Top seed Luke Humphries beat Nathan Aspinall to book his place in the knockout stages of the Grand Slam of Darts in Wolverhampton.<\/p>\n
England’s Humphries averaged 102.62 in a superb display as he maintained his 100% record to top Group A.<\/p>\n
Michael Smith, who beat American Alex Spellman 5-2, went through in second place.<\/p>\n
It means an early exit for Aspinall, who can consider himself unfortunate to have come up against Humphries – who hit a nine-darter on Sunday – in this kind of form, given his 100.01 average and five 180s might often have been enough to win against a different opponent.<\/p>\n
Former world champion Humphries will now face Jurjen van der Velde of the Netherlands in round two, which begins on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Chris Dobey will face 2023 world champion and fellow Englishman Smith in the next round after clinching first place in Group B with a 5-1 win over Martin Lukeman, despite averaging only 81.<\/p>\n
Wales’ Gerwyn Price is also safely through after a 5-1 victory over Switzerland’s Stefan Bellmont that sees him win Group D following Ricky Evans’ 5-2 loss to fellow Englishman James Wade.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, already-eliminated Stephen Bunting suffered a third final-leg defeat on the spin as he lost 5-4 to Group C winner Luke Woodhouse.<\/p>\n
Germany’s Martin Schindler is through after beating Alexis Toylo of the Philippines 5-2.<\/p>\n
The final group games in the bottom half of the draw will take place on Tuesday with world champion Luke Littler having already qualified for the second round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Top seed Luke Humphries beat Nathan Aspinall to book his place in the knockout stages of the Grand…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-133226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}