The European Tour season is in full swing at the minute and another event takes place this weekend when the stars of the sport head to Graz for the Austrian Darts Open, the latest tournament in the qualifying campaign for the European Championship.
Jonny Clayton did his chances of reaching the European Championship the world of good here last year when he won the title and he is among the field looking to make a successful defence of the crown. Plenty of players are looking to deny him.
Recent Winners
2023 – Jonny Clayton
2022 – Michael van Gerwen
2019 – Michael van Gerwen
2018 – Jonny Clayton
2017 – Michael van Gerwen
2016 – Phil Taylor
2014 – Vincent van der Voort
2013 – Michael van Gerwen
2012 – Justin Pipe
The Format
The format for this tournament remains the same as before, which means that the qualifiers meet each other over the course of the play on Friday before the last 32 of the tournament is played over two sessions of action on Saturday, with the last 16 on Sunday afternoon and the quarter finals on Sunday night. They are all the best-of-11 legs with the semi-finals also on Sunday evening. They are the best-of-13 and then the final in the same session is the best-of-15 legs. The draw has been pre-determined and is played in a straight knockout format.
Top Half
We are back to the normal look of the draw with the number one seed being sat at the top of the bracket. That player remains Dave Chisnall despite his indifferent start to the season on the European Tour. He is scheduled to meet Rob Cross in the semi-finals should the draw work out to the seeds. The defending champion Jonny Clayton is one of the men who will be looking to stop that from happening. Joe Cullen, Dirk van Duijvenbode, Ryan Searle, Stephen Bunting and Ricardo Pietreczko are the other seeds in this half.
The headline qualifier in the top half of the draw is Martin Schindler. He won a European Tour event two weeks ago and will go off in search of another this weekend. Daryl Gurney is another household name who is in this half of the draw, while the young star Gian van Veen is also going to have a tilt at the title from this section. Brendan Dolan, Darius Labanauskas, Ritchie Edhouse, Richard Veenstra and Chris Dobey complete the top half.
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Bottom Half
We have some big name absences late on in the piece this week and that has all led to Damon Heta being the second seed in the draw. Gerwyn Price was due to be the third seed but he with an injury so Heta will be seeded to meet Michael van Gerwen in the last four now. Just five other seeds in this half of the draw will be out to stop that from happening. They are Krzysztof Ratajski, Josh Rock, Danny Noppert, the finalist last week Ross Smith and Peter Wright.
One player jumps off the page among the unseeded fraternity in the bottom half. That is the world finalist Luke Littler who goes in search of a second European Tour title of the season. There are two other pretty appealing qualifiers in the bottom half of the draw this weekend. They are the UK Open winner Dimitri Van den Bergh and the former world champion Raymond van Barneveld. Two promising Dutch players are also in this section in Wessel Nijman and Jeffrey de Zwaan. The draw is completed by Dom Taylor, Andrew Gilding and Dan Lauby Jr.
Betting
Stephen Bunting has had a decent start to 2024. He began it by winning The Masters and sometimes when a player wins a TV title for the first time he can fade away a little for a while but that hasn’t really happened to ‘The Bullet’. In the European Tour this season he made the quarter final in the first event and the semi-final in the third one so he has been going pretty well. He also made the final of one of these tournaments towards the end of last season.
Bunting has also made the quarter final of the UK Open and the final of one of the Players Championship events so he is one of the form players on the circuit at the minute and looks to have a plot draw here. If we take Rob Cross out of the equation, and that isn’t an obvious hurdle to overcome but you would imagine he might have an eye on his Premier League campaign, then the draw is wide open for Bunting. The worst case scenario look about it is Richard Veenstra, Rob Cross, Jonny Clayton and Dave Chisnall through to the final. If he gets on a roll he can navigate that and if the draw opens up then so much the better. I’ll play Bunting this weekend.
Tips
Back S.Bunting to win Austrian Darts Open (e/w) for a 1/10 stake at 23.00 with Unibet (1/2 1-2)
