After a day of sorting out the qualifiers in the European Darts Grand Prix we are now down to the last 32 where the seeds play the players who came through on Friday across two sessions of play on Saturday.
There were no fewer than four world champions who came through on Friday to join the top 16 in the second round of the event. Raymond Barneveld, Mark Webster, Steve Beaton and Stephen Bunting all came through unscathed to set up a decent second day in the tournament.
Among the highlights on the card on Saturday is the battle between James Wade and Mark Webster while Michael Smith vs Dean Winstanley should be a decent game and it will be interesting to see how Michael van Gerwen gets on against the awkward style of Mensur Suljovic.
I’m going to go with a couple of bets on this card, one from each session and having taken Mervyn King on a couple of times I’m going to do it again in the afternoon.
We saw at the World Grand Prix last week how everything seems to be conspiring against King at the minute and what looked like a nice draw here against Jeffrey de Zwaan suddenly looks a tricky one after the Dutchman’s performance on Friday.
De Zwaan hit seven 180s in a 6-3 win over the competent Rowby-John Rodriguez on Friday and hit double nine when going for double 12 for a 9 dart finish. That was a really impressive performance and while de Zwaan isn’t the most consistent player known to man I have to trust him to deliver against a King who just looks like the world is on his shoulders at the minute.
In the evening session I have one too. I’ve been wary of backing Simon Whitlock over the last couple of years but I’m going to take him to beat Jamie Caven. I thought Whitlock played ok in the World Grand Prix and he has a 14-4 head to head advantage over the Derby man which could well be significant.
In fairness to Caven he made it look fairly easy on Friday night and one of my biggest concerns for him is that it is sometimes too easy. Whitlock needs this win and a good run to arrest his slide down the rankings. His better performances tend to come in Germany for some reason and I’ll take him here.
Back J.de Zwaan to beat M.King for a 3/10 stake at 2.63 with Coral
Back S.Whitlock to beat J.Caven for a 4/10 stake at 1.73 with Betfred
Blog darts YTD: +22.77pts
