Grand Slam of Darts Betting 2017 Winner Odds & Predictions

Back the field against MVG at the Civic Centre

Darts Betting

The Grand Slam of Darts is a hugely popular and much anticipated tournament because it brings together the best of the PDC and the BDO, the rival professional organisations. 2017 will be the 11th staging of the event and will once again be hosted at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton. The winner will be walking off with over one-hundred grand in prize money and looking to defend his title for the second successive season is Michael van Gerwen who is trading as the odds-on favourite at William Hill to collect the title.

Qualification

The PDC puts in twenty players to the 32 man draw for the Grand Slam of Darts. Any winner of one the top thirteen ranking events across the course of the season all get a place in the Grand Slam of Darts draw. They will be joined by the runners up of any of those 13 ranking tournaments, who didn’t qualify as a winner from one of them. If that list produces less than fifteen players then the reserve list is made of winners from the European Tour and that comes into play this season with Michael Smith, who won the Gibraltar Darts Trophy on the European Tour, gets the fifteenth spot. Eight more players from the PDC get to the tournament through a qualifying event.

The BDO qualifiers are a lot more straightforward. Three spots are up for grabs from the winners of the BDO World Darts Championship, the World Masters and the BDO World Trophy. If a player wins more than one of those, then the runners-up spots get opened up. The remaining spots to make up the eight will be non-qualified players from the BDO invitational Rankings.

Grand Slam of Darts 2017 Draw

The Grand Slam of Darts is split into Pools for the first round of action. There are eight girls and from that, the top two players from each will move ahead to the knockout stage. The winner of Pool A will face the runner up of Pool B in the second round and vice-versa. That works through the draw with Pool C qualifiers facing a Pool D opponent and so on.

All group stage matches are the best of nine legs, the second round goes up to the best of 19 legs while the final three rounds, the quarters, the semi and the Final itself are all contested over the best of 31 legs. Each of the eight seeds for the tournament will be split over the eight Pools. Each Pool consists of a seeded player, two PDC qualifiers and a BDO qualifier.

Seeds

Michael van Gerwen (1)
Peter Wright (2)
Gary Anderson (3)
Daryl Gurney (4)
Phil Taylor (5)
Mensur Suljovi? (6)
Dave Chisnall (7)
Raymond van Barneveld (8)

Grand Slam of Darts 2017 Winner Odds

Michael van Gerwen 4/5, Gary Anderson 11/2, Peter Wright 7/1, Phil Taylor 8/1, Rob Cross 22/1, Daryl Gurney 28/1, Mensur Suljovic 28/1, Raymond van Barneveld 40/1, Corey Cadby 50/1, Dave Chisnall 50/1, bar 66/1

Group A

Michael van Gerwen, Rob Cross, Joe Murnan, Ross Montgomery

Well, this should be a stroll in the park for top seed Michael van Gerwen who is looking for his third straight title. He recently got back to winning ways with a win at the European Championships, his first title since the Premier league darts triumph. There was some unusual slips from him such as his failure to get out of the group stage at the Champions League of Darts. This should be a much easier task ahead of him though. Rob Cross, the recent runner up to Van Gerwen at the European Championship will be favourite to follow him through.

Group B

Raymond van Barneveld, Gerwyn Price, Steve Lennon, Jamie Hughes

This is one of the groups where the seed (van Barneveld) is probably worth opposing in the group winner outright. The man to do that would be Gerwyn Price who was runner up at the UK Open this year and hit the last sixteen of the recent European Championship. It has been a great season from the Dutchman and can therefore be taken on. Welshman Price will be out for some revenge too after losing the World Cup Final to the Dutch this year. The other two aren’t likely to really challenge too much.

Group C

Phil Taylor, James Wade, Robbie Green, Peter Machin

This should be a competitive group which is headed up by the seeded Taylor. With his retirement set for after the 2018 World Championship, this will be Taylor’s last appearance in this event. With such a stunning career behind him, he has, of course, won it before, six times, in fact, his most recent coming in 2014. Along with James Wade in the group, Peter Machin from the BDO is in there and will be competitive after winning the BDO World Trophy this year. Machin is the variable in this one but Wade should just about be able to handle him.

Group D

Daryl Gurney, Darren Webster, Mark Webster, Danny Noppert

The rise of Daryl Gurney has been fantastic this season, having shown up well on the European Tour and winning the World Grand Prix recently, his first major televised title. He is up in the top five of the PDC Order of Merit for the first time ever and was runner up at the US Darts Masters this year. Mark Webster is a handy threat on his day, but the BDO’s Danny Noppert, who was the runner up of the BDO World Championship looks the value bet to qualify. He made a big impact on his Grand Slam debut twelve months ago in reaching the knockouts.

Group E

Peter Wright, Alan Norris, Corey Cadby, Glen Durrant

This should be a pretty straightforward group. The seeded Peter Wright is the front runner and should have no trouble getting through but there will be a challenge for the top spot from the BDO’s Glen Durrant. Duzza won the 2017 BDO World Championship and the 2016 World Masters, two of the three BDO qualifying tournaments. Still, Wright has been in good form in the last couple of months and should just have enough to win it.

Group F

Dave Chisnall, Stephen Bunting, Jeffrey de Zwaan, Scott Mitchell

Dave Chisnall can be pretty happy with the draw which should see him sail through to the next round. He hasn’t been a major force in the game at all this season and his best effort was a runners up spot at the Shanghai Darts Masters where he was pummeled 0-8 by MVG. He has the experience to squeeze through here as well and it’s an absolute crap shoot as to who joins him.

Group G

Mensur Suljovic, Michael Smith, James Wilson, Mark McGeeney

It’s been a great season for Austria’s Suljovic after his big PDC breakthrough win at the Champions League. He also had a good semi final at the World Grand Prix too this season and he shouldn’t have any problems in making it through to the next round. There’s not a great deal of challenges to come in this group for home and Smith looks the safest bet to join Suljovic in the next round.

Group H

Gary Anderson, Simon Whitlock, berry van Peer, Cameron Menzies

A comfortable draw for third seed Anderson who has every chance of going on and winning the tournament outright. Whitlock actually produced a good solid tournament recently as he got to the final of the World Grand Prix and lost there. That was easily his best effort for the entire season so the Wizard should have qualification appeal in this group. The lack of experience from the other two in the group, Dutch youngster van Peer and debutant Menzies, should see Anderson and Whitlock through.

Grand Slam of Darts 2017 Prediction

You can kind of see who is going to be separated out into the draw and can sort of plan a route for the players. The top half of the draw is where all of the main threats are really aside from Gary Anderson and Peter Wright and that makes the two Scotsmen huge threats here. Anderson was a losing semi finalist at the Civic Centre last year. Wright was also a semi finalist last season and is carrying good form at the moment. Anderson is a 13/8 quote to reach the final, while Wright is a 3/1 poke. Anderson has appeal.

Just because of recent form, Daryl Gurney is a great dark horse threat in the field. But then there is, of course, Michael van Gerwen at 4/5 odds-on favourite. What to do with him? He is the class act in the entire field and his win at the European Champions recently will have boosted his confidence. But just because he hasn’t won quite as much as he would have expected to have done lately, go and consider the 10/11 price on ‘The Field’ in Van Gerwen v The Field at William Hill.