Wednesday, 25 January 2017

PDC Worlds stats report

Finally finished. Thanks to all those people who uploaded matches to Youtube in the continual whack-a-mole game that is attempting to remove copywritten material. So, the results are:

Category             |sub 12|sub 15|sub 18|losing leg average
Round 1/Prelim losers|05.20%|40.52%|82.16%|82.67
Whole comp           |14.64%|59.26%|91.42%|89.03
Last 32 players      |16.91%|63.77%|93.65%|91.95
Last 16 players      |19.68%|66.95%|94.53%|94.25
Quarter final players|21.77%|70.30%|95.94%|97.61

Compare and contrast these figures to the BDO as a whole. Obviously van Gerwen being amazing inflates things to some extent, but not much - he only won 100 legs, and the comp only had about 1300-1400 or so.

Which individual players, outside of those already listed in that Premier League info post below, did well? I can tell you that as well. For the winning legs, I've taken 10 legs as a minimum, so you don't get someone hitting one 12 darter in a first round loss skewing the figures. Jeffrey de Graaf, I'm looking in your direction. For losing average, anything goes, as everyone's lost a bunch of legs.

Most 12 darters:
Darren Webster 28.57% (10/35)
Corey Cadby 28.57% (4/14)
Joe Cullen 23.08% (3/13)
John Henderson 23.08% (3/13)
Terry Jenkins 22.22% (6/27)
Cristo Reyes 20.83% (5/24)
Benito van de Pas 18.42% (7/38)
Chris Dobey 14.29% (3/21)
Michael Smith 11.90% (5/42)
Robert Thornton 10.53% (2/19)

Most 15 darters:
Cristo Reyes 75% (18/24)
Darren Webster 71.43% (25/35)
Chris Dobey 66.67% (14/21)
Corey Cadby 64.29% (9/14)
Dimitri van den Bergh 63.64% (7/11)
Benito van de Pas 63.16% (24/38)
Robert Thornton 63.16% (12/19)
Steve Beaton 62.5% (10/16)
Brendan Dolan 62.5% (10/16)
Daryl Gurney 61.54% (32/52)

Most 18 darters:
Darren Webster 100% (35/35)
Terry Jenkins 100% (27/27)
Chris Dobey 100% (21/21)
Steve Beaton 100% (16/16)
Simon Whitlock 100% (15/15)
Corey Cadby 100% (14/14)
John Michael 100% (11/11)
Cristo Reyes 95.83% (23/24)
Mensur Suljovic 95.24% (20/21)
Benito van de Pas 94.74% (36/38)

Best average in losing legs:
Simon Whitlock 101.54 (13 legs)
Dimitri van den Bergh 96.15 (12)
James Wilson 95.84 (9)
Cristo Reyes 95.12 (24)
Alan Norris 94.50 (23)
Corey Cadby 92.96 (10)
Brendan Dolan 92.58 (16)
Benito van de Pas 92.30 (36)
Daryl Gurney 91.96 (44)
Darren Webster 91.24 (31)

Read into these what you will. Some honourable mentions - Gurney and Smith had above 92% on the 18 darters over a much bigger sample than a lot that didn't get into a situation where they could win in 19 darts or more, White had over 60% in 15 or less in 28 legs. Read into these what you will.

It's the Masters this weekend. I doubt I'll be watching - I'll be in the pub Friday and away all day Saturday. I really don't see the point in this event - it's unranked, and it's really just a payday for the top 16. Don't we have enough of these already? We've got the Premier League starting imminently where we can watch 10 out of these 16 every single week. We have half of these face off in umpteen World Series events. Why not bin it and do something else? Someone on Twitter suggested a Ryder Cup-style event, UK versus the world. That'd be a lot more interesting. Why not a pairs event? We only ever see that in the World Cup, the only use of which is to scout rarely seen foreign players. Why not eliminate the last two players from the Premier League, and have a two day double elimination event for the last two spots? I'd be much more interested in seeing Huybrechts/Klaasen/Suljovic (if he wanted it)/van de Pas/Gurney/Whitlock etc face off.

As an aside, it was nice of the PDC to remove a huge chunk of the benefits of PDPA membership right after entries for Q-School closed. What exactly are they gaining from eliminating their ability to play in the European Tour qualifiers? These things don't last long anyway as there's so many qualifiers and so many boards. If someone wants to pony up £100 or whatever it costs to play nowadays, let them. If you need to pay a marker for an extra hour or so, then it comes out of their entry fees. Or, for that matter, the collective 100 grand you pocketed from Q-School entry money minus the cost of hiring a few tennis courts for a week.

Tuesday, 24 January 2017


I don't track a bunch of darts stats for the sake of it, I do it for the purposes of making a few quid on the side. Over the past couple of years I've posted my picks on the 2+2 darts thread (in the sporting events forum, there isn't a single non-troll left in sports betting) and am doing OK so far. I started tracking from the 2015 worlds (the first Anderson win), and the first year was mediocre - of 142 bets, I was 66-76 and down 1.25 units for a -1.05% ROI. The following year, I cut out some of the stuff that wasn't working (you will not see me tipping anything for the Premier League or anything unranked in general), and was up 6.41 units off 163 bets, 79-84 for +5.98% ROI. This could have been better but for a horrific Grand Prix (notably having Suljovic lose a deciding leg to Gurney, and Wright losing to Dolan, both for multiple units), and also having a huge accident trying to buy money with Taylor over Webster in a dead rubber, oh well. So far this year, which just consists of the worlds, I'm down less than a unit off of 29 bets. Anything going forwards will be posted up here in big bold letters, for ease of people scanning. I'll add a running total to the sidebar but don't expect to see anything before the UK Open, as there's nothing to bet on. Although do keep an eye out for that, as that has historically been my best tournament by a country mile. Odds posted will be the best available from reputable books on oddschecker at the time of posting - if you're not line shopping you're going broke, I'll ignore obvious misprices that never get paid out ever. If you're wondering why I'm up despite being down in terms of wins/losses, that's simply down to my belief that there's more parity in the game than bookmakers will give credit for, which can be exploited over the moderately short formats that flood the PDC calendar. This was somewhat seen in the worlds - all of Evans, Michael Smith, Dobey, West and Lerchbacher win the games they lost more often than the odds suggested and I was on every single one of them.

Nearly done with the stats for the PDC worlds. I've got seven games to go and only need to pay attention to one player in each of them.

Thursday, 19 January 2017

The most important double to hit

Bunch of things I want to talk about right now - Q-School is going on, the PDC have announced a bunch of changes to the European Tour and major championships which seem on the face of it terrible and seem to favour nobody, I want to get into betting and summarising where I'm at so far, but for now I just want you to think of the following scenario.

Standard PDC tour match, first to 11 legs. Let's give us two identical players - how good they are isn't that relevant to the exercise, but I've used a standard profile of for each ten legs, they'll throw one 12 darter, five 15 darters, three 18 darters and one 21 darter.

Obviously, the bookies have them equal and they'll win 50% of the time. That is, of course, assuming that they're equally good at throwing for the bull, and will have the advantage of throw half the time. But what if someone becomes perfect at throwing for the bull? How often does he win now?

For these purposes we'll assume he doesn't now just start throwing 150 every visit and this magical talent wears off once on stage. What we need to calculate is how often a game goes to a deciding leg, and how often we win on throw compared to how often we win a leg where it's a toss-up as to who throws first.

The latter is easier - obviously in the everything identical category, we win the final leg half the time. However, if we have throw, we win the final leg 68% of the time. But how often do we get to 5-5? We can just simulate a bunch of legs and see that this happens 26.6% of the time.

Plug those two results together and we increase our match winning percentage from 50% to 54.8%, rounded off a bit. So, in this situation, we get an extra win once every 20 matches. Think about how many matches a professional will play over the course of the year, and it's easy to see that this could work out to thousands in prize money, given that you win a minimum of 500 quid for every single Pro Tour win.

Monday, 16 January 2017

Premier League Predictions

I've run everything that I posted in the what's better than averages post through the master computer, and this is what it came up with:

Player A v Player B - Player A Win%/Draw%/Player B Win%

Kim Huybrechts v James Wade - 48.63/23.71/27.66
Raymond van Barneveld v Adrian Lewis - 34.95/24.18/40.87
Phil Taylor v Dave Chisnall - 36.91/24.12/38.96
Gary Anderson v Michael van Gerwen - 22.02/21.95/56.03
Peter Wright v Jelle Klaasen - 62.64/19.78/17.58

Adrian Lewis v Dave Chisnall - 59.16/20.89/19.95
James Wade v Phil Taylor - 30.87/24.13/45.01
Jelle Klaasen v Gary Anderson - 13.90/17.82/68.28
Peter Wright v Michael van Gerwen - 16.11/19.55/64.33
Kim Huybrechts v Raymond van Barneveld - 21.40/21.95/56.64

Gary Anderson v Peter Wright - 45.86/24.07/30.07
Adrian Lewis v James Wade - 68.86/17.87/13.27
Phil Taylor v Raymond van Barneveld - 18.90/20.97/60.13
Michael van Gerwen v Jelle Klaasen - 80.34/12.53/7.12
Dave Chisnall v Kim Huybrechts - 36.52/24.09/39.39

Dave Chisnall v Jelle Klaasen - 40.95/23.63/35.43
Michael van Gerwen v Adrian Lewis - 64.14/19.52/16.33
Gary Anderson v James Wade - 77.08/14.36/8.56
Phil Taylor v Kim Huybrechts - 33.88/24.55/41.57
Raymond van Barneveld v Peter Wright - 33.33/24.33/42.34

Dave Chisnall v Raymond van Barneveld - 21.34/21.48/57.17
Jelle Klaasen v Kim Huybrechts - 34.56/23.70/41.74
Gary Anderson v Phil Taylor - 71.84/16.75/11.42
Michael van Gerwen v James Wade - 87.84/8.51/3.65
Adrian Lewis v Peter Wright - 36.76/24.48/38.76

Adrian Lewis v Phil Taylor - 62.85/20.04/17.11
James Wade v Peter Wright - 11.44/16.92/71.64
Kim Huybrechts v Michael van Gerwen - 5.67/11.28/83.05
Jelle Klaasen v Raymond van Barneveld - 20.17/20.83/59.00
Dave Chisnall v Gary Anderson - 14.16/18.19/67.65

James Wade v Jelle Klaasen - 33.85/23.65/42.50
Peter Wright v Dave Chisnall - 61.55/20.32/18.13
Raymond van Barneveld v Gary Anderson - 26.76/23.25/49.99
Phil Taylor v Michael van Gerwen - 5.07/10.49/84.44
Kim Huybrechts v Adrian Lewis - 19.01/21.09/59.90

Kim Huybrechts v Gary Anderson - 12.94/17.99/69.07
James Wade v Dave Chisnall - 30.61/23.60/45.79
Peter Wright v Phil Taylor - 65.61/19.31/15.08
Jelle Klaasen v Adrian Lewis - 19.26/20.40/60.35
Raymond van Barneveld v Michael van Gerwen - 14.41/18.49/67.11

Raymond van Barneveld v James Wade - 66.61/18.77/14.62
Phil Taylor v Jelle Klaasen - 40.14/23.81/36.05
Gary Anderson v Adrian Lewis - 46.58/23.76/29.66
Michael van Gerwen v Dave Chisnall - 80.51/12.50/6.98
Peter Wright v Kim Huybrechts - 61.96/20.74/17.30

And if we add all those percentages up, we get the following predicted table:

Michael van Gerwen 14.70
Gary Anderson 12.15
Peter Wright 10.91
Adrian Lewis 10.62
Raymond van Barneveld 10.12
Kim Huybrechts 6.84
Dave Chisnall 6.74
Jelle Klaasen 6.39
Phil Taylor 6.32
James Wade 5.21

A quite clear top half and bottom half there. For relegation, Huybrechts is odds on right now, Klaasen about evens, Chisnall/Wade about 3/1, and Taylor 8/1. I don't bet on exhibitions so I'll leave it to you as to what to do with this in terms of value.

BDO Worlds stats report

Straight of the bat, congrats to Duzza. Looking at the list of PDC Q-School entries, it doesn't look like he's entered as was rumoured. So how would they do if they switched?

As stated in a previous post, it takes very little time to pull stats from the BDO, so I've looked at all of the scores, pulled all the data for all matches, and here's how things look:

Whole comp     |05.48%|43.15%|85.58%|84.05
Last 16 players|06.39%|46.65%|87.22%|86.12
Quarter players|07.06%|50.34%|88.84%|87.27
Darryl Fitton  |03.70%|42.59%|75.93%|87.14
Jamie Hughes   |03.92%|41.18%|90.20%|90.10
Danny Noppert  |10.71%|52.38%|90.48%|90.36
Glen Durrant   |03.53%|54.12%|91.76%|88.23

What can we tell from this? It's kind of hilarious that you need to eliminate everyone who didn't make the quarter finals before you get to a quality where you have players good enough to kill in 15 more than they don't. Fitton's stats are horrible - only in the legs he loses is he actually above the tournament average as a whole. Hughes if anything is worse, but at least he can kill in 18 a respectable enough rate, although how he got to the semi, I don't know - in legs vs Adams it was 17 all - Adams had 12 of those in 15 or less, Hughes had five. Heck, Adams has 63% fifteen darters as a whole, which blows anyone out of the water in the semis, and his four twelve or betters out of 41 is only slightly worse than Noppert, and Adams is also over 90% in sub-18 or less. Noppert probably is the best of the bunch, Durrant only just edging him on 15's and 18's. How good would Durrant be? I've still to finish the PDC worlds stats, but those stats aren't mindblowing, and he's simply doesn't hit enough 12's to compensate for not hitting many 15's. He didn't hit a single twelve darter in the final. van Gerwen hit thirteen 12 darters. Durrant could only manage thirteen 15 darters. Noppert's a more interesting prospect - if he can clean up one in five of the 18 darters into a fifteen, and put a bit more pressure on the losing legs, he's basically James Wade. At 26, he's certainly got a bunch of time and doesn't need to rush to switch, if he can get another final in 2018, or even bink it, he's then got the financial clout to give it a proper go without having to worry about results.

Wednesday, 11 January 2017


I haven't watched any of the BDO finals as of yet - working when it's on Channel 4 and not having BT Sport scuppers any chances of that, but it's always been a perennial debate as to the quality of the two organisations. Fortunately, the BDO website is putting up turn by turn scorecards for all of the games, which is nice of them (compared to the PDC, who rather than taking something from Darts for Windows and putting it into a PDF, use a much better than the old system but still mediocre flash based site. And then remove the information a week after the tournament).

So what I can do to compare the two is to do the sorts of stats that I list in the previous post - incredibly easy given that the BDO data is presented in a much easier to use fashion (when there - I'm compiling the remaining third of the PDC data watching the matches back on Youtube lol). I'll take the quarter finals onwards and see what the data looks like and how it compares. I don't see the value in comparing everything in its entirety - I just want to get a read on how the top players do against other top players in decent length matches, chuck the stats in a blender then see what level PDC player they come looking out like. We've already seen that in short format games the top guys can do well - the BDO participants in the Slam generally put up a good showing this year with 5 getting out (Adams did great the year before and we can excuse maybe not being so good this time around, Waites has won the thing in the past, Mitchell isn't exactly a mug), but getting actual good data will be interesting.

Tuesday, 3 January 2017

So what's better than averages?

Looking at how many turns a player needs to finish. That gives you a good idea. The object of the game is to score 501 points in as few turns as possible. Nobody should care if you're hitting 13 darters when 15 darters count the same. So as we've just had a major tournament, and we've just had a major exhibition series announced, let's look at how the competitors in the latter did in the former:

12 darts or less:
Michael van Gerwen 39%
Gary Anderson 26.88%
Adrian Lewis 23.53%
Raymond van Barneveld 22.39%
Jelle Klaasen 21.88%
Peter Wright 20.59%
Dave Chisnall 18.64%
Phil Taylor 11.54%
James Wade 9.8%
Kim Huybrechts 9.38%

15 darts or less:
Michael van Gerwen 81%
Gary Anderson 77.42%
Peter Wright 76.47%
Adrian Lewis 73.53%
Raymond van Barneveld 70.15%
Kim Huybrechts 68.75%
Phil Taylor 61.54%
Dave Chisnall 59.32%
James Wade 58.82%
Jelle Klaasen 56.25%

18 darts or less:
Raymond van Barneveld 98.51%
Michael van Gerwen 98%
Peter Wright 97.06%
Gary Anderson 96.77%
Phil Taylor 96.15%
Adrian Lewis 94.12%
James Wade 92.16%
Dave Chisnall 91.53%
Kim Huybrechts 90.63%
Jelle Klaasen 87.5%

But what about the legs players didn't win, you ask? Well, here's their averages in losing legs:
Michael van Gerwen 103.14
Gary Anderson 102.61
Peter Wright 98.47
Raymond van Barneveld 95.58
Phil Taylor 95.52
James Wade 95.03
Dave Chisnall 94.35
Adrian Lewis 89.08
Kim Huybrechts 88.3
Jelle Klaasen 84.43

So what do these tell us? A few things I guess. MvG is a literal god for one. But it also indicates how players win and how they can get beaten. I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but you do wonder how Wade, who didn't exactly have a bad tournament according to conventional stats, is as high as number five when he rarely hits 12 dart legs, and will let anyone break him in 15 darts over 40% of the time.

What we can also do is use these sorts of figures to simulate matches. If we make some assumptions to eliminate rare outliers, such as someone hitting a 12 on throw and losing to a nine darter, or someone on throw not finishing in seven visits and getting broken, then we just look at, for player A on throw:

P(A hits a 12) + P(A hits a 15 and B doesn't hit a 12) + P(A hits an 18 and B doesn't hit a 15) + P(A doesn't hit an 18 and B doesn't hit an 18 either).

The Premier League is probably the best thing to do this sort of thing for - it's leg play, and it's an even number of legs with a draw possible, so you don't need to faff around with variables like who's throwing first and would have the darts in a deciding leg. I'll shove everyone against each other later this week and find out some expected points lines. Will make for interesting reading to see if Klaasen hits enough 12's to overcome for being god damn awful at everything else.

Quick sample size note - these have just come from the worlds so far. Will see if the PDC site goes back further. Everyone here's got at least a 30 leg sample size as far as legs won, van Gerwen is up at 100.

Monday, 2 January 2017

PDC rankings and why they're terrible

Why exactly should Robert Thornton still be getting 100% of the ranking points for a major he won 15 months ago? Why until today was Phil Taylor still getting 100% of the rankings points for a major he finalled two years ago? Should John Henderson's Munich final in April 2015 be worth as much as Simon Whitlock or Benito van de Pas' Pro Tour wins from the last weekend on the tour in October? No, they shouldn't. So a ranking system I've been tracking for a while alters this in a very similar way to how golf's rankings work.

The formula is simple - upon winning prize money, it counts in full. Once two years have elapsed, the prize money counts for zero. The prize money counts in full for just over four months (130 days to be precise) - it then decreases 1% in value every six days until it's gone.

This gives more importance to recent events and vice versa. So, to use the Henderson example above, that currently counts for less than 16% of its actual value in the official rankings. In addition, I do not arbitrarily remove money won by players upon losing or never having a tour card - so players appearing in the World Championship, UK Open, Grand Slam etc who aren't PDPA members still get their money counted by my method, as does, say, Ronnie Baxter, who's out of the top 64 and will reset to zero at the start of next season. Hopefully by comparing them to where people are on the PDC official rankings, you get an idea of who's on the up and who isn't, which should be somewhat obvious to people paying attention to the tour, but still makes interesting reading in my opinion.

And so here's the 2016 season end top 101 (would be top 100 but LOL ties):

01 Michael van Gerwen 1337119
02 Gary Anderson 534769
03 Peter Wright 341320
04 James Wade 253558
05 Dave Chisnall 251764
06 Adrian Lewis 248353
07 Phil Taylor 243783
08 Mensur Suljovic 229719
09 Raymond van Barneveld 228163
10 Jelle Klaasen 200217
11 Benito van de Pas 181179
12 Kim Huybrechts 179923
13 Ian White 171193
14 Michael Smith 167600
15 Robert Thornton 156566
16 Simon Whitlock 146913
17 Alan Norris 143998
18 Daryl Gurney 136653
19 Gerwyn Price 127266
20 Terry Jenkins 126941
21 Stephen Bunting 117817
22 Mervyn King 108461
23 Joe Cullen 106483
24 Mark Webster 104701
25 Brendan Dolan 100529
26 Steve Beaton 97662
27 Darren Webster 87300
28 Justin Pipe 86274
29 Vincent van der Voort  85467
30 Kyle Anderson 83960
31 James Wilson 79028
32 Jamie Caven 78273
33 Cristo Reyes 76618
34 Jamie Lewis 67943
35 Chris Dobey 67722
36 Robbie Green 66261
37 Steve West 63666
38 Max Hopp 61444
39 John Henderson 58283
40 Christian Kist 57706
41 Andrew Gilding 56707
42 Joe Murnan 52949
43 Rowby John Rodriguez 52532
44 Jermaine Wattimena 52193
45 Josh Payne 50658
46 Kevin Painter 47981
47 Ronny Huybrechts 47132
48 Dimitri van de Bergh 45594
49 Ricky Evans 44410
50 Johnny Clayton 42935
51 Devon Petersen 40667
52 Mick McGowan 37294
53 Keegan Brown 32415
54 Jeffrey de Graaf 31853
55 Ron Meulenkamp 30040
56 Andy Hamilton 27876
57 Jan Dekker 25548
58 Dave Pallett 24483
59 Mark Frost 24349
60 James Richardson 23337
61 Andy Boulton 23221
62 Dirk van Duijvenbode 21599
63 Andy Jenkins 21411
64 Wes Newton 20894
65 John Michael 20759
66 Simon Stevenson 20208
67 Magnus Caris 19358
68 Jeffrey de Zwaan 19339
69 Kim Viljanen 17911
70 Mark Walsh 17260
71 Michael Mansell 16445
72 Berry van Peer 16177
73 Vincent Kamphuis 15807
74 Ronnie Baxter 14653
75 Dragutin Horvat 14500
76 Jyhan Artut 14291
77 Wayne Jones 14225
78 Zoran Lerchbacher 13927
79 Matt Edgar 13265
80 Dean Winstanley 12746
81 Stuart Kellett 12728
82 Nathan Aspinall 12597
83 Rene Eidams 12556
84 Andy Smith 11748
85 Willie O'Connor 11684
86 John Bowles 11307
87 Nigel Heydon 11189
88 Tony Newell 11074
89 Jason Wilson 10917
90 Steve Brown 10759
91 Darren Johnson 10603
92 Jerry Hendricks 10559
93 Yordi Meeuwisse 10455
94 Nathan Derry 10168
95 Matt Clark 10065
96 Mike de Decker 10053
97 Tengku Shah 10000
97 Kevin Simm 10000
97 David Platt 10000
97 Corey Cadby 10000
97 Jamie Hughes 10000







