Englishman James Wade began his PDC World Darts Championship campaign with a 3-0 triumph over Ryusei Azemoto, while Raymond van Barneveld suffered a shock first-round exit.<\/p>\n
Five-time world champion Van Barneveld looked out of sorts as he went down in straight sets to Stefan Bellmont, the first Swiss winner at Alexandra Palace.<\/p>\n
Seventh seed Wade only let one leg slip in a dominant victory against Japan’s Azemoto. <\/p>\n
“Tonight showed the practice I’ve been doing. It wasn’t spectacular but when I really needed to hit something, it happened,” said four-time semi-finalist Wade.<\/p>\n
He finished with an average of 94.75, compared to Azemoto’s 84.42, and the 42-year-old will take on Ricky Evans in the second round on Monday.<\/p>\n
Van Barneveld looked a shadow of the player who won four BDO world titles before lifting the PDC crown in 2007.<\/p>\n
The 58-year-old Dutchman took the opening leg but then lost eight in succession.<\/p>\n
Despite a higher average than his opponent, he checked out just 25% of his doubles while Bellmont hit 39%.<\/p>\n
World number 13 Martin Schindler averaged 99.14 and threw seven 180s as the German beat Stephen Burton 3-1 and will face either Keane Barry or Tim Pusey in round two on Sunday.<\/p>\n
American debutant Adam Sevada came out on top in the the first game on Wednesday, seeing off Canadian Matt Campbell 3-1.<\/p>\n
It was tight for much of their encounter but Sevada’s marginally better performance on doubles made the difference as he won 11 legs to Campbell’s six.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Englishman James Wade began his PDC World Darts Championship campaign with a 3-0 triumph over Ryusei Azemoto, while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-189119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}