Grand Slam draw

Have a bit of time and it's out, so may as well have a quick post about it:

Group A - Moderately boring. If it was peak Smith then this would be quite exciting, but Humphries and Aspinall look too good at the moment. Spellman's always going to be a wildcard but it seems as if we've heard less of him than we did a couple of years back where he did look very dangerous, if he is playing back close to that then who knows.

Group B - This one also looks fairly obvious. Dobey and Heta are a class apart with Chris playing the better stuff, Martin has been kind of anonymous this year and hard to gauge where it's at, but doesn't seem in the same ballpark as the first two. Jurjen's shown a decent bit of form so that probable match for third might not be too bad.

Group C - This looks like it's a two horse race for second to me. Bunting is clearly the best player, but maybe not quite so good as he was maybe six months ago. Toylo is one that might throw up something dangerous in any of the games but is probably a favourite not to do it in any of them, while Schindler and Woodhouse are probably closer than you think in terms of raw playing strength, Martin's just turned it into results. Probably one of the few groups where anyone can turn over anyone.

Group D - Price is the pick here, not Wade. Gerwyn's good in pretty much any format, while I don't think this short race format in the group stage is the best for Wade. Evans is hitting some nice form so it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if he was able to nick second - although it'd be less of a surprise than Wade winning the group given how much I've undersold him. Bellmont will be competent but I don't think there is enough in the game yet to be a serious threat to any of these, even in a short format.

Group E - OK, Littler is going to win, but after that, who knows? Gurney is the known name, Scutt was going through a pretty bad slump but looks to be kicking out of it at the right time, while Sedlacek is a dangerous player (just started getting seeded for the last couple of Pro Tours) and has looked that way for a while now. Probably the group with the easiest pick for winner but you can throw a blanket over the other three, could be a 3-1-1-1 group coming down to who gets the smallest kicking off Littler and can either avoid a bad defeat in the other loss, or put a hurting on someone in the win.

Group F - For the love of god. Ashton producing the game of her life to beat Nijman and we see him average 105 in all three games and lose the lot again would be the funniest thing, but Ashton going 0-3 is probably orders of magnitude more likely than Littler going 3-0 in the previous group. van Veen and Rock are extremely close to me, Nijman is behind but he is not far behind, but a clear third favourite. Could certainly spring an upset and navigate to second or some kind of 2-2-2-0 clusterfuck for sure.

Group G - This one seems like the group of death. van Gerwen is probably not quite the MvG of the past, but is certainly still a danger. Anderson might have tailed off a bit in the last few months but is still mighty threatening. Greaves is probably already at a top 64 level, while Springer might already be at a top 32 level. This one probably favours experience over youth as to who qualifies, but you really can't be too certain about any match in this group. Only other fourth seed you might have said that about is Sedlacek but he got chucked in the Littler group so meh.

Group H - I mean this one seems quite bland really. Wenig and Crabtree will get a lot of good stage experience here, but they're both some way off of Clayton and Noppert. Is there that much between the top two? Not really. Is there that much between the bottom two? Not really. Is there that much of a chasm between those two pairs? For me, yep, probably the easiest group to call a reverse forecast on, but that's only because Lukeman has course and distance (any more racing metaphors I can squeeze in?) and maybe a bit closer to the top two in that group even if JvdV isn't.

I've got other stuff to write about plus I might get some numbers out for this so it might be a busy week here, even after the fact this is the second post. In one day!

The WDF. Hmm.

You know how I said the WDF had done a shitty job publicising the World Masters? Well, at least as far as me being able to see any of the publicity they did do? It didn't take much for me to see things when something didn't go quite to plan, as the situation and their attempts at managing the situation somewhat blew up social media the other day.

So basically it seems someone worked out they had fucked up one of the invite tables or something like that, and invited the wrong player to the women's event. As this was apparently noticed during the final qualifier itself, it was seemingly too late to do a switcheroo of the invites, which is quite obvious as the player you'd take out can't really join the qualifier that's already started. As such, what they've apparently done is bumped the field up to 25, by inviting both the player they should have done in the first place, and the one they did by mistake, and rather than having two spots, those players in the last chance saloon quali have an effective play in game, and they all get paid first round money whatever happens.

Which is fine and is making the best of a bad situation - only then that they seemingly deleted the explanation post and blocked X comments for future posts relating to the tournament. Which isn't exactly the way to own your mistakes. The question is how on earth this has happened in the first place. I don't even think this is a case of not being able to count to 24, something's got to have gone somewhat wrong somewhere. Frankly it needs two things doing.

First, it needs an overhaul (installation?) of their player management system. I have no idea what systems they have in place at present, but the first rule of anything IT related is garbage in, garbage out. If you limit the garbage in, then you've at least got a fighting chance. Create a very simple database in terms of what it holds. First name(s), surname, DOB, gender, country, email address. I don't think you need any more data at this point. That then spits out a player number as a unique key, you use that when you enter a WDF event, organisers of the individual event then have known good data that they can feed into Dart Connect or whatever. The main thing I'm trying to prevent here is data being fragmented. God knows how many times I've needed to check whether it's Dave or David Pallett, Matt or Matthew Edgar in my system, let alone situations where there's even more complication, like Martin Atkins, more or less anyone from Scandinavia, places like much of East Asia where it is normal to list the family name first (and seemingly Hungary based on two seconds of AI research as to whether Andras Borbely being listed the wrong way round in DC for the World Open was a fuck up), I still have no idea whether Jeff Springer and Jeff Springer Jr are distinct players, etc etc. I list the fields as I do to cover everything the WDF hosts - Paige Pauling could quite legitimately enter all the open youth, open girls, open and women's events on any given weekend if she wanted. Check eligibility by filtering. Have consistent data across all things you do. One database is better than four.

Second, it needs one solid way to handle submission of tournament results. Have some sort of portal where tournament organisers can submit what they are planning to host, that can then return confirmation of what WDF level event it will be, and once the event is done, present the number of rounds needed to allocate everyone their ranking points. Have this email the players at this stage confirmation of their finishing places, and it's then on the players to notify if there's been a mistake somewhere. Get that bit right, with a back end table that has something like player id - tournament id - tournament date - round reached, and you can then do everything else from there more or less automatically. Yearly ranking tables? Done. Regional ranking tables? Done. Race tables? Done. Handling players winning an auto Lakeside spot by winning a gold event? Easy to identify, easy to handle, just depends on the exact WDF rules as to how you do it. Exclusion of players from Lakeside race list that you know have accepted an Ally Pally invite? Can be done. The rolling rankings are just a one off job. Something like race to Lakeside is also a one off job, would just need a touch more work to handle all the exceptions - the point is that if you get the back end data right, then getting what you want out of it becomes a lot simpler, and I'm not convinced they're getting the back end data right. Fix that, and they've got half a chance of going two weeks without someone making BDO comparisions on X. 

My consultancy charges are very reasonable and can be paid in the currency of Lakeside tickets, just as an aside.