Players Championship Finals tips: Ando's back on track

Anderson is getting back to form at just the right time of year.

Jaymes Monte looks to pick up where he left off at the Grand Slam of Darts with his daily tips for the Players Championship Finals...

With most PDC major tournaments spanning the course of at least a week, it's nice to have an event where we'll know the winner within just three days of the opening match. Sunday night's champion will have won five matches and 50 legs in the space of three days; this is not an event for those that lack endurance.

To kick things off this Friday we've got an afternoon and evening session, each consisting of eight best-of-11-legs matches. The pick of which is the penultimate bout of the evening's session when world number four Gary Anderson takes on world number six Wes Newton.

I tipped Newton as my fancy for the Grand Slam of Darts a few weeks back, but he came a cropper in a Last 16 final-leg decider against Lakeside champion Christian Kist. There was certainly no shame in losing to a player of Kist's quality in such dramatic circumstances, and it did little to shake my belief that The Warrior will go on to win Major titles sometime soon; just not this week.

Anderson was also a deciding-leg casualty at the Last 16 stage of the Grand Slam. However, there were a huge number of positives for the Scotsman to take from the week in Wolverhampton as he talked of rediscovering his hunger to win darts matches.

Averaging over 100 in defeat to Andy Hamilton, and around the 95 mark in each of his three group-stage matches Anderson looks to be traversing an upward form curve after at least a year of underachievement.

The pair crossed paths at the recent Players Championship event in Barnsley and Anderson came out on top as a comfortable 6-2 victor to make the head-to-head record between the two read 9-5 in favour of the Scot. At odds of 1.9420/21 he looks an outstanding bet to make that 10-5 this weekend.

Recommended Bet
Back Anderson to beat Newton @ 1.9420/21