Defending champion Luke Humphries beat Gerwyn Price to win his first night of the Premier League season, but the pair both sealed play-off spots in Birmingham. <\/p>\n
Humphries, who was in his third successive night final, overcame the Welshman 6-4 after an impressive 6-0 win over Stephen Bunting and 6-3 comeback win over Luke Littler.<\/p>\n
The 31-year-old was in imperious form, averaging 107 and 111, before another 100-plus average in the final. <\/p>\n
It guarantees a place at finals night on 28 May for the third successive year and rounds off a remarkable few weeks for the world number two.<\/p>\n
After week 10, Humphries sat seventh in the eight-player table and, before his run to the week 13 final, he was five points off fourth.<\/p>\n
He is now guaranteed to finish at least fourth and goes into the final league phase night in Sheffield on 21 May equal on points with third-placed Price.<\/p>\n
The pair join Littler and Jonny Clayton, who had secured their places after week 12 in Liverpool. <\/p>\n
“It’s been a struggle this year,” Humphries told Sky Sports.<\/p>\n
“I worked incredibly hard, I changed back to my old flights and it worked. I’m proud of myself. <\/p>\n
“It’s easy when you’re winning, but it shows true grit to come from my position to then get through and win it tonight.<\/p>\n
“I’m just incredibly proud of myself. Probably the most proud I’ve been in my life.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Defending champion Luke Humphries beat Gerwyn Price to win his first night of the Premier League season, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-584646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584646","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=584646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584646\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}