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":256386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-256385","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}