Gian Van Veen has been performing some scintillating arras lately and should be fairly confident of beating Ricardo Pietreczko who’s not been in the greatest of form all season, winning just 44% of his matches.

There’s been the odd glimpse from the German but even his 3-0 victory over Xiaochen Zong in round one, probably wasn’t as emphatic as the scoreline looks. He’s also not a big 180 hitter. At a rate of just 0.16 per leg, he’s going to struggle to match the scoring power of GVV who registers them at a rate of 0.26 per leg.

Van Vee arrives here on the back of registering five ton plus averages in his last six matches and if he’s anywhere near that level, he wins here. With the better scoring ability of the two also, he can achieve the match double.

Hempel just loves playing at Ally Pally. This is his fourth appearance and victory in this match would take him into the Last 32 for the third time.

In 2022 he defeated Dimitri Van Den Bergh 3-1 at this stage and similarly last year he also beat the Belgian in round two, it was closer on this occasion however as he took a mammoth rally for him to get across the line 3-2. Even the year he lost at this stage it was close, he went down 3-2 to Luke Humphries in 2023, that doesn’t look at all bad now does it?

He won emphatically in Jeffrey De Zwaan in Round One, hitting 180’s with regularity and if he can replicate that here he can come out on top versus Daryl Gurney, or at least go down in a five set thriller, which would also be good enough for this selection to prevail.

Shaggy is playing his good friend Rob Cross to conclude the darting action before Christmas and whilst the match is hard to call, Williams should have enough about him to register six or more 180’s in what should be a hard-fought match.

He hit NINE in his high quality opening round victory over Niko Springer and in reaching the Semi Final last year his 180 tally per match was 2, 7, 10, 6, 12 and 6. He made his debut in this event in the 2023 event and he also managed to notch up 10 and 6 in the two matches he played that year.

Interestingly, on that occasion he lost 3-1 to Rob Cross at this stage. Despite losing the game, he still achieved this line, hitting six against Voltage. The evidence all points to Williams getting the required amount of maximums in this to conclude the treble.