

Gian van Veen 65-35 Niels Zonneveld

Damon Heta 66-34 Steve Lennon

Danny Noppert 59-41 Luke Woodhouse

Ryan Searle 66-34 Krzysztof Ratajski

Mike De Decker 45-55 Wessel Nijman

Rob Cross 65-35 Cameron Menzies

Peter Wright 45-55 Ricardo Pietreczko

Dave Chisnall 64-36 Gabriel Clemens

Ross Smith 59-41 Nathan Aspinall

Jonny Clayton 78-22 Raymond van Barneveld

Gerwyn Price 79-21 Christian Kist

James Wade 49-51 Jermaine Wattimena

Chris Dobey 49-51 Dirk van Duijvenbode

Martin Schindler 55-45 William O'Connor

Josh Rock 80-20 Ricky Evans

Stephen Bunting 78-22 Ryan Joyce

Can't see that Betfair has all the markets up yet, and none have any notable liquidity. Will punt in the morning.

ET14 R1

Alright, let's get into the final event of the year. There is no data of note on Kramer, Springer (no, not that one), Troppmann or Rosandic. I can't discern who the last HNQ is for some reason, I assume Maxi used this one as the get in cheaply gamble that TCH's have a one shot at. Anyway, let's go.

Menzies/Plaisier - 51/49

Zonneveld/Labanauskas - 74/26

de Graaf/Lennon - 51/49

Joyce/Hood - 49/51

Woodhouse/Bissell - 62/38

Gilding/O'Connor - 57/43

Wattimena/Barry - 73/27

Gurney/Kist - 63/37

Pietreczko/Szaganski - 59/41

van Duijvenbode/Sedlacek - 70/30

Evans/Cullen - 44/56

Aspinall/Czerwinski - 85/15

As such, I've placed good chunks on Zonneveld (which seems more anti-Labanauskas than anything) and Hood (who we've thought's been underrated for a while), a touch on Gilding and a tiny sliver on Dirk. Back tomorrow evening all things being equal.

Post GP and PC 31/32 thoughts

Well, there was one very good reason why I thought there might have been a touch of value in the underdogs in the semis. There's me forgetting that last year they upped the number of sets needed for the semis and the final by one. Oopsie. That doesn't change the metrics that much, maybe a couple of percent swing, but it would be enough for things to go from "might be the slightest edge there" to "lol no let's come back next weekend". Ended out what was a pretty boring event for me - the Littler quarter was fine but after round one was there a single good game in there? I don't think there was. Even their dream final, which while seeing a good chunk of competitive sets, ended up being a one sided romp. Still, it's in the bank, with the top 2 getting all the cake there's no crazy FRH moves, but there is some, this includes anything won in PC 31/32, but nothing in terms of minimum cash from the upcoming Euro Tour:

1 Luke Littler

2 Luke Humphries

3 Stephen Bunting (UP 2)

4 Jonny Clayton (UP 2)

5 Michael van Gerwen (DOWN 2)

6 James Wade (DOWN 2)

7 Josh Rock

8 Gerwyn Price

9 Danny Noppert (UP 2)

10 Chris Dobey (DOWN 1)

11 Ross Smith (DOWN 1)

12 Damon Heta

13 Gian van Veen

14 Mike de Decker (UP 1)

15 Gary Anderson (UP 1)

16 Martin Schindler (DOWN 2)

17 Jermaine Wattimena (UP 1)

18 Nathan Aspinall (UP 1)

19 Ryan Searle (NEW)

20 Rob Cross

Guy falling out is Chizzy who must be the odds on favourite for most disappointing season at this point in time. Clayton was briefly ahead of Bunting for what would surely have been a career high #3, but strong Pro Tours for the Bullet sees him there instead. Noppie goes up as expected, Schindi takes a knock after a first round major loss, otherwise mostly as you were.

In other news, Greaves making the world youth final was clearly big news, although certain outlets somewhat disrespecting her and ignoring she's a three times world champion already was kind of sad to see. Beating van Veen, which is certainly in the range of possible outcomes, would be a huge story for the sport and SHOULD be bigger news than Sherrock > Evetts was, but probably won't be. Wouldn't surprise me if that fast tracked her into some World Series events. Well, maybe not the first two.

Cam Crabtree grabbed the Slam spot. This one feels a spot underwhelming. Obv the Dev Tour nerfed how good a player it could get by limiting who can play in it, but I think there's a few names in the top 10 who'd be more exciting for sure. He's not bad and I'm not saying that, his numbers are fine, but over the last year they're only a hundredth of a point better per turn than Chisnall and nobody would be excited about watching him right now, Hopefully Jamai can have a worlds spot fall to him through the rankigns but it seems dependent on results elsewhere, Bates being near the main worlds cutoff seemingly being the important one.

Half the remaining Pro Tours for the year got done this week. Good win for Wattimena who seems at the peak of his powers right now. Littler winning the other is neither here nor there (although I think he needed some money to secure Minehead), Littler losing first round to Edhouse in the other one was an oddity, but whoever had Dennie Olde Kalter finalist on their bingo card a couple of months ago was a brave man.

That'll be it for now, there is a Euro Tour draw out. Thoughts on that later, it's the last one before the Euros, there's a few spots on the line but it doesn't look that interesting a chase, it basically comes down to if Chizzy beats (probably) Clemens, which is nowhere near the worst draw he could have got but despite Clemens maybe having as quiet a year as he's had is no gimmie.

Any semis value? Maybe

Looking at the 365 lines, they've got both Lukes priced in at 1/4, which is an 80% chance of winning. That seems a tad excessive. Noppert and Clayton are not bad players at all. I've got both of these games at nearer the 70/30 marker - Humphries a touch above 70%, Littler a touch below, maybe in a realistic world Clayton could be priced a bit shorter by default but the pricing is such to account for the Littler hype/public backing, which is not unreasonable. So would I be betting on a Luke/Luke final? It seems by far the most likely outcome, I think it happens clearly more than half the time, but I certainly wouldn't be wanting to bet on either of them to win their respective matches. Would I want to bet on either of Clayton or Noppert to pull the upset? This is a more pertinent question, and I think the choice of the two would clearly be Clayton, but I'm not sure that you'll actually get the odds to offer sufficient safety in what you're doing to actually be profitable.

FWIW in a theoretical all Luke final, I'd put Littler at around a 2-1 favourite, although the numbers are all over the place. Mid sample appears 50/50, so you can only guess what Littler is doing in the other samples to make it balance at that overall projection.

GP quarters

Christ, what a turgid set of round two games those were, nothing to a decider and four whitewashes. Still, warms us up for the new expanded worlds I guess. Any value in the quarters now?

Noppert 34-66 Anderson

van Duijvenbode 45-55 Clayton

Littler 67-33 Price

Humphries 76-24 Menzies

So no, no value anywhere really.

GP R2

Should I even bother with this? Basically all the projections ended up bang on the bookies' lines. There were some exceptions, Dirk being the huge one, but outside of DvD it was very slim pickings, Cullen, Gilding and Rock maybe being fractionally undervalued in the market. Let's take a look anyway,

Menzies 30-70 Cross

Bunting 74-26 Noppert

Humphries 78-22 Ratajski

Cullen 26-74 Anderson

van Duijvenbode 70-30 Gurney

Price 43-57 Rock

Clayton 79-21 Woodhouse

Littler 80-20 de Decker

So, at a quick glance, it's pretty much Dirk and Rock again, although it should be noted for Dirk that the shortest form sample is pretty much bang in line with the market and it's only larger samples that push him to being as big a favourite as I suggest. Otherwise, it's mainly favourites being perhaps a tick or too on the long side, but nothing really exciting.

Grand Prix round 1 projections

I'm just going to post round one at this stage. Too many permutations for round two or later, no rush for those at this stage either. Two big caveats:

1 - THESE DO NOT FACTOR IN THE DOUBLE IN FORMAT. Frankly my data model is entirely setup for straight in double out. At this level of player, I don't think it's going to make an enormous amount of difference, everyone's likely to be somewhere in the one in three to mid 40% range on doubling in (it should be a bit higher than doubling out for obvious reasons), which I think is a tight enough range not to make any serious modifications. If you do have reliable data (and I don't think you have) and you are seeing a big difference in any game feel free to shift things by a percent or two. I really can't see it making much more of a difference than that.

2 - THESE DO NOT MODEL THE EXACT MATCH FORMAT EITHER. This is the only tournament with a first to two set format, and with first to four or more sets with no tiebreak. For round one, I'm going to pretend this is best of 15 legs (which is the longest the match can go), and then when we get deep, just use the projections as if there was a tie break. These will push up the better player SLIGHTLY, but you would think the better player will be in general a better doubler as well, so I think those more or less cancel out.

In any case, here we go. Use at your own risk.

Luke Humphries 68-32 Nathan Aspinall

Martin Schindler 59-41 Krzysztof Ratajski

Chris Dobey 69-31 Cameron Menzies

Rob Cross 53-47 Wessel Nijman

Stephen Bunting 71-29 Niko Springer

Danny Noppert 52-48 Jermaine Wattimena

James Wade 63-37 Joe Cullen

Gary Anderson 79-21 Raymond van Barneveld

Luke Littler 67-33 Gian van Veen

Peter Wright 30-70 Mike De Decker

Gerwyn Price 58-42 Ryan Searle

Josh Rock 81-19 Ryan Joyce

Michael van Gerwen 45-55 Dirk van Duijvenbode

Ross Smith 67-33 Daryl Gurney

Jonny Clayton 68-32 Andrew Gilding

Damon Heta 70-30 Luke Woodhouse

The ultimate Harrington visit

This is very much a fun, low content post, those expecting high value Grand Prix insights can come back tomorrow. But long term readers of the blog will know we're not fans of Rod Harrington here at Tungsten Towers. Heck, short term readers will also know if they've read the FAQ. In any case, it's not actually a name that's come up recently, until someone on X (I forget who and CBA to look through my archives, but you know who you are) highlighted that someone, I want to say Dirk, was on a simple single-double out in a recent Euro Tour, but missed a big number twice in a row to not get a dart at an out, which was described as "the ultimate Harrington visit" or words to that effect.

But no, was my retort. That would be if those two missed big numbers then left double nine, which Dirk then hits. But can we reasonably create a visit which does this? I feel we need some caveats here.

Firstly, you must be aiming at a reasonable target to set up yout outshot of choice. and it must be a reasonable outshot. Some people, like Littler with his D15 shenanigans and previous to that (the now resurgent it must be said) Mensur with D14, have pushed the boundaries of what is reasonable. Let's just have a bit of common sense. If you are on 40 and claim "going 8 for D16 and I pushed it into D11 I'm now on D9 gg" you can fuck off, you're going for tops.

Secondly, your miss must be reasonable. You might pull one into single 7 going for big 20, but nobody good is. The point is that Harrington would have a meltdown, and he's not watching your games at the Dog and Duck, and neither am I. Let's limit stuff to missing by one bed and that's it.

Finally, I think we should try to be consistent, we shouldn't really switch from being a tops and tens player to a 16s and breakdown thereof player mid visit for the purposes of getting a funnier route.

So, can we do it? Well I've got three that I think come pretty close. Making up the podium, and I think I just about prefer the first one, we have:

Requiring 41 - big 20 going for single 1, treble 1 going for single 1, double 9

Requiring 49 - big 3 going for big 17, double 14 going for single, double 9

Neither of those really do it for me - in both cases, the second visit has at least hit the number we're going for, even if we've not hit the single we wanted. However, there is one route which I think is the winner for now.

Requiring 43 - big 8 going for 11, big 17 going for 3, double 9

I think that's about the best I can come up with, looking at all the options for a second dart to leave 18, nothing else in the lead up seems to have either a legitimate neighbouring miss, or simply have a legitimate alternate target which we must go for (good job saying that hitting any form of 6 is a possibility on 24 for example).

This works, however, it still doesn't really cut the mustard for me, and for one reason. And that's the second dart. Now anyone at any level will probably have needed 35 at some point, and have been told "look if you want to leave D16 at least aim for the left side of the 3 so if you miss you still have D8" which, even at the pro level where they're missing big numbers fairly rarely (and is not only the entire point of the meme, but something someone ran some numbers on on the PDC site fairly recently), they'd probably tend towards making any misses miss left.

So can we do better? That's your challenge. Maybe there's some shank into an adjacent treble route I've completely misses or similar. Go for it. And if you are wanting Grand Prix numbers, I'm close to done with getting the players in that event up to date after PC28-30, even if I'm not close to the rest of the field, so check back later today or maybe tomorrow. I'm off work then so I should have something (which will be brief because double in format) before the off.

The Tungsten Analysis Hot 100

So this is something that I have teased on X I think. Here I've done something really simple, but really enlightening. Potentially. I've taken four of the metrics I used - the FRH ranking which has been in play for probably a decade now (scary to say that), which for newcomers is a modification of the main order of merit to primarily favour recency, then scoring averages for each of the last 100, 200 and 365 days, which are fairly comparable to the portions I use when making projections. The newest goes back towards just before the Matchplay, the middle one to just after (IIRC) the UK Open, the last year is self explanatory. All these have a "one leg played per day in the database" qualifier. So, here we go:

Some things to note. This is not in any way intended to be clickbaitey, although I may make an X post that is just that. It is what it is. Some people were unfortunate in missing the leg criteria by not much - Wright recently being the most egregious example, but Tricole and Greaves also didn't miss some by much (the latter not hitting the list at all as a result). Brooks being 5 recently is not a typo, he is that good. And for reference, these stats were taken BEFORE this week's Pro Tour games.

Swiss day 3

Not a good day 2 to follow up not a good day 1. Dekker being gifted chances that the average Challenge Tour player wouldn't usually give up for a second straight day is an irritant, but whatever, we will try to at least partially rebuild on Sunday.

Humphries/Searle - 47/64/57/56

Wattimena/Woodhouse - 64/60/60/61

Clayton/Schindler - 62/61/60/61

Dobey/Dekker - 78/85/81/81

Bunting/Ratajski - 81/68/62/70

van Barneveld/Edhouse - 55/53/49/52

Joyce/van Veen - 27/28/32/29

Cross/Noppert - 73/65/55/64

Seems like the session may start an hour earlier than normal so be on your toes people.

Edit - will just append on quarter final predictions. Expect no semi predictions.

Searle/Woodhouse - 64/60/62/62

Clayton/Dekker - 80/85/80/82

Bunting/van Barneveld - 85/77/74/79

van Veen/Cross - 42/44/53/46

Swiss day 2

Day of ups and downs. Mostly downs - in a big hole early, Pietreczko and Suljovic got me partially out of it, pick out some OK spots, Veenstra somehow gets there, but Nijman loses to Edhouse. What can we do. Still, it could be worse. Let's go into day 2 projections. Most recent form first, composite last.

Searle/Zonneveld - 62/58/60/60

Chisnall/Woodhouse - 58/57/53/56

Wright/Dekker - 55/72/74/67

de Decker/Ratajski - 60/52/54/55

Cross/Veenstra - 77/80/69/75

van Veen/van Duijvenbode - 54/49/49/51

Noppert/O'Connor - 51/54/56/54

Wade/Joyce - 71/60/57/63

Schindler/Pietreczko - 66/64/62/64

Rock/Wattimena - 71/70/65/69

Humphries/Rydz - 53/71/62/62

Clayton/Aspinall - 57/68/62/62

Heta/van Barneveld - 73/68/69/70

Bunting/Landman - 84/80/75/80

Dobey/Suljovic - 61/70/69/67

I suppose the interesting ones are Wright, where Dekker looks to be in shit hot form relatively speaking (although today maybe not so much), and Rydz keeping things close on the near sample vs Humphries. Might just be an adjust sizing thing, but they are notable.

Swiss stuff

Alrighty, we're back into Euro Tour territory, the quali is done and it is Bellmont plus randoms so I guess we're going to have a few games where there's no predictions, I will pass them completely if that is the case. As is usually the case, shortest sample first, composite (i.e. the one to use) sample last.

Scutt/Rydz - 37/51/59/49

No data on Smolik

Ratajski/Bates - 57/59/61/59

Gilding/Dekker - 72/72/72/72

No data on Fulciniti

Woodhouse/Wenig - 59/59/60/59

Pietreczko/Lukasiak - 79/79/79/79

Suljovic/Lukeman - 79/62/57/66

No data on Schnetzer

Nijman/Edhouse - 80/71/72/74

No data on Sood

Veenstra/Springer - 48/32/35/38

Wattimena/Bellmont - 90/81 (insufficient short data on Bellmont)

van Duijvenbode/van der Wal - 92/91/87/90

Gurney/O'Connor - 58/50/47/52

No data on Jorgensen

Second/Third Division Darts 2025 tables

This gets later every year I know

D2:

Gary Anderson 13.70

Jonny Clayton 10.80

Ross Smith 9.72

Damon Heta 9.11

James Wade 8.71

Callan Rydz 8.56

Dave Chisnall 7.86

Mike de Decker 7.55

Danny Noppert 7.33

Ryan Searle 6.66

D3:

Gian van Veen 10.55

Josh Rock 10.59

Niko Springer 9.51

Connor Scutt 9.39

Niels Zonneveld 9.33

Wessel Nijman 9.31

Martin Schindler 9.12

Berry van Peer 7.68

Keane Barry 7.44

Kevin Doets 7.06

Results:

PC1: Smith 6-1 Wade (2), Rock 6-5 Scutt (3), Nijman 6-1 Doets (3)

PC2: Smith 6-4 Noppert (2), Heta 6-3 Searle (2), Snuth 6-2 Chisnall (2), Schindler 6-2 Doets (3), Nijman 6-5 Springer (3)

PC3: Rydz 6-1 Wade (2), Rydz 6-5 Smith (2), Wade 6-2 Heta (2)

PC4: Wade 6-3 Rydz (2), Schindler 6-2 Barry (3), Nijman 6-2 Doets (3)

PC5: Anderson 6-0 Searle (2), Zonneveld 6-2 Barry (3), Doets 6-3 Schindler (3)

PC6: Barry 6-5 Nijman (3), van Veen 6-5 Scutt (3)

PC7: Anderson 7-3 de Decker (2)

PC8: Schindler 6-5 Doets (3), Zonneveld 6-2 Rock (3)

PC9: Wade 6-3 Clayton (2), van Veen 6-5 Scutt (3), Zonneveld 6-5 van Veen (3)

PC10: Anderson 6-1 Wade (2), Doets 6-4 van Peer (3), Rock 6-1 Schindler (3)

PC11: Anderson 6-4 Wade (2), Anderson 6-2 Heta (2), van Peer 6-4 Doets (3)

PC12: Clayton 6-2 Smith (2), Rock 7-4 van Veen (3)

PC13: van Veen 6-3 Zonneveld (3), Rock 6-2 Doets (3), Rock 6-4 Scutt (3)

PC14: Clayton 7-3 Noppert (2), Clayton 6-0 Wade (2), Noppert 6-4 Rydz (2), Schindler 6-5 Doets (3)

PC15: Chisnall 7-6 Noppert (2), Noppert 6-5 Rydz (2), Chisnall 6-2 de Decker (2), van Veen 6-0 Zonneveld (3)

PC16: Noppert 6-5 Searle (2), Smith 6-0 Noppert (2)

PC17: Nijman 6-4 Doets (3)

PC18: de Decker 6-0 Smith (2), de Decker 6-1 Noppert (2), Zonneveld 6-5 Schindler (3)

PC19: Rydz 6-4 Searle (2)

PC20: Barry 6-1 Nijman (3), Rock 6-3 Barry (3), van Veen 6-1 Springer (3)

PC21: No games

PC22: Scutt 6-5 Schindler (3)

PC23: No games

PC24: Smith 6-2 Rydz (2)

PC25: Schindler 6-3 van Veen (3)

PC26: Anderson 6-5 Noppert (2), Anderson 6-4 Rydz (2), Barry 6-2 Zonneveld (3), Nijman 6-3 Barry (3)

PC27: No games

ET1: Wade 6-4 Clayton (2), de Decker 7-6 Smith (2)

ET2: van Veen 6-4 Scutt (3), van Veen 6-4 Rock (3), Smith 6-2 Wade (2), Smith 6-4 Chisnall (2), Anderson 6-5 Snuth (2)

ET3: Rock 6-4 van Veen (3)

ET4: Smith 6-2 Chisnall (2), van Veen 6-4 Schindler (3), 
ET5: Doets 6-3 van Peer (3), Schindler 6-5 Doets (3), Schindler 7-6 Rock (3)

ET6: Snuth 6-3 Chisnall (2), Schindler 6-4 Rock (3)

ET7: Clayton 6-5 Smith (2), Noppert 6-5 Heta (2), Clayton 6-4 Noppert (2), Nijman 6-5 van Peer (3), Springer 6-2 Schindler (3), Springer 7-3 Nijman (3)

ET8: Clayton 6-0 de Decker (2), Heta 7-3 Clayton (2)

ET9: Noppert 6-3 de Decker (2), Anderson 7-1 Wade (2), Anderson 6-1 Clayton (2), Schindler 6-4 Springer (3)

ET10: van Veen 6-3 Schindler (3)

ET11: Wade 6-4 Smith (2), Searle 6-4 Chisnall (2), Rock 7-3 van Veen (3)

ET12: Springer 6-3 van Veen (3), Springer 7-6 Rock (3)

Masters: Heta 6-4 Smith (2), Wade 7-4 de Decker (2), Clayton 10-8 Searle (2), van Veen 5-4 Nijman (3)

UK Open: Clayton 10-3 Anderson (2), Scutt 6-3 van Peer (3)

Matchplay: de Decker 10-7 Chisnall (2), Clayton 11-8 de Decker (2), Wade 20-18 Clayton (2)

Budapest done

Well that's another tournament done, and another new Euro Tour winner, it's one we thought would get one at some point but maybe not that quickly, and the Niko Springer value train is now well and truly derailed. Huge result for him obviously, but first we're due an FRH rankings update:

1 Luke Littler

2 Luke Humphries

3 Michael van Gerwen

4 James Wade

5 Stephen Bunting (UP 1)

6 Jonny Clayton (DOWN 1)

7 Josh Rock

8 Gerwyn Price (UP 1)

9 Chris Dobey (DOWN 1)

10 Ross Smith (UP 1)

11 Danny Noppert (UP 2)

12 Damon Heta (DOWN 2)

13 Gian van Veen (UP 3)

14 Martin Schindler (UP 1)

15 Mike de Decker (DOWN 1)

16 Gary Anderson (DOWN 4)

17 Dave Chisnall

18 Jermaine Wattimena (UP 2)

19 Nathan Aspinall

20 Rob Cross (DOWN 2)

Sprubger leaps into thetop 50 with his bink, and actually moves one spot ahead of Clemens for the German number 3 spot. Bridging the gap to the top 2 is going to take some time - Pietreczko has more or less double Springer's ranking points, and Schindler is further ahead still, but there's time.

Budapest day 2

This is going to be very much an updated in running once I have entered data sort of thing with projections and nothing else. Be warned.

Scbjndler/Joyce - 67/62/55/61

Smith/Menzies - 75/72/68/72

Noppert/Owen - 64/70/73/69

Dobey/Beveridge - 72/79/76/76

Cross/Gurney - 68/70/65/68

Wade/Woodhouse - 68/58/57/61

Wright/Huybrechts - 55/60/67/61

Chisnall/Barney - 65/61/61/62

Heta/Springer - 65/54/54/58

Price/Veenstra - 73/81/77/77/

van Gerwen/Dennant - 71/78/76/75

Littler/Cullen - 82/78/82/81

Humphries/Aspinall - 37/72/65/58

Bunting/Tricole - 85/84/82/84

Rock/Pietreczko - 85/80/77/81

de Decker/Bissell - 60/73/73/69

1345 UK update - all projections now done. That Aspinall short term sample is, shall we say, interesting, but Luke's not played a huge amount of darts these past few months and does have a negative consistency score over that spell (i.e. his losing legs are scoring better than his winning ones) so maybe don't go ham on Nathan too much.

Few thoughts and Hungary round one

So I didn't get anything up past day one in Prague. If you caught me on social media you'll know I've not been great, but I think I'm on the mend now, have at least caught up with PC26/27 in the database and will be good for projections shortly.

First, World Series finals. Didn't watch a minute of it. Good for MvG to be "back" (hint - he never went away, field just got more fierce), but this has surely run its course. If the PDC want to continue to run effective exbos around the world, here's what I'd do - call them exactly that. Market it as something like PDC Live! and have each event be stand alone. This would probably make it easier to work in different players, as there's no season end tour that regulars want a free pass to. You might cry "but TV", well fuck them, half the time they didn't show these live anyway. Straight to PDC.TV.

Then, for that finals weekend, rebrand that as PDC vs The World. Pick out sixteen players that have been impressive in PDC Live, regional tours etc, and invite them over. The PDC players would be upcoming talent - we don't need the big guns for every event. I'm talking the likes of Springer, Brooks, Greaves next year, Doets, Zonneveld, Scutt, Taylor etc. Nijman/Menzies might be an upper bound. Rock, van Veen etc already too good. Friday night becomes an exbo. A blind draw pairs with each pair being one PDC/one world player would be fun, probably need to be bo5 to get it done, but that would be a huge laugh. Saturday is sixteen games with PDC against the world, the Sunday is the world against each other, played to Euro Tour Sunday format, but the kicker is the winner gets a tour card as well as the prize money. In terms of that, everyone gets, say, £2.5k - PDC players as showing up money, world players as round one losers money on the Sunday. On top of that, the Saturday games each have five grand riding on them. PDC player wins - it's theirs. World player wins - it increases the overall Sunday prize pot by five grand (500 to semis onwards 250 to R1/QF losers adds up I think), which I think would create a great "team" dynamic.

Next, we've all seen great darts tat over the years. I miss the days of Darts Corner desperately trying to sell unsold stock of Mark Dudbridge posters, I miss the Humphries/Littler half and half scarves, we've all got Snakebite practice rings or other gimmicky stuff. What else could make any pub, practice room, man cave or elsewhere complete? I have seen the future, and if anyone steals the idea, I want 20% or I'll see you in court. It is:

Your very own Werner Rankings Ladder (tm)!

We (at least those of a certain age in the UK at least) all remember those special pre season editions of Shoot, Match etc where they would have a pull out poster with each of the English divisions, and probably the Scottish Premier as well, with each spot having a little slot which you could slot in a little shirt for each team in the league given their respective position. Come to think of it, for our foreign readers I'm sure the Kicker Sonderheft still does these. Well, we do the same for darts. Have an A1/A2 size poster (struggling to think which might be best, I'm guessing nearer A1 than A2 but I think it's somewhere in the middle) with four 16-rung ladders on it, and have a whole bag full of darts players mugshots that you can then slot in as they move up and down the rankings. Have a couple of blank ones you can fill in should someone do a Ratajski, Williams (or Littler for that matter) rise from off the tour. Best drawing of the player in question that tags in Werner of the year wins an actual ladder. How would this not be an instant best seller?

Anyway, enough bollocks, we have a Euro Tour to look at. Will go short-medium-full-composite data as usual with the numbers for the "seeded" player.

Gilding/Dennant - 75/66/64/68

Menzies/Pres - insufficient data on Pres

Joyce/Edhouse - 59/56/56/57

Pietreczko/Williams - 67/49/58 (insufficient short data on Williams)

Huybrechts/Hyllgaardhus - insufficent data on Hyllgaardhus

Woodhouse/Borbely - insufficient data on Borbely

Nijman/Beveridge - 71/74/76/74

van Duijvenbode/Bissell - 69/81/78/76

Wattimena/Tricole - 71/74/74/73

Searle/Owen - 76/73/74/74

Gurney/Weber - 82/70/71/74

van Barneveld/Major - no data on Major

Veenstra/Crabtree - 47/44/47/46

Cullen/Wenig - 64/62/61/62

van Veen/Springer - 70/60/59/63

Aspinall/Sarai - no data on Sarai

So that's your picks. Only a small number of games that look moderately close, but that's what the PDC want so we will bow to their superior wisdom.

Prague day one

Health has been a rollercoaster this week, and if there was a specific one it would be Oblivion, but I have just now got all the data from Antwerp into the database, just about in time for another round of Euro Tour madness. Looking at the data, Pratnemer, Unger, Filip and Brejcha have insufficient data for any sort of projection, but everyone else is cool for overall numbers. So let's go.

Gilding - 76

Menzies - 62

Wattimena - 68

Joyce - 49

Woodhouse - 48

Nijman - 72

van Duijvenbode - 82

Gurney - 58

van Veen - 72

van Barneveld - 41

de Decker - 67

Cullen - 47

There you have it, nothing seems crazy at a first glance, let's go with it.

Antwerp day 2

Today was a tough day. Could have been worse, but for various reasons is not as bad as it could have been. Let us blast through round two predictions.

Cross - 74

Chisnall - 70

Rock - 77

Heta - 78

Dobey - 62

Noppert - 39

Wade - 70

Searle - 66

Wright - 54

Smith - 63

Bunting - 72

Littler - 86

van Gerwen - 49

Schindler - 51

Clayton - 68

Got confused for a minute there, but Price was doing Price things, so there you go.

Antwerp day 1

Crikey. Catching up with data entry with midweek PC events takes its sweet, sweet time these days. Still, it's all in the master computer now (except for last weekend's CDC events, which can frankly wait) so let's get some projections up for tomorrow. These will go in full - medium - short - composite order.

Wattimena/Weber - 77 - 76 - 79 - 77

Slevin/Schweyen - 79 (full data only)

Woodhouse/Engstrom - 69 - 68 (no short data)

Wenig/Huybrechts - 46 - 50 - 49 - 48

Ratajski/Lennon - 60 - 64 - 58 - 61

Menzies/Kist - 61 - 73 - 68 - 67

Gilding/Suljovic - 62 - 59 - 57 - 59

van Veen/Gawlas - 83 (full data only)

Smith/Vandenbogaerde - 65 - 64 - 50 - 60

Joyce/Pietreczko - 54 - 55 - 49 - 53

Cullen/White - 58 - 64 - 70 - 64

Nijman/Sedlacek - 69 - 67 - 62 - 66

van Duijvenbode/de Graaf - 75 - 82 - 77 - 78

Gurney/Rydz - 46 - 46 - 60 - 51

de Decker/Lukeman - 68 - 70 - 69 - 69

van Barneveld/van den Bergh - (no data)

Couple of things spring out. Nijman being that far ahead of an in form Sedlacek is just a factor of how good Wessel is. Dirk being that far ahead of new tour winner de Graaf might be a concern given both form and how much Jeffrey burned us at the worlds, but it's not a consistency thing - they're pretty much the same on that front, if anything Dirk is slightly more consistent.

I'll have round two predictions late on Friday, then I'm down in London for football all day Saturday. It's non league so I should be able to stay on top of stat compilation, but round three projections may be last minute, if appearing at all.

32 extra games! yaaaaaaaaaaay

I posted on this to some extent when it was announced, in that while I think the expansion of the worlds is great for the players, throughout all levels of the game for once it has to be said, for the consumers, i.e. you and me, it really doesn't add much. Let's compare and contrast exactly what the change is.

Round 1 last year:

32 seeds - bye. 32 Pro Tour players v 32 international/miscellaneous qualifiers

Round 1 this year:

32 seeds v 32 international/miscellaneous qualifiers. "33-64" on OOM v 32 international/miscellaneous qualifiers

Now the second half are clearly not going to be exactly the same, but there is going to be some serious overlap between the two. The auto spots to 33-40 would very much likely be in the 32 Pro Tour spots in the old system. Just looking at the names it's hard to think that any of them would have missed out. Then, similarly, those that are left in the Pro Tour list are likely to be those in spots 41 to a bit below 64 on the Pro Tour. Sure, you have your first year guys like Springer and Brooks who have had great year 1's of their card (although they're close), but there's very much a feel of the usual suspects. Looking at the list as is, the likes of Zonneveld, O'Connor, Mansell, Rydz, Evans, Soutar, Clemens, it's a fair enough mapping.

Of the "right side" of the draw, it's a bit hard to say whether the 64 from this year is actually weaker on average than the 32 from last year. While the expansion coming mostly in added spots to secondary tours, which theoretically speaking only adds weaker players, you're getting 16 shunted down from the Pro Tour, who theoretically might be a bit stronger having played at a higher level all year, even if those 16 are effectively the best of the bottom half.of the 128. Last year, looking by quarter, only Gotthardt got to round two (and lost), only Campbell and Gates got to round two (and both lost), Toylo, Merkx, Griffin and Barry got through from Q3 (and all lost) then ub Q4 Lee, Nebrida, Owen and Slevin got through, with just Nebrida and Owen winning through - so just two actually beat a seed, one of which should have been a Pro Tour qualifier but for the Jeffrey de Graaf thing (and given he went on a run as well I think that argument's a complete wash).

As such, I think that a huge number of the added games will be dull as ditchwater. Now some people will just want to watch their favourite players, want to see the elite put on amazing displays and go for nines, hit 180 overs bets and big checkouts, and that they roll to a 3-0 win with the adverts lasting longer than the match is not relevant to them. That's fine, everyone's entitled to get what they want from this sport. Me, I want a contest where there's genuine peril for both players. I would watch a fight between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua. I would watch a fight over the last can of special brew between two drunks in Cracky Gardens. I would not watch a fight between either of the first two and either of the second. So the question becomes how many of these matches will actually be boring as fuck?

The simple answer is the patented Tungsten Analysis Bar/Piss Break Test. This works very simply. We watch the first two sets. If the non seed wins one of them, this might be a decent game and we'll watch to the end. If not, i.e. the seed is two up, we assume it's over, go to the bar or for a slash, which given the inefficiencies of Ally Pally, will likely take us the next two sets to complete. If the game is over, we've correctly called it as boring and the match fails. If it's back to 2-2, we're back invested again and the match has redeemed itself.

So what we will do is take the current 32 on the race table, then also take the bottom 16 (in Werner Rankings Ladder (tm) order) from the Pro Tour list, and 16 players that should provide a representative list of international qualifiers. Now for this second part, I'm going to take the more obvious names, this coupled with the seeds in this scenario hitting basically all the Pro Tour qualifiers they can, will make the result seem more favourable than would typically be expected in terms of getting acceptable quality games. So our line up is:

Now I would hope that most people would agree with the assessment that I made in the previous paragraph that this method would likely produce a stronger than expected lineup to go against the seeds, it does look like that to me on paper, but I think it's kind of necessary to get players with enough data so that we do a fair assessment. I'll now do a draw, pit the 32 against the rest, and run the numbers:

Now this is the thing that surprises me. Mainly on how I defined my metric - it is really just too easy for someone who is relatively competent (at a world championship level) to be able to either hold out their set on throw, or nick the opponent's set. That is all they would need to do for me to consider a game interesting. Hold for three legs. That's it. If you think on a basis of "get a 15, they need to get a twelve, if not and I clean up in 18, they need to get a 15", then it asks not insignificant questions.

That said, the upshot of the exercise is that I'm going to give the PDC a break. I don't think the expansion as handled is great - I still think that pushing seeds to round 3, next best 32 from the Pro Tour to round 2 then everyone else in round 1 would be far better. At the same time, I can understand why they would not want to add another four days of sessions where the public buys in advance, and then gets shown Adam Gawlas v Tom Bissell, Stefan Bellmont v Adam Hunt, Lisa Ashton v Darren Beveridge and Darius Labanauskas v Jurjen van der Velde. As an example. There would be people that are so dense that would not look at a flatter bracket and understand that the elite players will not be playing, yet still whine about what they are seeing. Because people are idiots. People will quite easily see "world darts championship tickets brrrrrrrrrrrr" and buy them despite the outset clearly identifying there is zero chance of them seeing a truly elite player, and then complain about it. My point of view is fuck them, Matchroom's may be different. I don't know. I'm going to give them a mulligan for now -  maybe the qualifiers bring more than what I think they will. But I won't hold my breath.

Post Matchplay etc stuff

Always been more or less a couple of days behind everything, be it the back end of the Matchplay, the midweek Pro Tours, or the plethora of stuff that's happened this weekend, but we're up to date now. Big props to Littler, congrats to Wade for another fine tournament showing, then we've got new Pro Tour winners in Wattimena (we could see this coming) and Bialecki (maybe not just yet, but whatever), then this weekend a few players locked up their Ally Pally spots, which sold out pretty much instantly despite the increased pricing, increased session count and decreased overall quality of games. Fun times. That last comment I'll come onto in a separate post, but for now, we're due a new set of FRH rankings:

1 Luke Littler

2 Luke Humphries

3 Michael van Gerwen

4 James Wade (UP 3)

5 Jonny Clayton

6 Stephen Bunting (DOWN 2)

7 Josh Rock (UP 3)

8 Chris Dobey (DOWN 2)

9 Gerwyn Price (UP 2)

10 Damon Heta (DOWN 2)

11 Ross Smith (DOWN 2)

12 Gary Anderson

13 Danny Noppert (UP 1)

14 Mike de Decker (DOWN 1)

15 Martin Schindler

16 Gian van Veen (UP 2)

17 Dave Chisnall (DOWN 1)

18 Rob Cross (DOWN 1)

19 Nathan Aspinall

20 Jermaine Wattimena (NEW)

Searle's the player to drop out, although if Jermaine hadn't made the Pro Tour final he won, he would still be in the top 20. Zonneveld making a final moves him closer to the top 40, Bialecki's win puts him in the top 75, while Wenig making a final shifts him into the top 80. 

We've now got a little bit of a summer recess - I'll dive a bit more into what I said above about how the new worlds format is not good, but apart from a couple of Pro Tours, a Challenge Tour weekend and a chunk of silver rated WDF events, there's not much going on for the rest of the month, so expect sporadic updates, if any updates at all, prior to the Euro Tour at the end of the month.

As for a quick update on how the betting is going this season - it's fair to say being down a third from the starting bankroll is not where I'd want to be right now, but this is a lot more volatile than what I was doing previously. More than half the losses come from one man in one tournament and you know who he is. There's still some room before the end of the season to claw back towards parity, and I've had my first long shot each way worlds bet in BRadley Brooks, 250/1 boosted to 325/1 was too good to turn down for someone who did what he did at Q-School and has a Pro Tour win, semi and quarter in the last five events. It's going to need a bit of luck to get into a position where we can start to lay, right now he appears pretty much borderline as to whether he will be top 64, and that could come down to the PDPA qualifier and who comes out of that, but he's playing well enough and has enough of a peak game to be able to beat seeds in this in a short format, get out of round two and then we can probably look to just start betting his opponent to green out the position.

Well that was fortunate

Recalled I had bet on both van Veen and Bunting yesterday, and was fairly annoyed. Then completely overlooked I had gone moderately heavy on Rock, which got me out of the round at break even. So we are not in anywhere near as bad a position as I initially thought. Thank God.

So to the semis. Wade/Clayton. The numbers average at Jonny as having a 69% (nice) chance of winning the game. More pertinently, it is distributed in such a way that is not favourable towards Wade - the form sample is right on that line, and the 2025 sample is closer to 3-1 in favour of Jonny, with the twelve month data being the only thing that drags things back to that glorious 69%.

Now at this point I need to do some sanity checks. I've looked at the consistency stats - yes, Wade is better, but it is not obscenely better. I don't think it'll make that much of a difference. I'm not going to go with the sizing that the model is saying, sure, but I'm still going to put a confident bet on the Ferret.

Then we get onto Littler against Rock, which if things continue as they have been doing in this tournament, should close conversation for the match of the season debate. Both have been playing absurdly well, but in terms of whether there is value, this is hard. This is mainly due to Luke having more or less a three month holiday from ranked events. Full year stats say 70/30 Littler, and then 2025 stats say just a little bit below that, but still better than 2-1 Littler. Since April it says nearly 70/30 in favour of Rock. Betfair is currently trading at a tad shorter than 1.5 on Littler. I've already stated more than once that the form sample for Littler, based on sample size and that he may have been for all intents and purposes sandbagging, may not be any use at all. As such, I think this is a no go, even if we ignored the form sample it's not a Littler bet and it's not a good Rock bet, and the extent of what I am seeing is very much exaggerated in terms of Rock being able to take Luke to dicktown. I've been shoved a small free bet on the exchange, I'm putting it on Josh, but that's as far as I would go, this is just a sit back and enjoy game.

Matchplay quarters

Jesus, that was brutal. Absolutely brutal. After a very solid round 1 where we made substantial gains, everything and more was given back in round two with an 0-6 run, and even the two games I didn't bet I would likely have leant in terms of the value towards the player that ended up losing. The overall losses for the tournament are only minor, but still annoying given the position we were in, so I'm just going to put up the numbers in the same format as previous and not do too much commentary. I guess everyone's seen the games anyway and it's not like I actually watched anything live to add a great deal.

van Veen/Wade - 69/78/61 - 69

Bunting/Clayton - 56/52/64 - 57

Littler/Gilding - 89/88/64 - 80

Rock/Price - 56/55/67 - 59

Matchplay round 2

Numbers will be in full data/six months data/three months data/composite data format, the percentages being for the first listed player.

van Veen v Noppert - 54/62/50/55

Noppie won as expected again Menzies, although the margin of victory was somewhat larger than anticipated, while Gian was one where we thought he might run the favourite close and had chances, but he did convert them in what's the clear biggest story so far. He comes in as the favourite, and rightly so, but it seems as if, as has been the case for years, that Danny is undervalued and could represent small value at what we can get.

Nijman v Wade - 69/69/63/67

Nijman overcame any risk of TV hoodoo and got us our biggest bet of the first round in, while Wade played (at least on lol averages) the best he's ever done here, which given the number of matches he's played was quite something. These numbers indicate he should win around two thirds of the time, but he is nowhere near as short as the 1.5 that would indicate, so we will continue to punt on Wessel until the market adjusts and realises he is actually an elite player. Could be just them looking at Wade's first round as well, but whatever it is we'll take it while we can get it.

Bunting/Anderson - 37/43/51/44

Stephen looked pretty darned sluggish for some parts of his match with Joyce, although did recover well enough after that rough first eight or so legs, letting Joyce back into a game that looked won but eventually getting home. Ando didn't have too much trouble against Woodhouse, Luke winning the first two legs but not really doing much of anything after that. Ando projects as the better player, but is better on longer samples so probably doesn't offer any value either way if you're more of a bettor on form. I'll be trusting the composite number which makes it a Gary bet, but only a minbet.

Clayton/de Decker - 52/61/61/58

Clayton looked incredibly composed and solid against Schindler, who was not playing badly in the slightest and forced a real good game from the Ferret. de Decker wasn't great against Chizzy with one of the lower winning averages in round one, but with Dave playing how Dave has been playing in 2025 he didn't really need to do much more than what he did. The numbers indicate Mike might be slightly underrated, although that is based mainly on the long form, look at just 2025 and it's probably not value, and the first round games don't favour Mike either. I'll go with it, but again for more or less just the minimum.

Gilding/van Duijvenbode - 31/28/26/28

Andrew produced one of the better games he has done of late, averaging over a ton in a game with Heta that went to overtime, while Dirk needed a bit of a comeback and a bit of luck on finishing (from both players) to nick it against Cross by just the singular leg. Dirk's been playing well for some time, is trending completely in the right direction, and looks rather undervalued here.

Dobey/Price - 46/42/46/45

Chris pulled away from Pietreczko well in a game where the first half was very scrappy, and the second wasn't really that much better but Ricardo wasn't firing as much back as he did in the first half dozen or so legs. Gerwyn was in a, shall we say, feisty game with Gurney, where both players performed pretty solidly it has to be said but Price was able to manufacture an early lead and serve out enough legs to get over the line in a moderately close tie. Price, despite the seedings, should be favoured here, but not by much, the first round is a concern but Chris has been playing close enough for long enough to Gerwyn that I've got no problem with a moderate underdog play here.

Littler/Wattimena - 84/85/58/72

Littler was outstanding in a demolition job over Ryan Searle, we get the same sort of short sample size thing here as we did in that game, but I think any doubts as to whether Luke is in a bit of a rough spot have been set well and truly aside. Jermaine got through a scrap with Wright, neither playing awfully but seeing Wattimena start quickly enough and then survive a decent comeback effort, falling over the line from eight a piece. If we look at that bolded number in isolation then we should be betting Jermaine, but that looks clearly misleading given the first round, and something more like the longer stats look correct, which tell me to ignore the game, unlike in round one. Frankly there I believed Searle to have the possible A game to actually compete, I don't get the same vibes with Jermaine.

van Gerwen/Rock - 45/43/20/36

van Gerwen didn't do anything special against Barney, but at this stage of RvB's career, he didn't exactly have to, and just got the win. Rock on the other hand was sublime, it's either him or Littler for the pick of first round performances, Smith was down 5-0 early and although he offered more back after the first break to get some legs on the board himself, couldn't handle Josh's level of play. This is another one I think I can avoid. Like with Littler, MvG suffers from a small sample in the short data that isn't filled with great play, unlike Littler he didn't do much to correct it in round one, the raw overall number is a clear no bet, if we put him up nearer the two larger samples, then he might be small value, the true number is probably somewhere in between, which leaves Rock too short still but without the confidence of any edge to go with Michael here.

Correct score betting - a reprise

Mentioned this in the previous post, but thought I'd do it now. Let's say you're looking at tonight's games, you fancy a bit of a punt on the Littler game. You think he's going to win easily enough, but he's super odds on, so you don't see any value, so you pick a fairly one sided score out of a hat, let's say 10-4 Littler. Searle's not awful, should get some legs, but never really threaten. Can't disagree with any of that thought process, but there's a problem.

For your bet to win, precisely two things must happen. Now you may be thinking "well, yeah, Searle's got to win precisely four legs and Littler must win the match". True, but the two things I'm thinking of are the following:

a) The game must get to a score of precisely 9-4

b) Luke must win leg 14

How we get to 9-4, we really don't care - Searle can get off to a flier and Luke could then start steamrolling, we could get a bit of a reprise of Noppert/Menzies except with a few more legs for the loser, or anything in between. Doesn't matter. What does matter is the second point. Littler absolutely has to win the fourteenth leg.

The problem here is that darts works a lot like tennis. If you are on serve, you are much more likely to win the upcoming game than not. So it is the same in darts. We detailed in the previous post that even the worst player in the field should hold his throw more than half the time against the best player in the field. Now if Littler wins the bull, and opts to throw first (as he should), Searle is going to be on throw in the even numbered legs. Which includes the leg that Littler must win in order for your bet to win.

Of course, you could wait until we know who has won the bull, and if it is Littler then take a score that has Searle winning an odd number of legs. However, we don't know who does that (which, if you didn't know, you can see on sportradar) until fairly close before the off, and the bookie is going to flip to their prices of Littler having won the bull before you can place the bet. And they clearly do factor this in - looking at the live prices of Wright/Wattimena (at 5-1 Jermaine), the prices of 10-4 and 10-6 are shorter than all of 10-3, 10-5 and 10-7 - precisely because Jermaine has the darts in the even numbered legs.

So what should you do instead? Well, why not just go for the handicap bet - here, why not just take Littler -4.5 or -5.5? Or why not try to hit a middle? Take Littler -3.5 and Searle +6.5 at the same time, so 10-4, 10-5 and 10-6 will all pay off both sides. It won't pay off as much, but still gives you much the same sweat.

Tournament is going alright for me so far. Wade putting in his best ever performance, at least on averages, didn't help (and given how many games he's played here, that's some going), although I don't think he necessarily needed to with how Cullen was playing, but hitting on both Noppert and Nijman for lumps and then small pick ups on Gilding and DvD today keep things ticking over nicely. Searle pulling the upset this evening would be the icing on the cake, but that's pretty much a freeroll at this stage so long as Price and van Gerwen don't make mistakes on Monday night, when I'll probably be back to you with last sixteen thoughts.

Matchplay preview

Alright alright alright, let's get into this. I'll give you, for each player, a year long scoring number (and ranking, both overall and just within the field), 3m+, 6m+, year long and consolidated projections (largest data samples first, composite bolded), some blurb and then a projected final score (just based on 2025 data). DO NOT IN ANY WAY USE THAT FINAL SCORE PROJECTION AS A BETTING INDICATION - it is more to give you a rough idea of what the match winning percentage might look like in terms of size of win. I have gone over why I don't do correct score projections before and might reprise it in the quiet August month. But for now, the tournament.

(1) Luke Humphries - 95.61 (#3, #3) - 58, 58, 81, 66

Gian van Veen - 94.17 (#9, #9) - 42, 42, 19, 34

Humphries remains at the top of the game statistically, but has done most of his work in the big events with one major win, the Premier League, but nothing at European Tour level or below, much of which he's missed. van Veen did break through at Pro Tour level this year (beating Humphries in that final) and is starting to make moves on TV, so as such this is an inconvenient draw for both really. Humphries 12-10

(16) Danny Noppert - 93.04 (#15, #15) - 67, 69, 72, 69

Cameron Menzies - 90.99 (#28, #36) - 33, 31, 28, 31

Noppert maintains a top 15 position in pretty much everything, just about, but has had a moderately quiet 2025 so far in terms of results. Menzies has been doing work in comparison, with another Pro Tour win and a couple of other finals before getting that second bink, but is still to do a huge amount on TV and the numbers have fallen away a little bit it seems. Noppert 10-8

(8) Nathan Aspinall - 92.10 (#21, #24) - 30, 34, 28, 31

Wessel Nijman - 93.56 (#11, #11) - 70, 66, 72, 69

Aspinall has been looking real good on the European Tour with two binks, but the numbers remain unconvincing for his ranking, which in terms of the Werner is overstated given he's defending an absolute boatload here. Wessel has been consistently getting better numbers, but outside of getting fairly close on a couple of Euro Tours (including one semi where he lost 7-6 to Aspinall) he's not added to his debut win from '24 and is still to get anything of note done on TV. Nijman 10-8

(9) James Wade - 92.26 (#20, #23) - 62, 45, 59, 55

Joe Cullen - 91.24 (#23, #30) - 38, 55, 41, 45

Wade has had a bit of an up and down season, getting a Pro Tour bink and reaching the UK Open final, but his ranking probably outweighs the quality of his actual game at this point in time. Cullen on the other hand had an alright start on the floor with one final and one bink, but really needed those to get here and is probably drifting towards leaving the top 32 by the wrong end rather than back to where he thinks he belongs. Cullen 13-12

(4) Stephen Bunting - 94.36 (#6, #6) - 69, 74, 84, 76

Ryan Joyce - 91.02 (#27, #35) - 31, 26, 16, 24

Bunting got the Euro Tour break through finally this year, has been looking extremely good on the World Series, and is firmly established in that bracket of elite but just off the best couple in the world. Joyce is consolidating a top 32 position and has a Euro Tour final to his credit this year, but the numbers trail Bunting a fair bit, especially in the form based stats, so this could be a tough one. Bunting 10-7

(13) Gary Anderson - 95.71 (#2, #2) - 82, 75, 80, 79

Luke Woodhouse - 90.37 (#31, #40) - 18, 25, 20, 21

Ando in terms of just raw scoring is among the very elite in the game, has a Pro Tour and Euro Tour title this season and could have added a second last weekend, and is going to be hard to beat in this. Luke remains in and around the edges of the top 32, does have a couple of semi finals this year but is still waiting to break his PDC duck. Anderson 10-7

(5) Jonny Clayton - 92.76 (#17, #17) - 65, 64, 63, 64

Martin Schindler - 91.13 (#26, #34) - 35, 36, 37, 36

Jonny is doing a great job of remaining relevant in 2025, maybe slightly overvalued but not by that much and has good wins at Pro Tour and Euro Tour levels this season. Schindler has done the same though and outside of Rock is one of the players that seeds would want to be avoiding, even if on raw numbers this might not be as accurate a read as it appears to be. Clayton 11-9

(12) Dave Chisnall - 91.14 (#25, #33) - 42, 39, 50, 44

Mike de Decker - 92.61 (#19,. #20) - 58, 61, 50, 56

Chizzy is still in the top 16, but appears way down in 2025 with scoring dropping and just a singular final this year. de Decker's finally been given a World Series call up and is outscoring Chizzy generally speaking, but also just has the one final (although this was at Euro Tour level). de Decker 10-8

(2) Luke Littler - 96.81 (#1, #1) - 75, 74, 45, 65

Ryan Searle - 93.45 (#12, #12) - 25, 26, 55, 35

Littler's clearly the best players in the world, but looking at that form sample (where he's barely played in ranked events for full transparency) his last few months have been a bit below his best, and it is not as if he's been ripping up the unranked events then either. Searle has one Pro Tour win early in the season but it feels like it's been a quiet 2025 so far, but the numbers remain pretty darned good. Sure, Luke may just be able to turn the quality on like a tap, but if he can't then who knows. Littler 10-7

(15) Peter Wright - 91.54 (#22, #29) - 51, 46, 42, 46

Jermaine Wattimena - 92.73 (#18, #18) - 49, 54, 58, 54

Wright may well be falling out of the top 16 for the final time in the near future, the numbers just aren't there anymore and the results seem to be coming less and less frequently of late. Jermaine still needs a title, got another floor final this year and seems to be trending in the opposite direction, with likely enough to get across the line here. Wattimena 13-12

(7) Damon Heta - 93.13 (#14, #14) - 60, 53, 58, 57

Andrew Gilding -91.17 (#24, #31) - 40, 47, 42, 43

Heta has got another couple of Pro Tour wins, another Euro Tour final, but is probably at the highest ranking he's ever going to get to without a huge TV run, and the levels are probably not quite enough to seriously threaten to do that. Gilding holds on in the top 32 and is showing enough that it's a fair position, and while he did get to a Euro Tour final this season he didn't threaten to win it in the slightest. Heta 13-12

(10) Rob Cross - 92.94 (#16, #16) - 44, 45, 36, 42

Dirk van Duijvenbode - 93.94 (#10, #10) - 56, 55, 64, 58

Rob got the first Pro Tour win of the season, but after that it's been a bit quiet and he really doesn't seem like a top 10 player at present. Dirk feels like the player that would be more around that level, although he's not been able to add to his title tally so far this season. van Duijvenbode 13-11

(3) Michael van Gerwen - 94.71 (#5, #5) - 80, 82, 66, 76

Raymond van Barneveld - 90.59 (#30, #38) - 20, 18, 34, 24

van Gerwen, like Littler, hasn't played a huge amount in the last few months and that allows for Barney to keep the form based sample fairly close, did get a Euro Tour win, and still remains one of the world's best. Barney is holding on in the top 32 but I really don't think he's a top 32 level player and this is very close to the most one sided first round ties we have. van Gerwen 10-6

(14) Ross Smith - 93.45 (#13, #13) - 41, 41, 32, 38

Josh Rock - 95.11 (#4, #4) - 59, 59, 68, 62

Ross has the most convincing Pro Tour win this season by far, but outside of that, he's not doing anything to convince that he can really push on to hit the top 10, with a few players below him in the rankings outscoring him so he may go backwards before he goes forward. Rock is one of these, back to the sorts of levels he was at peak hype, he now has a TV title as well (albeit in pairs) and he could well be in contention to claim a major title in singles, he is that good. Rock 10-8

(6) Chris Dobey - 94.22 (#8, #8) - 77, 81, 76, 78

Ricardo Pietreczko - 89.44 (#32, #60) - 23, 19, 24, 22

Dobey's another one who could be getting to the stage where he is a legitimate contender, and this is a very scary quarter of the draw, adding to his title tally with another two Pro Tours this season, he's been known to be an elite talent and one that could just bypass the Euro Tour level of title without anyone batting an eyelid. Ricardo is kind of holding on at this level, has by far the worst numbers of anyone in the field with nobody else being below 90, and it's a second bad draw in a row, and this might not be pretty. Dobey 10-6

(11) Gerwyn Price - 94.27 (#7, #7) - 74, 82, 79, 78

Daryl Gurney - 90.98 (#29, #37) - 26, 18, 21, 22

Price is bang in form having won the last Euro Tour, finalled the last Pro Tour and is showing top ten level darts, above 94 being the sort of level where someone becomes a legitimate contender to win a title. Gurney got the TV win he's been after so will be confident, this however is an awkward draw and it's hard to give him a realistic chance given his numbers being well below Price's so this could be tough for Daryl. Price 10-6

Future rounds:

Humphries 11-9 Noppert

Nijman 12-10 Cullen

Bunting 12-14 Anderson

Clayton 12-10 de Decker

Littler 11-7 Wattimena

Heta 9-11 van Duijvenbode

van Gerwen 13-14 Rock

Dobey 12-14 Price

Humphries 16-13 Nijman

Anderson 16-14 Clayton

Littler 16-14 van Duijvenbode

Rock 16-14 Price

Humphries 19-17 Anderson

Littler 17-15 Rock

Humphries 15-18 Littler

Now one thing you might note is that I've not put a single wildly one sided scoreline on here. This is simply due to how good players are these days - it makes it very, very hard for anyone to break. If I look at a first round match between the best player (Littler) and the worst player (Pietreczko), you're going to have a minimum of ten legs, five on throw for each player. Now here, Littler projects to hold on throw slightly over 80% of the time - so one time in five, you'd expect Ricardo to break. Pietreczko on throw, although Luke is clearly better, still rates to hold his throw 52% of the time - more than half the time. So of those ten legs, if we say that Littler does a bit better than expectation and breaks Pietreczko three times, but Ricardo gets one break back, that is still only 7-3. That's enough to give Ricardo a guaranteed leg with the darts, if we give Luke the bull to throw first, say that Pietreczko doesn't break either the next two but does hold (not unreasonable, given he should hold more than half the time and we did give Littler the odd leg of the first five, so we'll make it 3-3 on the Pietreczko throw to that point), we get it up to 9-4 with Ricardo throwing to make it 9-5. So if I've not put any wins more one sided than 10-6, and have a lot of games being decided by just the one break or by overtime, that's just a factor of these things. Players are fucking good and it makes it hard to break. That's it. If we made something even more one sided and said someone would hold 85% of the time and break 55% of the time, that's only a 2.2% chance of a 10-0. Game is fierce these days.

Kiel aftermath

Well that early start caught me out, although even if it was the normal 12pm UK start I wasn't making it in time for any betting. Chisnall losing did the damage, often get the case where the market's saying 45% or there abouts and we've got it the other way around, that sort of thing loses often enough and that just so happened today to cause an overall loss in the event. We'll look to rebuild in Blackpool, expect a run through of the event, as for now, the latest FRH rankings:

1 Luke Littler

2 Luke Humphries

3 Michael van Gerwen

4 Stephen Bunting

5 Jonny Clayton

6 Chris Dobey

7 James Wade

8 Damon Heta (UP 1)

9 Ross Smith (DOWN 1)

10 Josh Rock

11 Gerwyn Price (UP 6)

12 Gary Anderson (DOWN 1)

13 Mike de Decker (DOWN 1)

14 Danny Noppert (DOWN 1)

15 Martin Schindler (DOWN 1)

16 Dave Chisnall (DOWN 1)

17 Rob Cross (DOWN 1)

18 Gian van Veen (NEW)

19 Nathan Aspinall (DOWN 1)

20 Ryan Searle (DOWN 1)

Wright slips out of the top 20 to let van Veen in, otherwise the only real moves are on account of Price binking yesterday, and Heta getting a Pro Tour in midweek. These include Matchplay mincashes, the first player out is not Smith or van den Bergh, but the oft forgotten Ritchie Edhouse. The top 35 is now the Matchplay field minus those three, without that mincashing Lukeman and Ratajski might be a tad higher, but they're not. Niko's now into the top 70, and the top 50 is probably a matter of when rather than if, with him now looking very good to be the only player to actually earn a European Championship spot, rather than being gifted it.

I'll run through Blackpool midweek. There's some very nice first round matchups, but we'll just go through in bracket order and see if anyone can realistically stop Littler.

Hood Is Good - Kiel day 2

Small profits made today. Did get a nice little bit on Justin Hood, but that was pretty much for the minimum, consideration for going beyond that was conditional on the Thursday evening line going in our favour which it clearly didn't. Had a moderate thing on Dirk and also a minbet on O'Connor but at huge odds on for both of them that's not really worth mentioning any further. Onto round two, the wheat has been separated from the chaff so we should have good projections for everything. Let's go. Again, we'll go short - mid - long - composite numbers, the last figure is the key percentage you want, you can use the others to get your trends if you value form over consistency or the other way around.

Searle - 64-68-63-65

Heta - 52-47-47-49

Anderson - 73-63-69-68

Noppert - 53-51-51-52

Chisnall - 63-55-56-58

Smith - 74-79-73-75

Clayton - 52-46-46-48

Wade - 52-47-56-52

Price - 65-66-65-65

Cross - 77-80-75-77

Bunting - 67-57-58-61

Humphries - 94-83-79-85

Rock - 79-76-76-77

Schindler - 48-44-42-45

Aspinall - 48-57-56-54

Dobey - 42-44-48-45

As I say, nothing up yet. I'll wait until the morning, then likely bet on Dirk as usual.

Kiel day 1

Long time no speak, with the advertise break in big things going on, we've got some props to give to Bradley Brooks, was playing some great stuff and has now converted to a Pro Tour title, and we've also hit the Matchplay cutoff, with Smith, van den Bergh and Edhouse being the biggest names in the FRH rankings to miss out. There's some real spicy first round ties (Smith v Rock seems the pick) but we can come to that in a post next week. For now, we've got the Euro Tour back tomorrow, and that pulls our attention. Just refreshing my data, and here's what I'm seeing for the first round matches. I should note that, for the first time I can remember in a while, the last twelve month stats sees someone (Littler) a clear point a turn ahead of anyone else in the game, but that's just an interesting point of note. He's not in Kiel, so we'll ignore him for now. Here's day one, and I'll post the first name winning percentages in short (3+ months data, i.e. to start of April), mid (6m) and full (365 days) projections, along with the overall average. As always if someone's not won fifty legs in a given period, the number will be disregarded as unreliable.

Mansell: N/A - N/A - N/A - N/A

Woodhouse: N/A - N/A - N/A - N/A

Menzies: N/A - N/A - N/A - N/A (note to self to check the spelling of this guy's surname in the data)

van Veen: N/A - 79 - 84 - 82

Wattimena: 54 - 52 - 55 - 54

Veenstra: 25 - 30 - 37 - 31

Nijman: N/A - N/A - N/A - N/A

Huybrechts: 50 - 45 - 50 - 48

van Duijvenbode: 86 - 84 - 74 - 81

Springer: N/A - N/A - N/A - N/A

O'Connor: 88 - 83 - 81 - 84

van Barneveld: 68 - 61 - 60 - 63

Gurney: 58 - 59 - 56 - 58

de Decker: 61 - 63 - 67 - 64

Pietreczko: 69 - 64 - 68 - 67

Cullen: 50 - 58 - 54 - 54

The markets are up on Betfair, but nobody's laying much, I've only had a tiny play on Hood in the last game and none of the markets that have had anything matched on them as of right now offer anything close to value, so it's a case of check back in the morning.

News round up

Been pretty quiet since the World Cup (that lay England suggestion went well, didn't it?), but there's been a few things happening so let's go through them.

First thing is Barney being announced for one of the World Seniors events. Now this one caught pretty much everybody out, and while I've seen the reasoning for him being in it given (he asked the PDC to play in it and they said yes), I do wonder why exactly the PDC are alright with it. This is a former world champion *of theirs* who is still doing enough to qualify for major events (he's in the Matchplay by £5k from Smith right now - if he just plays to his seeding in the remaining two Pro Tours that'll be £8k that Smith would need to find, more than £10k for anyone else, and would also need Joyce to overtake him), so clearly does have some marketing value for the PDC. This isn't, say, Brendan Dolan or Ian White getting the nod, no disrespect to them. Frankly, the only thing I can think of is that Barney's spoken with Porter behind the scenes, said that this is going to be his last season (he is 58 now after all), and will be handing in his card post-Ally Pally, and that as such, they don't have any sort of long term business relationship, so the PDC'll let him play other things and bill the next six months as some sort of farewell tour. That's just speculation on my part for sure, but I'm struggling to think of any other reasoning there could be - particularly if RvB tried to force Porter's hand and say he'll just resign his card now if you say no, although giving up the best part of fifty grand's worth of major prize money he's currently lined up for would be a pretty costly thing to do, so I don't think that would ever be realistic. Of course, I completely misread it in the first instance, and thought he'd got the invite for their world championship - not one of the run of the mill events. Here's my question to you though - if the PDC said "ok, everyone over 45 has carte blanche to play in these", is Barney even a favourite right now to get into the quarter finals of any given event? Anderson, Wright, Clayton and Ratajski I think are all clearly better. Gilding and Sedlacek are close. Then there's a few like Dolan, Suljovic, White, Vandenbogaerde and maybe some others that would be very clearly live, and that's before you get to those who are already on their circuit outside the PDC system, and those we haven't seen yet (Krcmar's playing well enough in 2025 that he could do a lot of damage, for example). Heck, Chizzy would be eligible in a few months. Could it be that Barney's looking to get what he can from the seniors before he's simply not good enough to compete in it? We'll see.

Then we've got the worlds criteria being announced. I think this has generally gone down well, although they took their time about doing it. Let's look at the changes and discuss, I'll go through in terms of general categories with what's changed:

Top 32 OOM and top 32 Pro Tour OOM > Top 40 OOM and top 40 Pro Tour OOM (+16) - these are fine. I don't think anyone thought for one minute all 32 spots would go to international qualifiers, but I was guessing more like they'd up the Pro Tour to 40 and leave the main order of merit spots as it is. That said, this does address a lot of the backlash they got about things like the Euro Tour changes and cutting back of opportunities for those lower down the rankings. Clearly not all of the 40 on the Pro Tour will be card holders, but this should make well over 60% of the card holders in any given year reach the worlds. Which is nice.

World Youth Champion & 1-2 of Development Tour > World Youth Champion & 1-3 of Development Tour (+1) - absolutely fine. I think most people assumed that some of the slots would be filled by expansion of the secondary tour positions. The tour is more than strong enough to warrant an additional spot, even given that a lot of the top names are card holders.

1-2 of Challenge Tour > 1-3 of Challenge Tour (+1) - also fine. Top end of this is always pretty stacked, some of them will clearly get in through the Pro Tour list, Labanauskas looking pretty much a lock for a spot there, but again, clearly good enough.

Women's Matchplay Champion & 1-2 of Women's Series > Women's Matchplay Champion & 1-3 of Women's Series (+1) - here I'm not so sure. I am not sure that the field is strong enough in the women's game to warrant a fourth spot right now, especially if Greaves (and others) opt to play Lakeside instead, and Greaves would be taking one of the Dev Tour spots instead anyway (and, going forward, likely the same if she does win a tour card and move to the Pro Tour full time). Granted, the numbers are worse because of the level of the field, but the averages aren't pretty and I think the status quo could and should have been maintained here. There's a reason why I don't include any data from here in my database.

Steel Darts Japan Winner, China Championship Winner, 1-4 of Asian Tour, 1-2 of Asian Championship, Indian Qualifier > Steel Darts Japan Winner, China Championship Winner, 1-5 of Asian Tour, 1-2 of Asian Championship, Indian Qualifier (+1) - again, fine. Area seems strong enough to warrant this many, adding an extra spot to the established tour seems the most sensible thing to do, although perhaps an alternative would be to host an additional country-specific qualifier to have precedence over the Asian Tour spot. A Philippines qualifier, for example, would seem to me to be a much better use of a spot than any of the three country-specific events they are hosting. I'd rather them have done that and made it 5 from the Asian Tour after all others are done than making it four from the women's game.

DPA Pro Tour Champion, Oceanic Masters Winner, DPNZ Qualifier > ANZ Premier League Winner, ADA Tour Winner, DPA Pro Tour Winner, DPNZ Pro Tour Winner (+1) - a sensible increase. I'm not sure I'm liking the idea of having two competing tours each providing a spot, and I'm not really sure what the ADA is, but the Oceanic region is good enough for an extra spot. I don't know what this means for the Oceanic Masters - it's essentially been replaced by the new regional Premier League, and giving it based on a series of events rather than just whoever might have run good on the day might give you a better quality of qualifier, but it is a fair bit of a downgrade for what was a fairly important event. Unless it's been cancelled going forwards and nobody's mentioned it, the area does seem to run its media based on pages that look like they were made on Geocities so that's entirely possible.

CDC Top American, CDC Top Canadian, CDC Next Best Player > CDC Top American, CDC Top Canadian, NA Championship Winner, CDC Continental Cup Winner, CDC Cross Border Challenge Winner (+2) - this seems a little bit of a weird way to do it. For whatever reason, I cannot find the first post the PDC made with their criteria for last year, so I am not sure if the spot there was for the NA Championship that Campbell couldn't use shifted to the main CDC rankings or just went elsewhere, I'm going to guess the former as otherwise it would kind of not be an increase. That they appear to be adding it to a one off event rather than their existing league is a bit of a weird one, making it three spots that may be decided this way, maybe they just can't work out which is their most prestigious event.

1-2 of SDC > Nordic and Baltic Championship Winner, 1-2 of SDC (+1) - again, fine, if they're setting up a new event, which they are doing with this Nordic championship, then adding a worlds spot to give it a bit of added prestige from the get go seems sensible enough.

East Europe Qualifier > SE Europe Qualifier, Czechia Qualifier, Polish Qualifier, Hungarian Super League Winner (+3) - now this is a huge increase. I do wonder if this is a placeholder series of events in lieu of them announcing a new regional secondary tour, which I think the area could certainly support, they're holding Euro Tour qualifiers already anyway after all. I think the countries are right - think Hungary's a bit behind the other two and Poland seems the strongest, but these are places that are holding Euro Tour or World Series events so it's logical enough.

PDC Europe Super League Champion, West Europe Qualifier > Netherlands/Belgium Qualifier, Mediterranean Qualifier, DACH Super League Champion (+1) - adding a spot here is fine. It would have been snappier to call the first of these events a Benelux qualifier (and it also means we don't forget Luxembourg, who seem to fit in neither of these events which I assume is just an oversight), but that could be fixed.

CDLC Qualifier, ADG Qualifier, TCH Qualifier 1-2 > UK/Ireland Associate Qualifier, CDLC Qualifier, ADG Qualifier, TCH Qualifier 1-4 (+3) - this is a mishmash of everything that's left. Although there's been plenty of calls to give a second African spot, I don't think it's quite the time given how few spots there are for some areas which are clearly stronger. Maybe that's something that comes sooner rather than later, similar in South America with Argentina looking pretty decent at the World Cup, but keeping it as is for the time being I think is the sensible thing. An associate qualifier for the UK and Ireland is a bit of an interesting one - I guess we have qualifiers for non-card holders for everywhere else, so why not? It'd essentially be a bonkers Challenge Tour event with all the money in one spot, which should be fun. Then we get an increase to four spots for any tour card holders that still aren't in. Which seems like a lot, given we could have as few as 40-45 players left - the brackets are only going to contain 10-12 players which is not a big field to run through, although at the very least it would take one heck of a number of withdrawals or other qualifying spots not running for someone to get a bye straight to the semis. If you're a card holder and don't make the worlds, you've been given your chances.

That leaves one qualifying spot to be determined - I don't know if this is a situation where they're waiting on something like knowing the Oceanic Masters will run, a potential new event that they're waiting for final clearance to unveil, or (hopefully not) some form of backup plan to gerrymander the field should a big name they want in the field not qualify. Maybe a catch all qualifier at some point around the WDF World Masters? Really not sure how they're going to use it, but we'll see.