Göttingen thoughts

Been a bit of a while since the last update - we've had some really fun Players Championships this last week, and the Challenge Tour has taken a big swing in the favour of Labanauskas who already at this stage has got to be looking pretty good to regaining his card. We'll do an FRH ranking update after this event, for one there's a little bit of a gap after this event, and for two I just noticed I didn't actually update my spreadsheet with the Belgium event after being away for that weekend, whoopsie. Into this week, and I'll just put out raw numbers for each of the first round matches, deal with those as you will.

Players - back to December for P1 - back to September for P1 - back 12 months for P1 (* - limited data, less than 50 won legs)

van Duijvenbode/Krcmar - 73* - 68 - 71

Pietreczko/Klose - no data - 60 - 67

Edhouse/Doets - 43 - 59 - 60

Wattimena/Kantele - 100* - 92* - 92

Schindler/Hunt - 58 - 55 - 65

Woodhouse/Gruellich - 71* - 69 - 75

van Barneveld/Evans - 39 - 44 - 49

Smith/Unterbuchner - 90* - 87* - 86

Gurney/Springer - 41 - 43 - 51

van Veen/Scutt - 55 - 45 - 48

Searle/Welk - no data

Nijman/Krohne - no data - 89* - 78

Gilding/Rydz - 39 - 49 - 46

Joyce/Cullen - 50 - 55 - 57

Menzies/Soutar - 36 - 52 - 58

de Decker/Lukeman - 76 - 66 - 66

So the ones with real limited data are those involving the home nations qualifier, Kantele's game, as well as the games involving Krcmar and Gruellich. In those two last ones I don't think anything more needs to be talked about, similar with Kantele, while those numbers are a tad aggressive, I don't think it's by that much (Jermaine is 1/5 in the sportsbooks). Klose as a former card holder I think we can go with the two longer samples as it's only missing newer data and we're roughly confident. Unterbuchner and Krohne we have some details on and they've both got incredibly tough draws, so I don't think I'm that bothered about the numbers being a bit high or short on data. That just leaves the Welk game, who's pretty much a complete unknown, but in the quali he was in the mid to high 70's in every game, with the exception of the semi final, where he did get up to 83 over 11 legs with the highest opposing average he faced, definitely getting some helpful opposing kills there. Against Searle, I don't think we need to talk too much about this one really.

I'll be back tomorrow evening with round two thoughts.