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.