Grand Prix round two

Not the greatest of results, some people underperforming fairly badly, and notably seeing Littler out, which throws things wide open. We're down to sixteen and up to a best of five set run, so let's project things:

Woodhouse/Aspinall - 35/40/38/38

Noppert/Joyce - 80/71/74/75

Price/Smith - 65/65/69/66

Clayton/Nijman - 49/37/39/42

Humphries/Wattimena - 72/73/78/74

Zonneveld/Anderson - 34/27/26/29

van Veen/Searle - 53/49/59/54

Wade/Bunting - 55/60/46/54

Let's go.

Grand Prix round one

There's been a bit more meat on the bones in relation to the calendar, and boy, choices were made, but that's a problem for future TA Towers and we've got the Grand Prix to project. Now as I mentioned above, I don't actually have a specific setting in the master computer for a best of two sets match. Presumably I thought as that only happens in a double start event where my data doesn't have a direct exact similar computation, let's not bother. But I'll treat this as a best of 11 match. For one, you need to win six legs in this, and for two, a first two three set match (which I do have projected) appears very similar in win chances to a best of 17/19 game in leg play, so it seems close enough. We're only talking a fraction of a percentage difference in any case. As always, I'll give four numbers - the win chance using data from the last three completed months (plus September), then 6+ months, then the last year, and finally an average of the three.

Littler/Woodhouse - 85/78/81/81

Aspinall/Doets - 65/60/59/58

Noppert/Springer - 61/55/62/59

van Gerwen/Joyce - 69/71/74/71

Price/Bialecki - 76/77/82/78

Smith/Menzies - 52/55/56/54

Clayton/Ratajski - 68/55/58/60

Nijman/Cross - 53/57/62/57

Humphries/Chisnall - 70/74/81/75

Dobey/Wattimena - 70/63/63/65

Rock/Zonneveld - 54/54/56/55

Anderson/Heta - 56/67/69/64

van Veen/van Duijvenbode - 50/46/55/50

Searle/O'Connor - 64/60/64/63

Wade/Cullen - 68/58/57/61

Bunting/Gilding - 67/59/63/63

Looks like there might be some value in some places, but I've got Challenge Tour etc to catch up on.

Calendar is out!

And there's a lot to break down in it, so let's jump straight in.

The big one is the long rumoured additional major has been called in - there's no specifics about the European Open, as it's called, other than it'll be in Salzburg the week after the World Cup. Now if this is just a replication of the UK Open, it should be pretty cool. But I guess the proof will be in the pudding, and we'll wait and see what the actual gig is.

The next thing to note is that the European Championship is now over six days, rather than the current four. You've got to assume that it'll be a longer format as a result, the additional two days looking incredibly natural to expand things to 48 players, but again, no specifics yet. If that is what it is and ends up being a pretty simple 1-16 get a bye and 17-48 face off in round one, in other words exactly like a Euro Tour except on steroids, that should be good.

The Premier League has once again snubbed the south west of England, with the nearest place being Cardiff. It's something that happened last year but I didn't really notice, but that seems a little bit harsh. They've had Exeter before as a natural lead in to the UK Open, why they need both of Birmingham and Nottingham, or all of Liverpool/Manchester/Sheffield/Leeds, is a wee bit odd, but whatever.

Euro Tour in France. OK then. I have no idea whether it will sell well, but it's a bit of an open question as to how strong the players there will be. Barring some sort of miracle late season Pro Tour run, Tricole is losing his card (and even if he sneaks into the worlds, he might lose it anyway). Labre has fallen off a cliff. Thuillier who we saw at the World Cup seems better than Labre at this stage. They've got a few who've played some of the Challenge Tour but nobody who looks that close to breaking an eighty average. There's someone called Damien Decla who isn't doing horribly on the Development Tour, but still is clearly a work in progress. So somewhat of a mixed bag. I doubt it'd be any worse than the ones in much of Eastern Europe. Weekend in Krakow is tempting!

The Development and Challenge Tours have been cut to 18 events a piece from 24, and are now running at just one per day over six weekends. I think this makes a lot of sense, assuming that the prize money per tournament increases to compensate, even if the overall amount pumped into each tour stays the same.

World Youth Championship clashes with the final day of the Grand Prix. One has to assume they think Littler isn't going to enter it?

Expect something for the Grand Prix on Sunday. It'll likely just be an attempt at projections, the model I have doesn't have anything that can really adjust to the double in start, nor does it have any standard option to look at how a best of three sets match will go, so the first round will likely be pretty rough.

Quick FRH update

Was meaning to do this on Monday but got sidetracked:

1 Luke Littler

2 Gian van Veen

3 Luke Humphries

4 Gerwyn Price

5 Wessel Nijman

6 James Wade

7 Ryan Searle (UP 1)

8 Jonny Clayton (DOWN 1)

9 Josh Rock

10 Ross Smith (UP 2)

11 Danny Noppert (DOWN 1)

12 Gary Anderson (DOWN 1)

13 Luke Woodhouse (UP 3)

14 Chris Dobey (DOWN 1)

15 Nathan Aspinall

16 Krzysztof Ratajski (UP 1)

17 Stephen Bunting (DOWN 3)

18 Jermaine Wattimena (UP 1)

19 Michael van Gerwen (DOWN 1)

20 Rob Cross

None of this includes any Grand Prix first round money, which as everyone here is in wouldn't change anything. You need to get down to Schindler at 24 before you find anyone that isn't in, and the 7.5k first round money wouldn't see the player directly below him (Gilding) jump him. Gurney at 28 isn't there, but the rest of the FRH top 32 are, with Zonneveld (at 33) and Bialecki (at 40) the two that complete the field.

In terms of the movements, Wade getting a bink mostly just offsets Wade not having got any ranking money since the Matchplay. Smith with a Euro Tour bink and final hits the top 10 for I think the first time, I don't think he got there when he won his major. Woodhouse consistently accumulating well sees him continue to climb, while Bunting not doing a great deal on the Euro Tours since the last update loses some ground, the 100k he got from a worlds semi now counting for barely 10% of that amount in these rankings. Lower down, there's not a huge amount to mention, Dolan getting a good Pro Tour run mostly just arrests a slide and he remains outside the top 50, but yeah, just in general there's not been a huge deal going on.

We've had a bunch of worlds qualifiers been confirmed, such is the depth in most places that it's the case now that it is familiar names, but also with some notable absences. Looking at what we've got coming up, we're a couple of weeks away from the Challenge Tour being done (and then the UK associate qualifier the day after), the Japanese tour is nearly done, and the Nordic tour will finish by the end of September. Bunch of stuff will be sorted in early to mid October, but that's a next month problem. For now, let's just not pay attention to the World Series finals.

Changes I would make if I was Matt Porter (again?)

I'm 99% certain I've done this before, but I'm not going to check what I said, or if I indeed said it. It's something I've been wanting to write for a few weeks, but Lendel posted something about the difficulties facing new card holders which tied in nicely, so I'll do it now. Some of these may well be reposts, but hey, if something was broken in the past and it's not been fixed, it probably still needs fixing. Besides, SUFC are producing awful football again and my life's too short to watch a 0-0 first half against Wolves. So here we go:

1 - Increase the number of tour cards to 136, and the number that retain them each year to 72

Now this is pretty much entirely related to what Lendel was saying in that it's incredibly difficult for a card holder to actually keep it. Doing this would maintain the amount of churn you have in card holders, but it would dramatically cut the percentage of those that retain them who are basically set almost forever given 40 of them get an automatic worlds berth and first round seeding, and an almost similar percentage will get all the cake from the European Tour and the bigger major titles. You'd need to tweak the UK Open a touch as you really don't have the time logistically to include another 8 players being knocked out, so probably cut the CT spots by 4 and the DT/notrileys qualifiers by 2 each, but that's a minor thing. Looking at the Q-School cohort from two years ago, the people holding their cards are:

Brooks (as he did bink a Pro Tour)

Crabtree (although probably only because he got the Dev Tour Slam spot)

Sedlacek (who looks clearly good enough and was very unfortunate to lose his card in the first place)

Hopp (who we know's been good enough historically)

Hood (although where he'll be in twelve months when that worlds run is off is a different question)

That's it, out of 29 people who got a card, only 5 rank to hold them right now. Kuivenhoven is extremely close assuming he holds everything.

2 - Increase the size of Pro Tour events to 144 runners and modify the prizes

This is pretty much directly related to the previous one. With more card holders being guaranteed the size of the Pro Tour has to go up as well. But why 144 you say? This does two things - it gives a lot more spots to the Challenge Tour, as you're always going to need eight players from that, although one thing I would do in conjunction with this is to say if you win an event on one of the major secondary circuits (ADA, Asian Tour, SDC, CDC), that also qualifies you to play one Pro Tour event. The larger field will allow this to happen without majorly affecting anyone else.

Now the increase needs a change in format - basically you require an additional "round zero" game on each board to get to the existing 128. That's sixteen boards, so needs 32 players to play in it. Anyone who isn't a tour card holder has to play in it, then the remainder come from card holders outside the top 64 on the Pro Tour rankings at random. The top 32 (of those entered obviously) are seeded as they are, and then the next 32 are exempt into the first round and drawn at random as presently. This adds maybe 20-25 minutes on each board, possibly less if something's one sided and the players are quick, which logistically isn't a huge deal.

I'd also modify the prize money. I'd drop last 64 money back to a grand, and then with the £8k that frees up, I'd add £250 for losers in the first round. Now that is £16k so we're only half way there, but you would think that as prize money continues to increase, this would not be impossible. If not, then trimming the money at the top slightly could be done alternatively. Going to £12k for a win, £8k for a runner up and £6k for a semi final gets you three quarters of the way there and I don't think that would really damage the bottom line of players typically getting there. There's certainly been some talk of how things at the bottom end are still very tricky for some players, and adding something that should at least cover expenses would likely go a long way for those at the bottom end of the card holder list.

3 - Make the Matchplay a 40 player field

As the size of the worlds has gone up, and the size of the Slam is going up, it's somewhat natural to think that the Matchplay (and the Grand Prix) should be the next in line. While I think that there's certainly a strong argument to keep these as events for the truly elite, and that watering down the field makes things less prestigious, I think there's enough depth here that this isn't a factor as it might have been even ten years ago. Look at the eight who are missing the Grand Prix as last players out - Reyes, Huybrechts, Sedlacek, Schindler, de Graaf, Greaves, Gurney and Veenstra. That's hardly a shit lineup. How I would add the eight players however, is not to just extend either of the existing lists, it would be to have a "year to date" Pro Tour list, so only everything after the most recent Q-School counts. This truly creates a level playing field for new card holders - everyone's on zero for this. Then, in terms of tournament logistics, you just have a Saturday afternoon session that plays out exactly like a European Tour session, with the eight from this new list facing numbers 9-16 from the ordinary Pro Tour list. That you can go on a heater like Reyes and Greaves have done as new (or, to be pedantic, returning) holders and not make the Matchplay (or, for that matter, the Grand Prix) is a bit crazy. Of course, part of that is thanks to the god awful Euro Tour changes, but we'll come to that.

You can expand the Grand Prix the same way, although there I think there's less of an argument against just making it 1-24 on the current Pro Tour list given how large a percentage of the season is already done. But I think adding an extra session where it's by far the hardest place to get tickets for would be first in line for me.

4 - Scrap the World Series finals

Honestly, who cares about this? The individual events, fine, whatever, they don't really interest me but I can see they hold them (although the locations and invites are clearly open to question). But this finals event? It sucks. Basically any big name that was invited gets in, and anyone that is a local player in either Australasia or Asia that gets into both the relevant events gets in. Anyone that catches a PDC main tour invited player on a bad day and sneaks a win gets in. Until you don't get a visa then you don't get in. I figure the only reason it exists is to give the Netherlands a "big" event, as they don't have anything else apart from one Premier League night and one Euro Tour, which compared to the amount that Germany gets (heck, even Belgium has more) is weaksauce, but that could be rectified. Why not have the European Championship rotate around places? It's been in places other than Germany before (heck, again, it's been in Belgium more than it's been in the Netherlands). There's no reason why, if they're not going to move back to Dublin (and I can't see that they can with developments at the Citywest), why it needs to be in Leicester forever. Move something around.

5 - Modify the European Tour events

Everyone thinks the current incarnation sucks. The European Championship field last season, outside of Springer, was depressingly vanilla. The current race looks terribly similar to the other major 32 man events. In short, they've made too many of the Euro Tours look the same and the EC finals, seeding order aside, looks like just the other majors. How would I do it? I would cut the straight invites back to 24 - the top sixteen in the Pro Tour order of merit, and then the top 8 on the main order of merit not otherwise qualified. Seeding is then the top 16 from the Pro Tour - if any of the PL players have a cry that they're not seeded, and rushing from one very well paid gig to another in 24 hours is too hard, that's on them for not playing enough floor events. That then frees up eight slots - I'd give six back to the Pro Tour qualifiers (so they now have 16 total, or basically a one in seven chance of getting in any given event), restore one slot for associate members (probably just have one big qualifier in conjunction with the first CT weekend), and give an additional slot to the home nation qualifier. That should give a good enough combination of "star power" and giving the rest of the tour a much fairer shot of getting in than they are at the moment.

6 - Have the first Challenge Tour weekend be the one with four events, not the last one

This is something I've definitely said before. The first weekend always draws a lot more players and the events take forever. Just for the sake of limiting the amount of time anyone's playing on any day, switch it up. Play CT1 in full on day one and CT3 down to the last 128. Play CT2 in full on day two and CT4 down to the last 128. Then finish the remaining two events on the final day. Trying to go through two entire 300+ player tournaments on back to back days and then a fifth on the last day is all kinds of crazy. In a perfect world, I'd have said try to collaborate with the WDF/NDB and have this at the same time as the Dutch Open back to back (something I've said previously as well), but they've moved it just about late enough in the calendar that this isn't really feasible. Maybe you could try this with some other large non-PDC event at another time of year to cut down on a flight, but I do appreciate that a lot of the Challenge Tour players will be by no means professional and can't/won't want to budget too much holiday time to darts out of a given year, even if it did cut down the average expenses per event.

7 - Change the worlds to a flatter bracket

While last year's event wasn't quite as much of a dumpster fire in terms of one sided games as I thought it might have been, I do maintain that even matches make for better sport, and I would do what I said before they announced a straight 128 man bracket as they did last time - have top 32 into round three, next 32 into round two, and the other 64 into round one. Last year we had 22/32 seeds win 3-1 or better, and half the others go through. Only five went out in the first round - Smith and Menzies you could see to some extent given their draws (Harrysson, Manby), while Edhouse and van den Bergh were in some danger against a lot of opponents. The only real shocker was Munyua beating de Decker. Second round was a bit better but still had eight 3-0's (nine if you count the walkover Clayton got), and while there were quite a few seeds dropping, these are basically the same matches as you'd get in round three of a "flat bracket" as I'd do instead - they're both the last 64 as is. And looking at those results you got, would anyone say that any of the seeds that lost were in a spot you were like "nah, that's never going to happen" - probably not. You could argue that Price and Nijman losing were surprising given how well they were playing, but Plaisier and Clemens aren't exactly mugs. Even Merk beating Wright I don't think can really count just based on how badly Peter's game has degraded. But yeah, the gist is to trim out the mismatches and give us games which, if maybe not quite so high quality per se, are at least interesting. It's the same sort of reason why the Premier League gives out parachute payments - they recognise that if a team comes up and feels it can't take the financial risk to try and compete, it creates for a shit product. I've seen what happens first hand when teams do that and it really, really sucks. Just pick any random section from last time and tell me which would be better - the three games you got as is, or how it would have looked if you got the two "qualifiers" playing, the winner playing the 33-64 guy, then the winner of that playing the seed.

That's the lot for now. I'll be out for the Manchester derby shortly so I won't have any projections for the quarters onwards.

Very quick round of 16 data dump

van Veen/Doets - 49/45/58/51

Searle/Dobey - 40/41/45/42

Joyce/Wattimena - 48/36/37/40

Price/Smith - 60/61/65/62

Wade/Cross - 53/51/51/52

Noppert/Nijman - 48/37/43/43

Heta/Woodhouse - 50/45/48/48

Bunting/Aspinall - 39/33/42/38

Looks like we've got a lot of close ones. Not a huge amount of value that I can see, Nathan maybe being the best. Small bit of rebuilding done yesterday after the clusterfuck that was Friday.

Oh my god that did not just happen. That didn't happen.

That might be the most brutal day I've ever had in terms of punting. Gilding misses a match dart. Burton gets 5-4 up and then Joyce goes into god mode. Menzies, meh, whatever. Barney just did Barney things. Huybrechts FUCKED UP SIX MATCH DARTS IN HIS HOME COUNTRY, this was the worst, I literally after the game just went "hey, let's see how often we can kill 24 in six darts", and I did it 40% of the time, and I'm an amateur that wouldn't take a leg of a Challenge Tour player if you gave me 20 goes. Then Dirk decides to begin and end with legs where he has 21 darts to break and doesn't do it either time. Marvellous. I guess at least the good thing is that we did withdraw the topup we made a bit ago, so as such we didn't lose more than we did? I mean I'm pleased for Bialecki in that he's likely in the Grand Prix now, but jesus, this was a horrific day. Let's rebuild.

Ratajski/Doets - 43/42/42/42

Wattimena/Sedlacek - 48/57/61/55

Schindler/Cross - 40/41/42/41

Noppert/Landman - 76/76/81/78

Searle/Baetens - 62 (only long data on Baetens)

Dobey/Zonneveld - 72/65/62/66

Woodhouse/O'Connor - 65/63/59/62

Smith/de Graaf - 56/55/60/57

Rock/Joyce - 61/67/71/66

Price/Brooks - 69/74/75/73

Wade/Long - 84/86/76/82

van Veen/Clemens - 67/68/76/70

van Gerwen/Heta - 51/56/60/56

Aspinall/Springer - 74/71/69/71

Bunting/Dolan - 77/73/74/75

Nijman/Bialecki - 66/73/73/71