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.

Metal fatigue

And by metal, I mean specifically tungsten. One of the big problems people have made out in relation to the Premier League is that we see the same games again and again. So let's quantify that. Here's a cross-table as to how many times we have seen each game take place just in the Premier League this season:

This might be a tad small, but it should give you the gist of things. The only games we have seen the bare minimum of times were the respective games between van Gerwen, Cross and Bunting, and this is despite van Gerwen withdrawing from one against Price. What is should highlight beyond anything is how many times this format has given us Littler against Humphries. It is, if we exclude the finals day, every other week.

Now, back in the old days of wrestling, a promotion would NEVER give away a match between their two top talents who they are pushing towards a pay per view major card matchup. Now clearly this is different - anyone that is paying for the subscription (at least in the UK) who has paid in for the Premier League is going to be getting the Matchplay as well. But this sort of thing just will naturally harm the potential draw rate. How on earth can they possibly try to do any sort of billing of their dream Luke on Luke violence final as "the final we've all been waiting for" when due to the ridiculous Premier League format, they have given this game away NINE TIMES already this season? It goes the same for more or less anything between these players - they are clearly not the top eight players in the world, but the PDC clearly see these players as at least marketable if not. Why should us, as keyboard warriors (sorry, punters), give a shit if we get Aspinall against van Gerwen in the Matchplay when you've given this to us six times already?

It gets worse when you expand to other televised events. Let's go through what we've seen from events we can see. I'm going to include the European Tour, as we can see all of those. I'm not going to include the Pro Tour, as while a lot of the games between these players will take place when there is a high probability of these coming against each other, it's not guaranteed and I'm pretty sure nobody is tracking it. So let's go through event by event.

World Masters - Nothing miraculously

UK Open - Bunting/Dobey

Bahrain - Littler/Price, Humphries/Aspinall, Humphries/Bunting, Price/Bunting, Dobey/Bunting

Dutch - Littler/van Gerwen, Littler/Bunting, Price/Cross, Cross/Bunting

Nordic - Littler/Aspinall, Humphries/Price, Aspinall/Bunting, Price/Cross, Dobey/Cross, Cross/Bunting

ET1 - No games

ET2 - Humphries/Aspinall, Price/van Gerwen

ET3 - Humphries/Bunting, Aspinall/Price, Aspinall/Bunting

ET4 - No games

ET5 - No games

ET6 - No games

ET7 - No games

ET8 - Aspinall/Dobey

So, a bunch of the additional games have come from the World Series events, and not so much from the Euro Tours - mainly because a lot of players in the PL have either not entered or withdrawn from the tournaments in question. What that does to the cross table is this:

It's not a huge change, but it tells us enough - apart from two matches, we have seen everyone who got to the PL finals day against anyone else in the PL at least four times already this season, barring two matchups.

So what can we do about it? The first thing would be a reversion to the previous PL format. Increase back to 10, and go to an actual league format - the strength in depth is there regardless of who you pick, the cut down to 8 after 9 weeks does add jeopardy which frankly is not there in the current format, and you only see every game twice, plus whoever plays each other in the finals night. You never go into an event thinking "well I saw these two last week". Only three weeks didn't see some sort of rematch from the previous week. Increase the field, limit the number of times people play each other, it increases variety. Secondly, they really need to go back to what they used to do probably nearly a decade ago now, and use toe World Series as kind of a proving ground for those players who are on the up, but who they might not quite see as Premier League ready. Looking at the line ups they have had so far, in Bahrain they had 7 PL players plus Wright (van Gerwen not there), all 8 in the Netherlands, and then 7 PL players plus Clayton in Copenhagen (again, van Gerwen not there). Now I guess for the Wright inclusion there may have been some pressure on the PDC to include certain players, and I don't hate the inclusion of Clayton given he's had a good season, but they are hardly the future of the sport. Why on earth are we not just having 3, 4, 5 of the Premier League line up and some real wild cards in there? Why are we not giving Josh Rock a shot? Gian van Veen? Wessel Nijman? Damon Heta? Martin Schindler? Mike de Decker? Granted, some of these may end up as jobbers to the stars in the relevant events, but why? Plenty of them have done enough, are playing well enough and are young enough that they may be on the cusp of going stratospheric if things go their way in the next six months. Wouldn't you want to see how they handle themselves on a huge stage against the best in the world?

World Cup madness

I see that they've made the group stage draw (but seemingly not the knockout draw) for the World Cup. I've instantly seen two wildly different takes on England's chances - they are, naturally, the favourites, and are priced in one place at 4/11. Now, yes, vig, but let's call that a 75% chance. In reality it's lower, but let's just round it off to that. Oche's said it should be 1/7 - i.e. that the chances of England not winning are half of what the bookies say. Lendel's said it should be evens - i.e. that the chances of England not winning are twice what the bookies say. That's quite the difference, but whose thoughts are more outlandish?

With no draw, it's hard to say, and it's even harder to know how to model doubles - we have no idea if Littler is running into his perfect format, or whether he hates it with a passion. The latter is possible, I hate hate hate playing pairs. I think the best thing we can do is to set bounds, and say that the best chance the better team has will be the chances of the better player for the better team (likely Littler, but it's close), and then swap the players to get the worst chance, and the winning shot will be somewhere in the middle. Let's assume it was done in draw order, whereby England, as the 1 seed, would get the 16 seed in round one, then 8, 4 and 2. This would give them Finland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and then Wales. Only the last two are fixed - they could end up getting much tougher teams in the first two rounds (although I think more teams seeded in the group stages are fielding nowhere near their strongest teams - but let's go with it.

vs Finland:

Littler v Kantele - 100%

Littler v Harju - 89%

Humphries v Kantele - 100%

Humphries v Harju - 86%

vs Ireland:

Littler v O'Connor - 80%

Littler v Barry - 94%

Humphries v O'Connor - 75%

Humphries v Barry - 92%

vs Northern Ireland:

Littler v Rock - 62%

Littler v Gurney - 86%

Humphries v Rock - 55%

Humphries v Gurney - 81%

vs Wales:

Littler v Price - 63%

Littler v Clayton - 73%

Humphries v Price - 54%

Humphries v Clayton - 66%

Now these numbers are quite, quite telling. Let's chuck the Finland numbers out as both Kantele and Harju are working on very limited data for the smallest sample, although if we do play split the difference, say England win 95% of the time and it's 1/20 in the pricing, it's probably not too far off, it's not worth mentioning. If we look against Ireland - Willie would be expected to beat either Luke somewhere between one in four and one in five times. Keane would not be as good, which is fine - no slight on Barry, but O'Connor is clearly the better player right now. The average of all those is 85%. That's clearly an indication that England are massively favoured, but not a lock. That drops to, say, a 1/6 pricing, pre vig. That immediately makes the 1/7 valuation Oche had look ridiculous, and we're not even at the semi final stage.

In the semis, we get a pair of opponents where one player is doing really well (fun fact - since March Rock has a higher points per turn in my database than Littler over a 50% larger sample), and the other player is certainly not playing badly, and may be a tad underrated. Add all those percentages together and split them and you get to 71%. That's more or less the 4/11 that the bookies (or at least the bookie was quoted) to win the whole tournament. Then we go to the final. No player is rated at less than a one in four chance to win a best of 19 against any other player in the match. That should be the deciding factor in telling you not to bet on England to win this event - they're too short. Way, way too short. Wales ought to be no more than 2/1 to win the final - and this is a known pair which has binked this event twice, so understands the tournament, and are known to be playing well as of right now, with (since March) Price being second only behind Humphries in scoring, and Clayton being over 93 per turn which is clearly enough to be considered at an elite level and he has a Euro Tour bink of late. Combine, say, a 1% chance to lose the opening game, a 10% chance to lose the quarter, a 25% chance to lose the semi and a 30% chance to lose the final, all of which are likely underestimates of England's chances to lose, and you get them at being odds against to win the tournament.

I'm clearly making some simplifications. But in such a unique format, you have to make these sorts of adjustments. I'm going off the data I have. Are England favourites to win? Absolutely. Should we bet England to win? Absolutely not. We should probably do the opposite.

Matchplay getting closer

Aspinall managed to bink another Euro Tour, looks like he was fortunate to do so, probably will throw up even more opportunities to lay him in the future, looking at post worlds data he's not even in the top 20 in scoring, but we're going to need to wait a fair bit to try to exploit that, with over a month's wait before we have any ranked events that we can realistically bet on (yeah, the odd line might pop up for Players Championship events, but it's not realistic to react to those in time given they're all midweek and drawn on the fly with work commitments). New FRH rankings are as follows:

1 Luke Littler

2 Luke Humphries

3 Michael van Gerwen

4 Stephen Bunting

5 Jonny Clayton

6 Chris Dobey

7 James Wade

8 Ross Smith

9 Damon Heta (UP 2)

10 Josh Rock (DOWN 1)

11 Gary Anderson (DOWN 1)

12 Mike de Decker (UP 1)

13 Danny Noppert (DOWN 1)

14 Martin Schindler

15 Dave Chisnall

16 Rob Cross

17 Gerwyn Price

18 Nathan Aspinall (NEW)

19 Ryan Searle (DOWN 1)

20 Peter Wright (DOWN 1)

Gian van Veen is the player to drop out, but you have to think that's only going to be temporary. Heta gets back into the top 10 with his final, while Nijman is getting closer and closer to the top 32 following another good run at this level. Matt Campbell breaks back into the top 60 following his final session visit.

That's probably going to be it in terms of posts for a bit - as mentioned, there's no Euro Tour for a month, so I'll be looking to use this non-darts, non-football time of the season to recharge the batteries ahead of the Matchplay run up.

Leverkusen quarters - ah, that's better

Not a perfect run by any means as Aspinall pulled off the win over Pietreczko, but a triple hit on Heta, Campbell and Bunting clawed back a good chunk of Saturday's losses, so we'll take that. Clearly when it looks like we've identified players to lay, we'd rather not have to lay them twice for obvious reasons, but at least it did work this time. Onto the quarters:

Campbell/Heta - 33/67

Menzies/Clayton - 36/64

Aspinall/Dobey - 30/70

Nijman/Bunting - 48/52

As such, looking at the markets, there's nothing really doing in the top two, we'll lay Aspinall one more time (backing someone who just averaged 110 and 6/8 on doubles rather than Brooks and Pietreczko makes things a bit more comfortable), and take a small nibble on Nijman. If we project further looking at who's favoured, Clayton's a tiny favourite over Heta (not even 55/45), while Dobey's probably around that mark as a favourite against Bunting. A Clayton/Dobey final would similarly be extremely tight - would give Chris the edge, but it's so marginal and with him still not having won at this level, there might be that sort of intangible element that makes it a coinflip. This should be a pretty damned good session regardless.

Leverkusen day 3 - the rebuild starts here

Wow is all I can say about that one. Wouldn't call it the worst day ever, but it might be top five, with two large bets running into a 107 average and 6/6 on doubles and then a 106 average and over 50% on doubles as well. Brooks didn't help, I did sense check that when the numbers said he should be favoured, and it's right, there is a little bit of a consistency issue but it's never going to be enough to swing something to not be a bet. We did at least downsize so that's a start, nicking that one would probably have turned the day into break even. Eight games, let's go:

Wade/Campbell - 57/43

Heta/Harrysson - 78/22

Menzies/Edhouse - 58/42

Clayton/de Decker - 56/44

Aspinall/Pietreczko - 53/47

Dobey/Gilding - 66/34

Wright/Nijman - 45/55

Bunting/Gurney - 65/35

As such, it looks like continuing to lay Aspinall, Gurney and Harrysson will be the plays for me, although I'm cutting the bet sizing on account of at least some of these playing well, and obvious bankroll things, also Campbell may be a tad undervalued. Let's see what happens.

Leverkusen day 2

Yesterday was a big irritant. I think I described it on X as like putting the lunchtime kickoff in an accumulator - I had a small number of minimum plays all in the 2-3 range, which went alright, but then had a max play. On the first game. So we know how the whole day is going to go right from the outset. And when Madars couldn't score, that basically set the tone and the rest didn't matter. Oh well, at least I thought the edge of the play might have been a bit overstated and toned the bet down slightly, but it's still a bad one. We go again today:

Smith/Campbell - 70/30

Searle/Gilding - 60/40

Heta/Mansell - 68/32

Noppert/Edhouse - 71/29

Chisnall/Menzies - 52/48

Anderson/Nijman - 60/40

de Decker/Joyce - 59/41

van Veen/Gurney - 73/27

Dobey/Springer - 55/45

Wade/Wenig - 59/41

Wright/Pilgrim - 76/24

Clayton/Wattimena - 56/44

Smith/Harrysson - 76/24

Aspinall/Brooks - 49/51

Schindler/Pietreczko - 62/38

Bunting/Woodhouse - 62/38

Leverkusen day 1

Draw is up. At a first glance, that looks pretty favourable for Gilding, Woodhouse, Wattimena, Pietreczko, Edhouse and to some extent Michael Smith (who due to withdrawals has been upgraded to a first round bye) in the Matchplay hunt. Cullen, Gurney, Barney, Joyce and Zonneveld could have had easier draws, but the only real bastard draw any of them could have got is probably Springer, so they'll all be happy to miss that one (Dirk got the short straw there). Let's jump straight into round one:

Razma/Pilgrim - 74/26

Edhouse/Krivka - insufficient data

O'Connor/Mansell - 61/39

Zonneveld/Wenig - 60/40

Campbell/Soutar - 52/48

Wattimena/Hermann - insufficient data

Gilding/Knopf - insufficient data

Nijman/Dolan - 68/32

Pietreczko/Bohrmann - insufficient data

Menzies/Huybrechts - 60/40

Joyce/Evans - 56/44

van Barneveld/Harrysson - 68/32

Cullen/Brooks - 52/48

van Duijvenbode/Springer - 57/43

Woodhouse/Horvat - long data only

Gurney/Veenstra - 57/43

We have seen some of the names here before that we don't know. Krivka played ET3 and lost 6-4 to Edhouse so it is a rematch, didn't look awful, did beat Krcmar in the quali but that was back in February now. Hermann is a Dev Tour player, has seemingly a couple of quarters (although the most recent one I think is an error on dartsdatabase), so probably not terrible but clearly an awful draw. Knopf also played ET3 and got swept by Menzies, quali performance was underwhelming, Gilding should have no trouble. Bohrmann is a complete random but did get up into the 90's a couple of times in the quali so while I don't think he should threaten Ricardo, if he can get to 3-3 or so it could get spicy. Horvat is a known player, we just don't have a huge amount once we exclude his 2024 data.

Looks like we've got a few close ones. I'm intrigued to see Brooks project so close to Cullen, there is a minor consistency thing but it is only that as Joe's about as up and down as the database on average as well. Pilgrim being that much of a dog to Razma is maybe a little bit more of a consistency thing, but he's really not had a great twelve months at all, getting through Q-School aside. Ought to be a decent day, Betfair doesn't have all the markets up yet and there's nothing matched on most markets, so will wait to bet until the morning in all likelihood.

Edit - Neglected to actually do the line on the Woodhouse/Horvat data we actually have. 65/35 that one.

Ups and downs

Very weird tournament. Round 1 was not good in the slightest, nicking just the two wins through Edhouse (just) and Springer, whereas round 2 was pretty darned elite, going 6/7 before Rock inexplicably lost to Pietreczko. The upshot was that we made a tiny profit - but at some cost. It seems like we've been betting on Clayton a fair bit (although in actuality it's not been that many), and he's binked so the value is gone, and Niko Springer being good is a fairly open secret but one that the market hadn't fully adjusted to. And he's finalled, so the value has gone. We'll go again in Leverkusen in a couple of days in what is actually the last Euro Tour before the Matchplay cutoff (although we do have a few Pro Tours), so the last chance for someone to make big moves. Before we look at that, some new 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 Ross Smith (UP 4)

9 Josh Rock (DOWN 1)

10 Gary Anderson (UP 7)

11 Damon Heta (DOWN 2)

12 Danny Noppert (UP 4)

13 Mike de Decker (DOWN 2)

14 Martin Schindler (UP 1)

15 Dave Chisnall (DOWN 1)

16 Rob Cross (DOWN 6)

17 Gerwyn Price (DOWN 4)

18 Ryan Searle (UP 2)

19 Peter Wright (DOWN 1)

20 Gian van Veen (NEW)

Aspinall's the player to drop out. It's kind of surprising to see Cross dropping that much, but he has been pretty darned quiet this year. Still, it's pretty close all the way up to Wade so plenty of chances to make some moves. Niko's only a few places off the top 64 now.

So with the Matchplay coming up, here's the key spots (picture courtesy of the Weekly Dartscast):

Anyone above Cullen looks safe (Dirk's the next one above and a clear 13 grand ahead of Cullen),  while below Zonneveld, O'Connor's near four grand further back, Doets is another 2k behind Willie, and nobody else is above 50k. While it's not impossible that someone can come from nowhere (heck, Ratajski wasn't really in the running a couple of weeks back), being a whole Pro Tour win behind is a fair bit. Sure, there's five attempts to do it, but you've got to think that everyone else isn't going to stand still. We'll see how ET8 changes things - but for now, here's what these players are doing in terms of points per turn in 2025:

Ratajski 92.97

Wattimena 92.62

Smith 91.33

Joyce 91.05

Cullen 91.05

Gilding 91.02

Zonneveld 90.73

Woodhouse 90.52

Gurney 89.80

van Barneveld 89.80

Pietreczko 89.56

Lukeman 88.76

Edhouse 88.64

As such, Wattimena excepted, the three players who are scoring the most are those in 16th, 17th and 18th respectively. Those in 9th to 12th are all looking pretty good, so should just keep ticking over. The problems come for the bottom three - Zonneveld isn't playing bad at all and is basically right in the middle of the pack. but being more than 10k behind Joyce is a big ask, and there's four other players he needs to get by as well. Edhouse is rock bottom of the rankings but at least has ET8 to try to get some cash - Lukeman's not in ET8 and isn't much better. Those that need to look over their shoulders are Pietreczko and Barney, but it feels like Ricardo is playing a tad better of late, whereas with RvB you don't really get that same feeling. It should be noted that WD are indicating ET9 counts, whereas the OOM rules on the PDC site indicates the opposite. I'm leaning towards the latter.

Should be back Thursday with thoughts about Leverkusen.

Onto the Netherlands

Ross Smith looked fantastic and Ratajski got the results to back up the darts he's been doing in the Pro Tours since we last spoke, unfortunately the latter isn't here to build on it, but we've got a pretty good set of 48 players, as I'm away down in London for the playoff final this weekend, I'm not going to be able to update any projections on the fly, so will call each round 1/2 permutation, see who's most likely to come through, then run a bracket from there. Numbers will go in seed v PT, seed v qualifier, PT v qualifier order.

Humphries/Menzies/Plaisier - 71-79-61

Smith/Joyce/de Zwaan - 56-71-66 (de Zwaan only with long data)

Price/van Veen/Krcmar - 54-75-71 (Krcmar only with long data)

Chisnall/Edhouse/Huybrechts - 60-61-52

Clayton/Woodhouse/Hopp - 63-83-73

Smith/van Barneveld/Hendriks - 70 (no data on Hendriks)

Heta/Gilding/Sparidaans - 56-81-76

Noppert/Zonneveld/Vandenbogaerde - 61-76-67

van Gerwen/de Decker/Mansell - 61-75-66

Searle/Cullen/Meikle - 64-76-65

Wade/van Duijvenbode/Harju - 29-63-80

Wright/Nijman/van Peer - 47-75-78

Bunting/Wattimena/Springer - 54-53-49

Schindler/Lukeman/Wenig - 62-62-51

Dobey/Gurney/Kuivenhoven - 71-71-50

Rock/Pietreczko/Sedlacek - 75-77-52

Which gives a knockout stage of (with just the two seeds favoured to fall, oddly in the same part of the bracket):

Humphries 64-36 Smith

Price 70-30 Chisnall

Clayton 48-52 Smith

Heta 48-52 Noppert

van Gerwen 55-45 Searle

van Duijvenbode 59-41 Nijman

Bunting 58-42 Schindler

Dobey 46-54 Rock

Humphries 48-52 Price

Smith 53-47 Noppert

van Gerwen 49-51 van Duijvenbode

Bunting 42-58 Rock

Price 58-42 Smith

van Duijvenbode 50-50 Rock

Price 51-49 either of those two. That semi is too close to call.

Won't be back until Tuesday. May tweet some stuff if I see anything interesting.

Some pre-emptive projections

These are given as is, and will obviously not take into account the quarter finals:

Semis:

Lukeman v Wade (43), v van Duijvenbode (22)

Anderson v Wade (75), v van Duijvenbode (55)

Wright v Woodhouse (61), v Smith (55)

Gilding v Woodhouse (56) , v Smith (50)

Final:

Lukeman v Wright (31), Gilding (36), Woodhouse (41), Smith (35)

Anderson v Wright (67), Gilding (71), Woodhouse (77), Smith (71)

Wade v Wright (38), Gilding (43), Woodhouse (49), Smith (42)

van Duijvenbode v Wright (63), Gilding (67), Woodhouse (73), Smith (67)

So, by the looks of things, the winner looks like it is going to come from the top half, and it's likely to be whoever comes through the probable semi final of Ando and DvD. Will Dirk finally get his first Euro Tour? He's probably not going to get a better chance than this. Should also be noted that in all of these stats, Wade's form drops like a stone off a cliff once you get into the three and six month statlines, it's only what's still in the database from October backwards that is keeping the numbers you see quite as "good" as they are.

Sindelfingen last eight

3/3. That went well. Puts us back up to where we were before Friday's evening session and in a nice spot for the tournament. Last eight is now set, here's where I see things:

Lukeman/Anderson - 22/78

Wade/van Duijvenbode - 26/74 (trending towards DvD)

Wright/Gilding - 54/46

Woodhouse/Smith - 44/56

As such, the real value appears to remain on Dirk, although Ando should probably be a bit shorter.

Quick round 3 projections

Yesterday was OK, Dirk and Niels did well for us, Michael Smith dodged a bullet for us, just a shame Joe didn't quite get it done. Very quick this morning:

Lukeman/van Barneveld - 46/54

Cross/Anderson - 41/59

Zonneveld/Wade - 47/53

van Duijvenbode/Schindler - 62/38

Menzies/Wright - 41/59

Gilding/Noppert - 44/56

Woodhouse/R Smith - 32/68

Humphries/M Smith - 67/33

Sindelfingen round 2

Wow, that was looking like it was going to be an extremely strong session for a while there. That afternoon session was close to perfect - yes, Bradley Brooks missed a lot of doubles, but that one was a bit of a flier anyway and only for a small punt as the large bets on van Veen, Scutt and Woodhouse piled in, and Leon Weber got us a good chunk given the price he was at. Then in the afternoon, if anything Searle was worse on doubles, Ratajski wasn't quite as bad but certainly wasn't brilliant and should clearly have been at worst 5-4 up rather than losing 6-3, Rydz dropping the game is neither here nor there as again that was just a small punt, upshot is we're right back where we started. Oh well. Frustrating, but it is what it is. On to Saturday, let's see what we have.

Danny Noppert v Wessel Nijman - 48/52

Damon Heta v Martin Lukeman - 68/32

Michael Smith v Daniel Klose - 75/25 (again long data only on Klose)

Gary Anderson v Gian van Veen - 54/46 (shorter data favours GvV a tad more)

Chris Dobey v Luke Woodhouse - 68/32

Nathan Aspinall v Niels Zonneveld - 53/47

Rob Cross v Mike De Decker - 56/44

Dave Chisnall v Ross Smith - 33/67 (newer data HATES Chisnall)

James Wade v Joe Cullen 48/52 (shorter data likes Cullen a lot more)

Jonny Clayton v Andrew Gilding - 59/41

Gerwyn Price v Raymond van Barneveld - 77/23

Peter Wright v Leon Weber - 72/28

Michael van Gerwen v Dirk van Duijvenbode - 50/50

Luke Humphries v Connor Scutt - 56/44

Josh Rock v Martin Schindler - 63/37

Stephen Bunting v Cameron Menzies - 62/38 (recent data favours Bunting a bit more)

I've listed where there's more than marginal changes in the sample size, as I know some people may favour form a lot more than larger samples. Form is baked into these numbers somewhat - these take an average of the numbers from current month plus last three months, plus last six months, then a twelve month sample - so a great leg thrown yesterday will effectively count three times, whereas something thrown last September only counts once. I think I have listed this methodology before, but if not, this is what I am meaning when I say short, medium or long data, I generally want 50 won legs before I'll include something. I'll be placing my bets in the morning, but don't expect anything before Sunday morning for the third round, on a long football trip to South Wales tomorrow.

Sindelfingen round one

Just going to be a quick short notice one. Will do it in dribs and drabs as I get a few minutes away from the day job:

Martin Lukeman v Benjamin Pratnemer - insufficient data on Pratnemer

Cameron Menzies v Michael Unterbuchner - insufficient data on Unterbuchner

Wessel Nijman v Bradley Brooks - 61/39 (slight form trend towards Brooks)

Gian van Veen v Nathan Rafferty - 90/10

Ritchie Edhouse v Connor Scutt - 27/73 (slight form trend towards Scutt)

Luke Woodhouse v Johan Engstrom - 85/15 (long data only)

Ryan Joyce v Leon Weber - 67/33 (slight form trend towards Weber)

Jermaine Wattimena v Daniel Klose - 79/21 (long data only)

Ryan Searle v Niels Zonneveld - 68/32

Joe Cullen v Marcel Erba - no data on Erba

Mike De Decker v Max Hopp - 79/21

Raymond van Barneveld v Krzysztof Ratajski - 32/68

Andrew Gilding v Gabriel Clemens - 47/53

Martin Schindler v Callan Rydz - 47/53

Ross Smith v Paul Krohne (long data only) - 75/25

William O'Connor v Dirk van Duijvenbode - 34/66

FRH update

When I say FRH update later tonight, I mean now, got done with entering all the data but then hit the wall and just needed to come back to this the next day. So here we go:

1 Luke Littler

2 Luke Humphries

3 Michael van Gerwen

4 Stephen Bunting

5 Jonny Clayton (UP 1)

6 Chris Dobey (DOWN 1)

7 James Wade

8 Josh Rock (UP 1)

9 Damon Heta (UP 2)

10 Rob Cross (DOWN 2)

11 Mike de Decker (DOWN 1)

12 Ross Smith (UP 4)

13 Gerwyn Price (DOWN 1)

14 Dave Chisnall (DOWN 1)

15 Martin Schindler (NEW)

16 Danny Noppert (DOWN 1)

17 Gary Anderson (DOWN 3)

18 Peter Wright (DOWN 1)

19 Nathan Aspinall (UP 1)

20 Ryan Searle (DOWN 2)

Dimitri's the player to drop out, having had a pretty quiet year so far and he's not even 21st, van Veen is the last player out right now and he's fallen below Edhouse. Joyce is up to the top 25, while if Nijman wasn't top 40 before, he is now.

Probably nothing before Sindelfingen so check back on Thursday.

Graz quarters

Tad irritating that. Wattimena basically not showing up is fine, it happens, Cullen losing from 5-3 up is a bit more annoying as that swaps the entirety of the book really. Can't complain too hard though as we really dodged a bullet with Schindler being down. On to the quarters and it looks like we have a half decent chance of a new winner - is this when Dobey or Dirk finally step up? Does Joyce go one better than his previous final this year? Ross Smith has a major but he's not actually won one at this level. We could very easily have a final between two players who have never won a Euro Tour, which'd be a lot of fun. But for now, some projections:

Gurney/Rock - 26/74

Schindler/Dobey - 40/60

van Duijvenbode/Smith - 53/47

Heta/Joyce - 59/41

New FRH rankings later tonight once the event is done.

Graz round 3

Little bit of a recovery. Looked unlikely once Searle lost to Joyce, but Campbell pulling off the upset put us into the black for the day, so we'll take that. Eight games tomorrow, and our projections are this:

Wattimena/Gurney - 65/35

Noppert/Rock - 41/59

Doets/Schindler - 31/69

Dobey/Nijman - 54/46

Campbell/van Duijvenbode - 26/74

Wright/Smith - 41/59

Heta/Cullen - 58/42

Chisnall/Joyce - 48/52

Graz round 2

Not the ideal set of results yesterday. Big one was the Razma game, while Madars did well to get things back to a decider, Ian (who's quietly having an alright season) wasn't missing anything on the outer ring, and while they both did their job in leg 11 leaving a double after twelve, White having first shot was more than enough. Elsewhere, Bissell could maybe have got into an early lead and asked questions of Pietreczko but didn't, while van Peer wasn't really close to Doets. Nijman did his job and so did Woodhouse (although that one was a bit close for comfort) so it wasn't a critical loss, but gives us work to do today.

Smith/Landman - 74/26

Searle/Joyce - 63/37

Noppert/Springer - 55/45

van Veen/van Duijvenbode - 51/49

Cullen/Tricole - 70/30

Rock/Ratajski - 61/39

Gurney/Suljovic - 51/49

de Decker/Nijman - 47/53

Heta/Sedlacek - 67/33

Wright/Woodhouse - 59/41

Clayton/Wattimena - 55/45

Aspinall/Doets - 64/36

Dobey/Pietreczko - 72/28

Bunting/Campbell - 68/32

Schindler/Dennant - 66/34

Chisnall/White - 56/44

As such, there's only a couple of places where I'm seeing real true value, and I've taken decent chunks of Ryan Searle and Joe Cullen. There's a few where I've had a small stab, but these are only like 1% shots, you can work these out yourself. Should be back this evening with round three projections.

Graz

So today I learned there was a new rule for the HNQ's in that a card holder can apparently opt to go for one home nation qualifier over the course of the year as opposed to the tour card holder qualifier. Hence why Suljovic got in. This clearly seems like a reaction to the Czech event last year where I believe both Sedlacek and Gawlas didn't get in and the home contingent was not marketable, clearly this is just a bit of a marketing gimmick in the newer areas as for Germany/Netherlands this seems irrelevant as the card holder qualifier seems possibly easier, but hey, it's a new thing. The upshot is we've got Mensur, Rowby, Zoran and Goedl all in, so all known quantities, let's quickly scan through round 1 and just give probabilities, I have the NFL draft in less than two hours so I'll try to be brief:

Geeraets/Campbell - 48/52

Ratajski/Mansell - 67/33

Razma/White - 62/38

Gilding/Landman  62/38

Tricole/Goedl - no data

Joyce/Harju - not sufficient data on Harju to be confident

Pietreczko/Bissell - 60/40

Dennant/Rowby - 65/35 (no short data on Rowby)

Wenig/Springer - 36/64

van Duijvenbode/Jehirszki - no data

Nijman/O'Connor - 60/40

van Barneveld/Sedlacek - 50/50

Edhouse/Suljovic - 52/48

Doets/van Peer - 51/49

Wattimena/Lerchbacher - no data

Woodhouse/Rafferty - 78/22

Where I'm saying there's no data, there might be a handful of legs, but we're dealing in one or two matches so it is nowhere near representative. Hence what I post on the Rowby game, we have basically nothing this season. The Harju game I could probably put something up, but it would fall into sample size issues pretty quickly and I feel it'd just say lump Joyce regardless and as he's going to be big odds on, I'll just leave it alone.

What did we learn from Munich?

This is just going to be a brief one, and I'm going to hold on new FRH rankings until after Austria, but I think one thing is clear - that is the best we have seen van Gerwen in a long, long time. That may be close to his best. van Gerwen at his best is a huge addition to the sport, and if he keeps playing like that for the next three months it will make the Matchplay an extremely interesting proposition. van Veen is continuing to play great stuff, it really is a case of when and not if he binks one of these, he was one of the five we posted up in a very Dutch list as to who would be the next one to win at this level (Bunting, as one for a major, was not included), and he'd probably be higher on the list now than he was then (just before the UK Open). Rock is really looking back to his best as well, Ratajski is continuing a phenomenal start to 2025, and aside from Nijman dropping the ball in the opening round, we were close to flawless as to who we actually bet on.

Should be back Thursday evening. It'll be a late night with the NFL draft so I should be able to have the time to get everything sorted the day before.

Munich round 3

Today was a very good day. Only Dirk let us down, which when I ended up on more than half the matches, can't be complained about. Yes, some of these were small plays to be sure, but a win is a win and after a rough start to the year it's good to get some numbers in the black. Onto the last sixteen:

Price/Rock - 52/48

Cross/Ratajski - 55/45

Joyce/Zonneveld - 54/46

van Gerwen/Searle - 54/46

Chisnall/Smith - 34/66

Schindler/van Veen - 36/64

Wright/Razma - 55/45

Littler/Cullen - 78/22

Munich round 2

Oh Wessel, why do you lose a disproportionate amount of the time. Sheeeeeeeeit. Let's pile on to round 2 projections:

Noppert/Razma 56/44

Heta/Joyce 60/40

Gilding/van Veen 36/64

Searle/Menzies 68/32

Rock/Williams 78/22

Cross/Pietreczko 70/30

Smith/Ratajski 46/54

Cullen/Mansell 60/40

Wade/Zonneveld 54/46

Price/van Barneveld 77/23

Chisnall/van Duijvenbode 29/71

van Gerwen/Huybrechts 74/26

Littler/Crabtree 84/16

Wright/de Decker 50/50

Clayton/Schindler 57/43

Smith/Wattimena 59/41

I suppose the one that looks crazy is the Chizzy one. But when did he last play well?

On to Munich

Always catches me out this one starting on the Saturday. Let's rush through the games.

Joyce/Borbely - Always tough to gauge these qualifiers. Borbely came through way back in early February and let's just say he didn't look good.

Edhouse/Mansell - Real nice game second up. Ritchie's better, but not by much (maybe 52/48), and Mickey's trending better in 2025, but again, not by much.

Razma/Grundy - Looks like pretty much the archetypal 70/30 game in favour of Madars, regardless of sample. Odd, Grundy hasn't looked awful and I don't think Razma has been spectacular, but numbers are numbers.

Woodhouse/Crabtree - This is becoming a nice opening session, and one that might be deceptively close, I've naturally got Woodhouse better, and the 2025 stats are the best, but this is only 58/42 and he's not actually significantly better than this this season. Crabtree can play.

Gurney/Zonneveld - Session becoming more stacked. Zonneveld might actually be a small (53/47) favourite here, he's quietly been getting a lot of good performances and results and could very easily catch Gurney off guard here.

Nijman/Williams - Jesus, this session is excellent, although this one might not be one of the better ones, with Wessel playing so well he projects better than three in four, just getting up to 76/24, with the best numbers being the most recent numbers.

Huybrechts/Behrens - OK, they've got to chuck in the odd dud, Finn being a qualifier who didn't break beyond the low 80's and is pretty much unknown. Kim's not really done much of anything for quite some time, but shouldn't need to do much of anything to get the dub in this one here.

Menzies/Doets - How this one isn't in the evening session is beyond me, this might be the best opening stanza on the Euro Tour of all time. Doets has been a bit up and down and hard to gauge, but I've got Cammy up 64/36 here, which doesn't seem unreasonable particularly given his form to start the season.

Pietreczko/Paxton - Into the evening session and we've got a Euro Tour debut for Adam, to the best of my knowledge, not got a huge deal on him but it's averaging at 70/30 in favour of Pikachu, which feels like it should be about right.

van Veen/Eidams - Rene's been around for a while and we typically know what we're going to get, there's the odd flash but that's pretty much it, and there's not been big evidence of it at least in the qual, and against Gian it might not matter regardless.

Suljovic/Ratajski - It is a little bit weird that these are listed this way round but that is the way the PDC wants to work, pretty easy to call this one in favour of Krzysztof at just over a two in three clip (68/32), Mensur's done it all but Ratajski is continuing to play at a clearly superior level.

van Barneveld/Rosenauer - Michael has probably been around as long as Barney has. He got aided to an 88 average in the quali one time by Roetzsch but is showing nothing to make us think RvB is in any trouble at all.

Wattimena/Unterbuchner - We get to the last of the HNQs and probably the best of this pick, Michael hitting 95 in the final round and a couple of relatively unassisted games at or just above the 90 mark. We know he's dangerous, but such is the draw rigging that you're getting a tough opponent just way too often, and Jermaine's definitely one of those.

van Duijvenbode/Boulton - Dirk's showed a bit more form of late and looked alright midweek, and is projecting as a surprisingly massive favourite here, up at 84/16 which does surprise me as Andy's a pretty solid pro.

Schindler/Vandenbogaerde - Mario's a name that has popped up a few times this year and this feels like this might be a redo from somewhere, maybe even a Euro Tour we've already done, and this one comes up in Martin's favour as you would expect, the raw numbers of 71/29 feel like they may be selling the Belgian a bit short but the best sample is in 2025 so meh.

de Decker/Engstrom - Mike finishes the session off against Engstrom, the Nordic qualifier who we have probably enough data on for the 85/15 projection in favour of de Decker to likely be accurate enough to go with.

That's your lot, back for round two when we get there.